A spoiler-free revisionist movie review.
Ruggero Deodato’s “House on the Edge of the Park” is straight up “genre trash”. Terrible movie. Review over. For those wondering why this lesser-discussed grindhouse rape-revenge “most disturbing movie of all-time” nominee is so bad, let’s talk. Come on, I know this spot over by the park where we can groove, baby. I’ll be quick (probably not).
I’ve written a few times now on how sometimes, the old is not new. It’s something I keep coming back to, but I don’t think I need to dedicate an entire review to justifying myself anymore (it’s not new, heh-heh). Dated is sometimes dated, and classics are designated for a reason. It’s why modern artists still callback something like, okay easy example, “The Godfather”: The Godfather didn’t go out of its way to try anything different. It was common material – about universal themes of family and personal responsibility – presented cleanly and professionally by a game cast & crew who were compensated adequately (one would hope). I think the most out-and-out original thing that the first movie achieved was its on-screen dramatization of the Italian Mafia, but it could have been about a food truck turf war with the same cast & crew doing the same commendable job and we’d still be talking about it (the world would just be a far-different place, as well as some ’90’s-to-2000’s rap lyrics). The Godfather is fifty-years-old and has not aged poorly – except maybe James Caan’s “air punching”, but even that carries a certain charm once you’ve seen it a few times. Okay, done talking about that. Moving on.
Most movies from the “grindhouse” era have not aged well. Or “exploitation films”, “Blaxploitation”, “Brucespoloitation”, “drive-in movie” – whatever your flavor. And unless yours’ is one with that special spark that helped it enter the pantheon of well-trodden genre classics or you’re a contemporary like Rob Zombie who grew up on them and idolize them warts-and-all, they don’t hold up. You literally watch them to laugh at how bad they are: either poorly made with dollar-store special effects & bad acting, or terrible generic plotting with dumb teenage characters. The same thing happens now with these dime-a-dozen direct-to-streaming movies – we’re just in a different era, and standards aren’t the same. We don’t shoot on 16mm anymore because it’s cheap & available: you shoot on your iPhone because it was free because your mom bought it for you as a Film School graduation present & because it’s HD-capable. And realism: realism is the name of the game now (“cinema of the body” is how modern leather jacket-wearing bad boy & girl directors got their notoriety). Pretty much, it doesn’t matter what generation of filmmakers you grow up with as a viewer of all-things horror: if something turns out to be better-made or smarter than expected, it’s a nice surprise. But no one is going into something like last month’s “The Invitation” thinking it’s going to be an unsung masterpiece of tension & nihilism “as-yet unseen in contemporary cinema”! At least, I don’t think they are. I wasn’t. And hey, it turned out it was pretty good, because my expectations were low.
So when you ask what grindhouse films have that “special” quality and I say “Blood Feast”, “Man with the X-Ray Eyes”, and “Sweet Sweetback” (to name-drop a few), know that Deodato’s 1980 film “Cannibal Holocaust” is on that list, too: it has escaped criticism to become an undisputed classic of the genre – regardless of your opinion of it. On the surface, it’s about an off-the-grid Amazonian tribe having a really-good snack of a disruptive American film crew. Not new. But it presented the material in that pseudo-documentary Mondo-style, which was new, and it helped that the acting was earnest, too. Yes, there are animals killed in the full uncut version. No, the animal deaths were not PETA-approved. No, I do not approve of animal abuse. Are Larry Clark fans pedophiles? That’s up to personal taste. Trust me when I say the “turtle scene” is the least of your worries. It’s not Netflix. Can you believe that Netflix has a school show with a high school-aged succubus in it? Why is your school show giving me a boner, Netflix?
Anyway. Cannibal Holocaust. Good movie. Great movie. An excellent example of a genre film – an “exploitation” film – that has stood the test of time. Cannibal Holocaust is over forty-years-old and has not aged poorly.
