Through the passages of time there are certain movies that are spoken about with a sort of legendary status. For me my niche area is horror movies, from as far back as I can remember people spoke of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre. A few years later and I started to hear about I Spit On Your Grave, and then someone mentioned Last House On Dead End Street. While Texas Chainsaw Massacre and I first met about 10 years ago, and I Spit followed a few years later; Last House On Dead End Street kind of eluded me. It would be bought up in conversation then forgotten, where as normally as soon as something comes up I immediately make a purchase. It was not until recently however when sorting through a massive stock of DVD’s I purchased some 4 years ago that I discovered for the last few years I had been sitting on this “gem”.

The reason for the appeal to me of Last House On Dead End Street is that it enters the seedy world of snuff movies. With films like 8mm, Thesis and a brief touch in Hardcore; I had high expectations. This after all was apparently a movie that was regarded as an inspiration piece, and certainly something the producers of 8mm had seen.

The film itself is just diabolical; you cannot clearly identify any of the characters. As well as the edgy filming so many of the actors look very much alike, in particular Terry and one of his film crew. The editing in the movie is incredibly bad, none of the pieces add up to anything very much. Nothing is ever explained, the grudge is never explained, and the reason for some of the more laborious scenes just seem like they are there to make the movie achieve a certain runtime. There are odd random scenes designed to illustrate a point, like one of the movie producers wives being involved in the S & M scene; incidentally the whipping scene is just awful, she paints herself up like the black and white minstrels then gets whipped by a disabled man, with a similarity to Igor from the Frankenstein movies. After a period of time with her being beaten I started counting the lashes, unaware of how many I missed she takes 213 lashes and amazingly still stays standing. Another annoying element of this is that the lashes, her flinches of pain, and the noises are all out of sync with each other.

And this is the movie in a nutshell; there is no deep meaning, no moments of humour, no message to deliver, and worse of all no plot. As if that’s not bad enough most of the time you cannot even figure out what the actors are saying as the sound is so appalling.
I’d be far understating the fact if I said that this was the worst movie I had scene this year, and probably to say it’s the worst movie I have seen in my entire life would certainly come close. This movie tries to be artsy but ultimately just delivers nothing; it’s terrible from start to finish.