LAST HOUSE ON THE LEFT: Stab Your Way To Fortune

“I don’t know if you’re familiar with CREEM at all,” I begin to tell film producer Sean Cunningham in his spacious office in a sleazy building off Times Square. “It sounds awful,” says Cunningham.

Maybe, pal, but it ain’t nearly as awful as Last House On the Left, Cunningham’s Grade D gross-out, a staba-thon filmed in bloody hack-a-rama. I’ve seen it twice, and at one point I was convinced it was one of the greatest movies every made. Now I’m not so sure, though it’s certainly one of the most truly frightening movies of its ilk to come around in years.

Basically, it’s about how two teenage girls on their way to a rock festival (to see “Bloodlust,” the group that dismanties live chickens on stage) stop in the bad part of town to score some grass. They fall into the clutches of four escaped criminals: Krug (David Hess) and Weasel (Fred Lincoln), two psychos who’ve been doing time for the murder and rape of a priest and two nuns; Sadie (Jeremie Raine), a sadistic dyke who looks like a squat Tricia Nixon who drank too much Romilar; and Junior (March Sheffler), Krug’s drug addict son.

For the next hour and a half, “The Road Leads to Nowhere,” as the theme song says. The girls are taken out to the woods, tortured, forced to do humiliating things (like watching The Waltons) and are finally slowly, brutally murdered.

That’s only about two-thirds of it. The killers seek refuge in the nearest house, which turns out to be the home of one of the girl’s parents. The parents discover their visitors’ deed, and devise a scheme for revenge so gruesome that it pales the original crimes. A few clues: it involves a treacherous act of sodomy, and an electric buzzsaw.

The question arises: who would make a movie so subjectively horrifying, and why did he, she, or they do it? We hoped to find an aging, bulging, fastbuck shyster who hated children and drank Drano for breakfast. But Sean Cunningham is short but muscular; he wears jeans and flannel shirts, sports a beard and mustache, and has sharp, intense blue eyes. He’s thirty-one years old, and lives with his wife and two children in suburbia.

Cunningham got into movies through theatre. He studied theatre and drama at Franklin Marshall College in Pennsylvania and at Stanford University. For awhile he made a good living as a stage manager and freelance producer and director, and was making up to $2500 a week when he produced The Front Page at Long Island’s. Mineola Theatre with Robert Ryan and Henry Fonda.

“I became dissatisfied with professional theatre because it’s the theatre business, not some idealized, romanticized thing. So when a friend came back from'California and said he wanted to make a movie, I said sure, let’s make a movie.'' I didn’t even know what a movie camera looked like.”

(Those who’ve seen Last House and who are ready to interject that he still doesn’t know what a movie camera looks like will please sit still while Cunningham continues his story.)

“It was one of the worst riiovies ever made,” he said. “But miracle of miracles, it was a big hit.” The name of the movie was The Art of Marriage.

“All of a sudden I was a successful film producer, and that makes you learn about movies in a peculiar way: every time you make a mistake, it costs you in dollars. You don’t often make the same mistake twice.”

Cunningham then made some documentaries, including a series called News of the Month in Art, which covered art shows in New York. Then, he said, “I raised some , little bit of money and made the most expensive home movie ever made, called Together. ” I remembered that movie, a soft-core semi-porno billed as “an adult love story.” Again, the movie was financially successful beyond anyone’s imagination.

“In that film I finally learned how film works — that it is* a visceral experience, a non-rational thing. But anyway, I had the choice of waiting for the phone to ring from Hollywood, or make another movie. I decided to make Last House On the Left. ”

Cunningham produced the film, which was written and directed by Wes Craven. It was shot in and around New York with mostly inexperienced actors. David Hess, who played Krug, is a composer, Sheffler a night club comic, and Lucy Grantham, who plays the trampier of the two girls, is now a student. All gave strong performances. The budget was remarkably low: around $150,000. But what secret bloodlusf motivated Cunningham and Craven to undertake the project? Was it mere sadism and greed?

