I don't normally watch movies with mediocre ratings across sites, but this one was pretty influential. I gave it priority over the 2009 remake, which some consider better and others worse; I suspect the remake is gorier. If nothing else, this version is only 84 minutes -- short enough that I watched a couple of the documentary shorts on the disc. Which, personally, I liked better than the feature itself. Hey, my main goal was education.
Since a couple scenes were shot in New York City, I take the setting to be mostly rural upstate New York. Slightly rebellious teens Mari (Sandra Peabody) and Phyllis (Lucy Grantham) go looking for some weed at night. They ask the wrong guy, who leads them into a trap. Four young adult captors take them out to the woods for sexual assaults and a bit of other torment, after which, well, they can't very well leave survivors, can they? Since it's late and the crooks are far from their base, they seek shelter in the titular house, which, as luck would have it, is Mari's. Her parents (Eleanor Shaw and Richard Towers) follow the evidence and plot a fittingly brutal reprisal....
OK, I just spilled pretty much the whole plot, including some of the final act, but let's face it: There's very little here. To a large extent, it was basically improvised. I might as well throw in the subplot of two cops trying to find the missing teens but hampered by an empty gas tank. No surprise that this was Wes Craven's first time as a screenwriter or director.
Care to know about the crooks? Krug (David A. Hess), pronounced "Kroog," is the leader. Weasel (Fred Lincoln) is something of a knife nut. Sadie (Jeramie Rain) is apparently bi, at least tolerating the erotic attentions of Krug and Weasel but wanting a piece of the action with the captives. Junior (Marc Sheffler), Krug's disrespected brother, doesn't actually approve what the others do, but they pay him in drugs to help out.
Yeah, Craven's the only name you're likely to know, except maybe producer Sean S. Cunningham (Friday the 13th). Most of the actors had only stage or porno experience if any. Some think they did an underrated job, given talk of their convincingness, tho I was unimpressed at Mari's parents' reaction to realizing what happened to her.
Even Craven didn't get a career boost right away, because this picture is super-polarizing. It got the kind of negative reactions from Americans you might expect from Parisians. Some of the people involved went on to regret it, tho I think the only one to hate it at the time was Peabody, who genuinely feared that she might have entered a snuff film. (It doesn't help that they had no permits to shoot where they did.) You could make the case that Craven's eventual boost was as much a curse as a blessing, because it was a long time before he could make a non-horror as he wished.
Presumably, the most controversial factor is how much gets shown. By post-Hostel standards, it's almost tame. Yes, we see nudity, blood, and worse, but not as much as I was led to expect. Some key moments are still off camera. From what I gather, much worse came within the decade.
I'm not certain that "horror" is the best word for it; I felt more scared watching a PG-13 superhero animation. At first, it comes across as a drama, which makes sense for a plot lifted from Ingmar Bergman's The Virgin Spring. The camerawork deliberately evokes a documentary, complementing the typical bogus "true story" claim. Some moments veer toward comedy, particularly with the cop scenes. The scoring is pure '70s and not remotely ominous. One original song even sounds like a parody of "Eastbound and Down," despite the cops (and Smokey and the Bandit, for that matter) not being around yet.
Torture porn? The makers quibble with that label. We're not supposed to find it pleasant. The crooks themselves feel bad at a few moments. Even the parental vengeance, which includes Home Alone-like rigging, hardly carries cathartic value. Sure, Junior's the only one I felt at all sorry for, but other viewers were unaccustomed to seeing such monsters getting humanized at all. That's the other ingredient to the polarization.
As usual when others love or hate a movie, I fall in the middle. I can admire a few aspects of the execution (no pun intended), and I see how its genre-blending uniqueness could generate a cult following. But a history lesson is the best I got out of it. I've said enough that you should be able to decide whether to check it out.
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