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The Last House on Dead End Street



cast :

Roger Michael Watkins, Ken Fisher, Bill Schlageter

crew :

Directed by: Roger Michael Watkins
Written by: Roger Michael Watkins
Produced by: Roger Michael Watkins
DOP: Ken Fisher
Editor: Roger Michael Watkins
Music Score by: James Flamberg/ Roger Michael Watkins

release date :

1977

Exploitation cinema, as a cultural cinematic phenomenon, is usually defined as a certain type of filmic trend that exploits the senses of its targeted audience to the utmost extreme using a raw is real coda. It is a movement infamously known for its daring and shocking sensationalism, enthusiastically embracing shoe-string budgets, wooden or improvised acting, amateur camerawork, scratchy film quality and free-wheeling scripts that are tied to fearlessly unorthodox filmmaking, which emerged as a common practise in the 1970s, consequently generating a cult following. Probably one of the most notorious examples of this Grindhouse movement was Roger Michael Watkins’ sordid horror revenge exploiter ‘The Last House on Dead End Street’ (1977). A titular rift, it would seem, on Wes Craven’s ‘The Last House on the Left’ (1972), made five years previously, ‘The Last House on Dead End Street’ (originally titled ‘The Cuckoo Clocks of Hell’ although in some instances the film was later re-titled ‘The Fun House’ for its debut release) concerns the murderous exploits of a recently released from prison drug-dealer named Terry Hawkins, (played by Watkins himself using the pseudonyms of director Victor Janos and actor Steven Morrison). Terry decides to channel out his aggression at society by venturing into the underground world of snuff moviemaking. However, there is a unique twist of fate to this intended profitable endeavour: Hawkins yearns to bring a new level of realism and depravity to his ‘snuff’ films by bringing real scenes of murder and torture to the screen. He hooks up with his equally delusional buddy Ken (an ex-slaughterhouse worker who was jailed for sodomizing a cow) and a couple of girls and together they lure a blind man into a theatrical rendition of a ‘Greek tragedy’ and murder him while Ken films the ordeal. They sell this filmed venture to a bunch of rich perverts and then attempt to break into the porn industry. When they find that their work has been pinched by a bunch of porn peddlers, hoping to make a quick profit from their unique endeavours, the group enact revenge on the perpetrators by fiendishly turning the cameras on the porno distributors and making them the victims of their latest snuff adventure, with typically horrendous results.


‘The Last House on Dead End Street’ features a band of completely hateful characters that have little or no redeeming qualities and represent a deeply unflattering portrayal of humanity. Hawkins, our main ‘protagonist’ (in the loosest sense of the term) also serves as our disgruntled and unhinged opening narrator. When we first meet him, he is about to break into a barren University building which is guarded by a blind caretaker, the setting of which we later learn that will serve as the appropriate backdrop for his films. It is at this point that Terry laments about serving his gruelling prison sentence determinedly vowing that he will “Show what Terry Hawkins can do!” An increasingly cold and ambivalent atmosphere is immediately established through a series of grainy, distorted camera angles close ups of the gargoyle ridden building, which is suddenly intercut with scenes of disturbing bloody debauchery at the hands of a masked surgeon (which we assume is a flashback of one of Terry’s horrific previous crimes) and then undercut to the relentless heartbeat pounding of the obtrusive and ominous soundtrack.


Apart from the visually pretentious gory-fest, part of the appeal of exploitation cinema is its rough-edged, almost naturalistic aesthetics that stem from the documentary style conventions of cinéma-vérité filmmaking. If, to some extent the viewer is repelled by the severe scenes of bloody carnage it’s the unpretentious style of the camerawork that tends to usher them into this debauched world in the first place, establishing a palpable sense of reality. Notoriety also comes courtesy of the film’s free-wheeling production history where it was said that the director was fuelled with drugs while making the film (he later claimed that most of the budget went on these amphetamines), adding to the inebriated feel of the footage. And while Dead End Street may not have any noteworthy artistic integrity par se, it is a film that dares to cross boundaries to expose a new level of aesthetic violence or ‘gross-out spectacle’ that now – and after the contemporary horrific heights raised by the Saw and Hostel films – we would comfortably place within the category of torture-porn.