“Wes is one of the sweetest and gentlest people I’ve ever met. And I’m rather pacifistic by nature. But we decided to go into a genre market, and We wanted to do something unique.

“We tried to make a movie that lived up to its advertising. I don’t know how many hundreds of movies claim to be ‘the scariest thing you ever saw — the worst this, the worst that — ” Cunningham’s eyes begin to sparkle as his modus operandi begins to unfold.

“It took us into an analysis of what was scary. Looking at violence and horror films, it’s an incredible turn-off, because violence is so romanticized. We figured to reduce violence and brutality to a human level. It’s not in the amount of blood you spill, or the number of people you kill. What appalls people about this film is that it treats the death of some young girls in a very realistic way. It’s one thing to say ‘bang bang, you’re dead.’ But if you get to know the girls, and you want them to live, and you watch the life drain out of them slowly, it becomes something different and horrible.”

(Stab, hack, stab, stab, cut, twist, deeper, stab,,yecch.)

“Then,” says Cunningham, hardly missing a breath, “we explored other elements, like the potential for animal behavior in all of us. Just when you’re,, about to sympathize with the parents and their revenge, the vengeance grows to such dimensions and becomes so brutal that you can’t really identify with them.”

Cunningham acknowledges that the film has received criticism for inspiring violence. Until it started making big money on its second run, theatre owners received threats in some towns demanding. that they stop showing the movie, or have their theatres burned down. But Cunningham sees it a different way.

“Philosophically, the movie is antiviolence.’\(Yuk-yuk-yuk.) “But instead of having some milktoast going around saying ‘gee, violence is terrible,’ it’s like, okay, you guys like violence, here’s some real violence for you. How do you like it now.

“It’s so violent that if someone says a picture is ‘More violent than Last House On the Left, ’ you just don’t wanna see it. And that’s just fine with me.”

Of course, there are other points of view. There’s one story, probably baloney, about some parents making their 16-year-old kids go to see it, so they could say “see, here’s what happens when you get mixed up with dope.” In other words, seeing it as a proper Christian moral tale. One or two intellectuals have made parallels between Last House and Ingmar Bergman’s revenge classic, The Virgin Spring. Last House is on its way to becoming the biggest cult-of-fear classic since Night of the Living Dead. It has grossed almost eight million dollars. In one theatre in Denver it broke the house attendance record previously held by The Sound of Music. (Hack, hack, stab, turn, knife, guts, stab, blood, hack, all the way to the bank.)

MAME

(Warner Brothers)

Lucille Ball is just like Kleenex to 42 million tv viewers. A household word, you know, Jello... but whatever Lucy is or does, she is still Lucy. And this is the case with Mame. Her antics are I Love Lucy, dolled up for an eight million dollar extravaganza.

Mame is the tale of a racy lady of New York who “inherits” her newly orphaned nine year old nephew, Patrick. Lucy gives us a guided tour of child care — her way. Patrick’s (who might as well be Little Ricky) schooling includes anything from a tango at a Speakeasy to a perch on the Statue of Liberty.

Lucy gavots through art deco and bathtub gin on a .still-gorgeous pair of gams, trading insults with her “bosom friend” Vera who is an aging Theda Bara gone dyke (also TV’s M&ud), losing her loot in the crash, and all the while playing Mary Poppins gone astray.

The saga of Auntie Mame spans 20 years and Auntie manages to tie up all the loose ends in the last 20 minutes of the movie. She rescues Patrick from an untimely marriage to a debutahte snob and her “right side of the track” family — with the help of Patrick’s pregnant nanny and 42 homeless unwed mothers —; gets him married off to her Irish maid; becomes a grand aunt; and jets off to Russia with her new charge (“any child is deprived until he’s seen Siberia”).

Mame is great garbanzo for a Sunday Matinee. It’s for us sticky sentimentalists who like to lijugh out loud, and \ cry into our popcorn. It’s corny as a breadbox, but if you’re a sucker for Hollywood fantasy, you’ll have a great escape into the wonderful world of razzle dazzle, where everything has a happy ending.

Jaan Uhelszki