By Tristan Bishop
Are you old enough (let’s say, 35 or above) to remember the days before DVD and the internet? Back in the pre-digital era, being a horror junkie could be tough work – we didn’t have scores of companies releasing pristine prints of obscurities on VHS tape (Redemption being the exception to the rule), and researching rarities took more effort than typing titles into Google; most of our knowledge came from fanzines, video trading lists and good old word-of-mouth. Back then, we would obsess over whether the Dutch subtitled print of Nightmares In a Damaged Brain was fully uncut, and we all knew one guy who claimed to have the full version of Cannibal Holocaust which included the piranha bait scene (but had a rule of never lending out his tapes).*
It was during this era I became aware of Last House On Dead End Street, a mysterious film credited to suspected pseudonyms, which I could never locate a print of, but which was whispered about as if it was something truly dangerous, in the same breath as the similarly-titled Last House On The Left (which in itself was plenty shocking enough back in the days when the only way to view it was on a bootleg cassette). The film was apparently made in 1972, but shelved for 5 years before a small cinema release. Possibly my favourite mention of the film was in the sadly-missed Psychotronic Magazine, where Michael J Weldon signed off his review with the line “have you ever heard anyone actually admit that they saw it?”
Then the internet and DVD boom happened, and the floodgates opened for so many long unavailable (and even unheard of) genre films, and, for me, LHODES (as it shall henceforth be known) got buried under hundreds of Italian, Spanish and Asian horror flicks. Then, in 2000, something interesting happened. A director of porn films named Roger Watkins popped up on an internet message board claiming to be the director of LHODES (the film is credited to Victor Janos). This lead to Barrel Entertainment putting out a DVD a couple of years later, which finally got this film seen by some of those who had previously only heard rumours about it. However, I shamefully never got around to actually seeing it….
…Until this week, as it happens, when I found myself awake in the early hours of the morning with an urge to watch something scuzzy and low budget. Perfect, I thought, expecting a rough-edged but somewhat boring 70’s shocker to send me off to sleep again. 78 minutes or so later I was awake and transfixed by this strange, dark movie.
Here is the plot the film – a man called Terry Hawkins (played by director Roger Watkins), gets let out of jail, and plans to take his revenge on society. It appears Hawkins previously dabbled in porn, so, trying to go a little harder, hooking up with two girls and a couple of guys, he starts making snuff films, eventually killing his old porn industry cohorts. The end.
It doesn’t sound like much plot to fill nearly 80 minutes of film, and, truth be told, it really isn’t – so whether Watkins’ claims that the original cut was nearly 3 hours (!) are true or not, the film would have been a real slog to get through at that length! As it is, this film is not well made: the editing is awful and hard-to-follow, the script is barely there, and the dubbing is some of the worst I have ever seen, with the characters words very rarely following their mouth movements. The film feels like a student project for most of the length, with pretentious dialogue balanced against technical incompetence, but…well….it has something.
A little background certainly helps in appreciating this film. Like the main character of Hawkins, Roger Watkins was involved in porn, and used drugs heavily (in fact he claimed most of the budget of this film was actually spent on amphetamines). After LHOTDES (Originally under the title The Cuckoo Clocks Of Hell, and then The Funhouse) was picked up, cut, re-edited, and finally sat on a shelf for 5 years before release, Watkins never made another ‘proper’ film, so it’s entirely appropriate to view LHOTDES as one man’s drug-crazed catharsis, a real middle-finger-up to those who might have mistreated him. With these parallels in mind, Watkins’ crazed, maniacal performance starts to have real power, and the increasingly more outrageous scenes in the film start to become more disturbing.
In fact, the earlier killings in the film are bloodless and amateurish, which makes a later sequence where a woman is repeatedly slashed in the face, before her limbs are removed and she is eventually disembowelled a real shocker. This goes far, far beyond anything glimpsed in Last House On The Left or Texas Chainsaw Massacre, and reminded me of an HG Lewis gorefest without the colourful slapstick approach, and finally I understood why this film had the reputation it did – the amateurish approach only serves to underline the extremity of this sequence, and this is when viewing it on a laptop HD screen. Can you imagine seeing this on a blurry, choppy nth-generation VHS? It would have felt truly dangerous and transgressive, I would imagine.
Of course, there have been more extreme films since, and infinitely better made ones, but LHOTDES feels like a one-off, made around the same time as Last House On The Left (and later marketed as a rip-off, even using the ‘Keep Repeating’ tagline), it’s just as grim, but feels more like a dark spell cast onto celluloid than an actual professionally-made film. Maybe it wasn’t just a movie after all?
*IT DOES NOT EXIST. No, not even on the Venezuelan VHS. Now sit down and be quiet.
Click here for Plumbing the Depths #1: Raw Force.