The night she arrives at the remote Collingwood lakehouse, Mari (Sara Paxton) and her friend are kidnapped by a prison escapee and his crew. Terrified and left for dead, Mari’s only hope is to make it back to parents John and Emma (Tony Goldwyn and Monica Potter). Unfortunately, her attackers unknowingly seek shelter at the one place she could be safe. And when her family learns the horrifying story, they will make three strangers curse the day they came to The Last House on the Left.
Masters of horror Wes Craven and Sean Cunningham revisit their landmark film that launched Craven's directing career and influenced decades of horror films to follow: The Last House on the Left. Bringing one of the most notorious thrillers of all time to a new generation, they produce the story that explores how far two ordinary people will go to exact revenge on the sociopaths who harmed their child. The remake of Wes Craven's notorious rape-revenge shocker is a crowd-pleaser rather than a grim moral lesson about the price of doing very bad things, and as long as the downbeat lead-in doesn't put them off, the third-act payoff will have audiences cheering. Pampered, slightly naïve Mari Collingwood (Sara Paxton), who's spending the summer with her parents, Jack and Emma (Tony Goldwyn and Monica Potter), at the family's isolated lake house, hooks up with her pal Paige (Martha MacIsaac) at the general store where Paige works. City girl Mari is a straight-arrow who channels her energy into competitive swimming, while the small-town Paige is a little wilder and less goal-oriented; when scruffy, baby-faced stranger Justin (Spencer Treat Clark) offers to sell them some good weed, it's Paige who leaps at the offer. Mari tags along in the spirit of being a good sport, and frets when she realizes the rundown motel where Justin and his family are staying is out of cell-phone range—she's the kind of kid who actually checks in with her mom when she says she will. A storm gathers, Paige and Justin party and Mari hangs out gamely, but the fun screeches to a halt when Justin's family comes home early. Justin's fugitive dad is a sadistic sociopath named Krug (Garret Dillahunt), who was en route to a maximum-security prison when his brother, Frank (Aaron Paul), and girlfriend, Sadie (Riki Lindhome), engineered his escape, cold-bloodedly killing two police officers in the process. The fugitives are big news and their pictures are everywhere: They need to get out of town fast and need Mari's SUV, but the girls have to go. Krug and company take off with the teenagers in tow, taunting and abusing them as they drive. Though terrified, Mari keeps a cool head and, after steering her abductors onto a road tantalizingly close to the sanctuary of her parents' house, makes a bold attempt to escape. It fails dismally: Frank and Sadie catch Paige just before she makes it to a busy construction site, and her desperate show of bravado so enrages Krug that he stabs her and rapes the virginal Mari, while Justin watches in mute horror. As Krug and his minions regroup, Mari makes one last break for freedom, diving into the nearby lake and attempting to swim to safety. Krug shoots her in the back and leaves her to die in the water. With the SUV damaged and the storm intensifying, Krug and his bleeding, bedraggled crew make their way to the nearest shelter, which just happens to be the Collingwood house. Jack and Emma welcome them with food, drink and medical attention—Jack is a doctor—but it's only a matter of time before they realize they're sheltering the beasts who brutalized their beloved daughter. What will they do? Well, the fact is pretty much everyone knows what they do, either because they're familiar with the original film or because they've seen the trailers for the remake, which give away the whole plot, right down to the last gruesome fillip that's tacked on to the end like a roadshow square-up reel. So it's no spoiler to reveal that Jack and Emma wreak bloody vengeance, torturing Frank, Sadie and Krug as cruelly as they did Paige and Mari. You can see why Craven got behind a Last House remake. The trouble is that the tweaks and tucks made by the new Last House team—director Dennis Iliadis and screenwriters Alleca and Ellsworth—all undermine the brutal directness of the original. They include the totally extraneous invention of Mari's late brother, Ben (presumably to raise the stakes on the Collingwoods' investment in their surviving child); the fact that Mari has sworn off smoking dope (read: she's an unambiguous good girl) and lives to make her way home (not a spoiler, by the way—it's in the trailer); and the recasting of Justin as an innocent and fundamentally decent kid helpless to resist his domineering dad. Put it all together and you have a film designed to make audiences root for the Collingwoods to give Krug, Frank and Sadie exactly what they deserve, a satisfying thrill ride rather than a downbeat examination of the ways in which violence—even when morally sanctioned—eats away at the souls of the perpetrators. None of which will have much to do with the success or failure of the new Last House: If it can bring in both genre buffs familiar with the original film's reputation but unwilling to watch old movies and thrill-seekers whose curiosity is piqued by the atrocities promised by the tell-all trailers, it should do just fine. This gets a grisly 4 on my "Go See" scale and think about what you would do if someone hurt the one that you love? Oh, revenge can be so sweet!
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