Last House On The Beach (1978/Italy/Severin DVD)
Picture:
C+ Sound: C Extras: C Film: C
After A Clockwork Orange, Straw Dogs and Last House On The Left, there was a cycle of films (like House By The Lake with Brenda Vaccaro)
that was trying to outdo the rape, violence and shock of those films, but
failed to do so in the majority of the cases because it became tired and
predictable. By the time of I Spit On Your Grave, the efforts went
overboard and the cycle eventually collapsed.
However, these films were not only coming from the U.S. and England, but
Italy (known for its giallo films) tried their share of such films and Franco
Prosperi’s Last House On The Beach
(1978).
Having
previously directed the likes of Goodbye
Uncle Tom (aka White Devil: Black
Hell) and the infamous Mondo Cane
films, he seemed like the kind of filmmaker to make such a film in such a cycle
and does not fail to make it as sleazy as possible. Three bank robbers (Ray Lovelock, Flavio
Andreini, Stefano Cedrati) need a place to hide and find a house with what
turns out to be young women and a nun (Florinda Bolkan) who they kidnap and
slowly decide to terrorize, assault and kill.
Though
not as relentless as the film’s it imitates or anywhere as smart (this is no Salo to say the least) and on its 30th
anniversary, what it tries to do in some of its more stylized attacks is bad
imitation about as bad and as much as the current wave of really bad Night Of The Living Dead/Texas Chain Saw Massacre rip-offs. To show you how bad, the most shocking of the
early rape scenes is in slow motion (read Clockwork
Orange and Straw Dogs) tries to
distinguish itself by shock and sacrilege (one of the young ladies is held down
by two of the perpetrators while the remaining perp makes the nun watch) with
the one holding her down for the other one is put in make up to make him look
like Mick Jagger. Now this is not just
any Jagger, but the sexually ambiguous Jagger of the Donald Cammell/Nicolas
Roeg film Performance in 1970. Yawn!
Oh, and
it does not justify/make this interesting enough to buy this failed dud either.
The
anamorphically enhanced 2.35 X 1 image was shot in 2-perf Techniscope when the
Technicolor company (even in Italy, apparently) stopped making three-strip
Technicolor prints and the result is that while some shots still have some good
color, the print shows its age and is lucky it looks as good as it does
considering it has hardly been seen in all these years. The Dolby Digital 2.0 Mono is an English dub
only and though there is an odd “Dolby Surround” logo on the back of the case,
this mix has no such sound. Extras
include the Italian & German trailers, plus a making of featurette with
Lovelock called Holy Beasts vs. Evil Beasts.
- Nicholas Sheffo
