The Last House on Dead End Street (1977)

Angry young punk Terry Hawkins (fiercely played with seething rage and intensity by writer/director Roger Watkins) gets released from prison after serving a sentence for selling drugs. Bitter and vindictive at the world that has shunned him, Terry decides to strike back by making his own snuff movies.With its unsparingly seedy'n'sadistic tone, grainy washed-out cinematography, suffocating atmosphere of total moral decay and raw undiluted evil, droning synthesizer score complete with a prominent pulsating heartbeat on the soundtrack, grungy locations, uniformly hateful, revolting, and sympathetic characters (Terry in particular is a super resentful piece of foul misanthropic work), and jolting outbursts of harsh and graphic violence (gruesome highlights include a drill bit to the head and a woman who's been tied to a table having her legs sawed off prior to being eviscerated), this resolutely grim'n'grimy scuzzfest possesses a potent nihilistic edge that delivers quite a vicious kick right to the teeth. Extremely ugly and unpleasant stuff for sure, but undeniably powerful and unsettling just the same.

Personally I don't like exploitation and snuff films. I feel that they are grim and upset the viewer and impair his ability to discriminate between humane and animalistic. 'The Last House on Dead End Street' was released 5 years after Wes Craven's depraved exploitation classic 'The Last House on the Left', but this one surpassed the record of depravity that Craven had set 5 years before. I don't like praising this movie for it made me upset and empty for many months, but I need to be true while reviewing it. As I watched this flick, I kept repeating 'This is just a movie'. I confess I didn't do this when I watched Craven's 'The Last House on the Left', which bore the aforementioned tag line. Although an amateurish effort by all means and produced out of a budget sufficient only to buy a few sacks of potatoes, this film will rule your senses forever and will haunt you in your dreams. The film doesn't pick up instantly and waits until the viewer has grown suspicious about the actions of the misanthropes and begins thinking 'What are they up to?'. Their questions are answered when the protagonist begins showing his true color which is as black as death itself!The film begins with Terry Hawkins (Roger Watkins, who closely resembles Quentin Tarantino), who has just finished his jail sentence for drug charges and is now looking for a new livelihood. He meets two cheese directors and now wants to try his hands with film making. Terry claims that he had earlier made few porn films but was unable to sell them. Terry and the directors want to try their hands with the new sensation of horror, Snuff films. They soon begin luring victims to a derelict and abandoned palatial building, where they are hacked, cut, drilled, decapitated, tortured, sawed and finally killed on screen. Their methods are so elaborate that they would definitely cause the viewers to puke on their nastiness. This goes on with several victims, until the viewers come to know that police had received a tip about their vicious and depraved deeds and they raided the place and arrested all the culprits and perpetrators.This might look like a documentary of a failed man, but you must see it yourself if you have the nerves to watch and forget this stuff. I say again, you may watch it, but it will live with you forever. The murders and slaughterhouse scene may induce nightmares and arouse abhorrence. Yes, the protagonist wants that you should hate him. This is a hate worthy film, but I can't give it 'zero' on the basis of my own dislike. May be it was hard for me to throw this film out of my mind, but its penetrative and lingering nature is certainly something that keeps this one infinite miles ahead of the modern stinkers like Fred Vogel's 'August Underground Mordum' and Nick Palumbo's 'Murder Set Pieces'. This film actually lets you dive deep into the mind of a depraved killer and answers some of the questions like 'How are they different from us? and 'What is his motive?''. Roger Watkins is the guy who hides behind the name Victor Janos and many other pseudo names that show on the performer/production credits. It's said that Roger Watkins had a planned budget of $3000 to make this film, but he spent more than $2,200 on amphetamines alone during the shooting and what remained was used to make the film. Unbelievable? Believe it!

I bought the "2 disc collector's edition" (Tartan) of this infamous pseudo-snuff movie (I tried to watch an awful DivX copy of it before, but it was barely watchable and I gave up). I must say I expected much more from it. I found the first 45 minutes quite boring and lame; the last killings get graphic and "imaginative" though. The 2nd disc contains useless outtakes (with no audio) and 4 short films, which are not bad, especially "Ron Rico". All 4 short films have no soundtrack but a commentary (very funny at times, but dull after a while), I guess mainly due to the songs they original used, they didn't have copyrights for.

Almost TOO sick and TOO depraved for words, this mean-spirited and hideously edited US exploit-flick! It might be called pure cult cinema with an enormous shock-value, still this questionable reputation can't hide the fact that "Last House on Dead End Street" is a nearly unendurable film and that you'll need at least three very long showers to wash away the dirty feeling after seeing it. All you ever read about this film is true. It's definitely a true statement that the on screen gore is ultimately gross and that the tone of the film is disturbingly nihilistic & offensive. Now, I don't have a problem with that (on the contrary, I even pro-actively search for this type of films), but I do think there should at least be a point to the violence or some sort of moral that needs to be made clear to the audience. "Last House on Dead End Street" has neither. It's just 80 harsh minutes of insane violence and nasty images of horrible looking set pieces. The plot is as simple as it is irrelevant, and handles about a misanthropist ex-con who mobilizes his former friends to help him make porn movies and earn some extra money. When he discovers that people are only interested in extreme shocks and snuff nowadays, the whole gang goes berserk and complete their film with the rich clients as real-life victims. The first half of the film is surprisingly dull and just plain awful, with some really amateurish attempts to provide the characters (that you couldn't feel less connected to) with a background and really ugly camera-work. The second half is full of gory sickness but still as awful as the first; perhaps even more so. During one of the most notorious sequences in horror-history, both a woman's legs are brutally sawn off while she's kept conscious with medication. The reason for that is that she can witness later how her stomach is cut open with a huge pair of pliers and how the intestines get removed and proudly shown to her. Sick enough for ya? "Last House on Dead End Street" could have been a truly nightmarish experience if everything (apart from the human guts) didn't look so damn fake! Especially the acting, but also the clumsy camera-work and lighting are so amateurish that it's nearly impossible to let this film affect you. Admirers (and, believe me, there are a lot of them) use the cheapness as an argument to claim that it only increases the genuine exploitation feel to it, but I strongly disagree. I've seen enough exploitation movies that are stylish and convincing DESPITE the limitations in budget. I wouldn't advise anyone to see this film (apart from some personal enemies, perhaps) but if your curiosity becomes too hard to resist, you can always purchase the brand new double-disc special edition on DVD. But do yourself a favor and wait at least three hours after you had dinner.