To view ‘The Last House on Dead End Street’ in this context opens questions in relation to spectatorship and the boundaries of cinematic extreme and what we may deem as fundamentally sleazy and unashamedly perverted imagery. It is certainly not over stating the mark to reveal that ‘The Last House on Dead End Street’ is indeed an unprecedented endurance test to watch. One that dares to inflict upon its viewer scenes of such unflinching depravity and torture that it is as if surviving the viewing experience would be to succumb to an unredeemable Michael Haneke experiment of guilt-ridden pleasure. But then again, the spectacle denies the viewer any protection or distance from the unlawful acts dramatized. Scenes of porno-exhibitionism seem to sit comfortably with bloody sadomasochistic torture, including an infamous climactic live surgical procedure that involves the conscious amputation of various body parts and a masked ‘Deer Hoof Women’, who uses the animal paw as a dildo substitute to inflict unquestionable humiliation on one of the targeted porno distributors. But is it us who are to blame for choosing to witness this horrific fanfare, subsequently forcing us to question our voyeuristic involvement with the narrative or is it the torturous and pathological path laid out by the director that is indeed questionable? Whatever the answer a new level of creepy self-reflectivity comes from the proposed source material itself, which is believed to be from the Ed Sanders’ book ‘The Family’: about the life and times of Charles Manson and his contemptible family. Notably the book includes one chapter that even suggests the possibility of Snuff films being made by the notorious gang and there is also some notable chanting of ‘Terry is the answer’ heard in the film during the climactic murders.


Perhaps it is cutting it too close to the bone for inner contextual analysis but comparing ‘The Last House on Dead End Street’s’ terrifying existentialist conclusion to the film’s own ill-fated post-production period seems to suggest a self-reflective predetermination. Behind-the-scenes conflicts with the producers mirror the film’s own inner anguish at auteurism which cumulates with Terry repeatedly screaming “I am directing this fucking movie” at the tortured producers. After production ‘The Last House on Dead End Street’ was infamously hacked to pieces in the editing room, to such an extent that at least 100 minutes were cut for the theatrical release with an ill-suited final voice-over ‘message’ tacked onto the end by the distribution company that informs the viewer that justice was ultimately served. The film had its home four years after production in a run of Grindhouse and Drive-in cinemas but the director (and virtually everyone involved in its production) ultimately disowned the project primarily due to its heavy butchering by producers. It was not until almost thirty years after its initial release in 2000 that Watkins decided to come out of hiding to admit he was the creator of the film on a fan website.


‘The Last House on Dead End Street’ may be deeply flawed aesthetically, with its off-centre dubbing and poor editing style (mostly as a result of careless post-production butchering), but this only seems to enhance its ‘snuff’ authenticity. It is also a film that successfully establishes an overwhelming sense of tension through both its harsh creeping inevitability and through its pulsating musical score, which has the same unsettling organic tangibility as the score later used in Tobe Hooper’s original ‘The Texas Chainsaw Massacre’ (1974). One would find it aimless to view the film through rose-tinted glasses, but by looking beyond the notoriety and by probing beneath its graphic aesthetic we may at least start to gain some deeper understanding towards how the film is tellingly reflective within its own historical context and how ‘The Last House on Dead End Street’ is fundamentally defined by the circumstances in which it was originally conceived. As the tagline tellingly stated at the time, in its near post-modern rift on Wes Craven’s ‘The Last House on the Left’: “It’s back! The evil that had you screaming…it’s only a movie!”


Watch


Country: USA
Budget: $3,800
Length: 78mins


Filmography:
'The Texas Chainsaw Massacre’, 1974, Tobe Hooper, Vortex
'The Last House on the Left’, 1972, Wes Craven, Lobster Enterprises


Pub/2008


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