The House on the Edge of the Park has aged horribly. Let’s see what it ticks off on the old Scantron: it’s not disturbing; it’s lifeless & boring – nothing happens; it looks cheap; it’s miscast; it’s a bunch of torture scenes strung together without any binding, and the torture itself is woefully lame; when characters aren’t disgorging lines from an online Newgrounds Disco-era soundboard (“Yeah Baby!”), they’re regurgitating pseudo-spew about the privileged without actually paying off its writer’s sociological aspirations with simple things like expository dialogue, character arcs, and hey, plot structure; and, since we’re on endings, it has one of the single worst last ten-minutes I have seen in a feature film for a good long while. House on the Edge cannot stand up to hard contemporary scrutiny and has been outclassed-and-outperformed by everything released since. That I went in to it with unusually-high expectations is my own fault, and the fault of the website that recommended it as part of its top-ten “most disturbing movies” list (you know who you are). Silly me to expect lightning striking twice from the guy who made “The Barbarians”.
What’s the plot? Plot, plot… plot… plot… psychopathic car mechanic Alex & his socially-inept co-worker-slash-adoptive little brother Ricky crash a one-percenter’s house party and proceed to be the absolute-rudest guests imaginable. Eventually, the guests have their comeuppance. That’s it. The End. The same sort of thing had already been done eight-years-prior by Wes Craven with his “The Last House on the Left” – also with actor David Hess as the lead instigator, and also a movie with no redeeming historical or social value (sorry to those who think so not sorry).
Sexual assault as entertainment isn’t news. Every week, “Chicago PD” finds another reason to shoehorn an unnecessary aside into its show, even if the episode has nothing to do with anything sexual whatsoever (although in its defence the new season hasn’t yet, so that’s 0-for-3). I understand that it’s a device – like any in a scriptwriter-slash-filmmaker’s toolbox – used to increase audience sympathy, but that just makes its use seem more scuzzy than it is already (you have to make your episode more watchable by adding rape?). I can’t say I necessarily approve of the wholesale use of rape or sexual assault in art, but I can say that, if used appropriately and with some decorum, it does make a movie or an episode of a TV show feel more intense or “thrilling”, with the heroes getting back at the villains 90% of the time all the sweeter. Emotional release is a good reason to be a film lover.
But time has passed and my tastes have matured, along with my personality (we hope). I have no plans to see any of the new “I Spit on Your Grave” movies, but the original’s legacy is solidified. Different generations, different standards: if you want to be challenged by a movie & have your heart broken, that’s your incentive. Film, as in art, provides the possibilities for the other 10%.
House on the Edge is your garden-variety grindhouse movie, then: been there, done that. A dearth of originality does not make a movie terrible. Maybe there will be some horribly scarring scene I won’t expect (like the four-way at the end of “A Serbian Film”) or, God forbid, it could just be a tense, well-directed, well-acted movie in which I hope & pray for the victims of the brutality to escape, from the comfort of my couch in well-densified, well-populated suburbia – far from any abandoned farmhouses or creepy damp basements, or house parties that go wrong.
But after a promising initial half-hour (with some class Riz Ortolani music in there, too: “Give it to me, give it to me…”), House on the Edge devolves into Hess going from party guest to party guest poking them like the carnival geek who bites the heads off chickens (Ebert gets the credit for that reference). This alone wouldn’t kill the movie, but everything about the way it’s presented does. First off, David Hess is not a believable psychopath: Philippe Nahon, Kevin Gage, or Tyler Mane this man is not. He wasn’t pervasive in Last House on the Left and he isn’t here: he looks like a zhlub that wouldn’t be out-of-place in the background of a Judd Apatow movie slipping on a banana peel, and he talks in that horribly-forced 70’s-way that I think is supposed to make his Alex character persuasive but in today’s contemporary world feels blatantly manipulative.
Second, it’s not scary. None of the victims do anything to help themselves until the last ten minutes and just stand around accepting their fate. The movie caused a big hoopla when it came out because of the frequency of its sexual violence, but these scenes are honestly pretty tame taken independently (“Once Upon a Time in America” or “The Accused” this is not) and it didn’t help much that none of the female actresses were all that good at acting. Third, it’s boring. There’s no story. Maybe there’s some buried subtext in the dialogue about Alex grooming Ricky to dislike the bourgeoisie because of an unspecified childhood trauma, but the script neither confirms nor denies this theory. Cannibal Holocaust at least had something to say about colonialism, even if it was something we already knew (ie. White people suck). House on the Edge has nothing to say about anything. At it’s core, it’s just another horror movie, but a poorly-made one at that. Shame on you, Deodato! No way am I buying your Cannibal Holocaust tie-in visual-novel adventure game when it comes out now! I’m not even joking.
The final nail in the proverbial coffin is that ending. It’s not worth spoiling here: I’ll leave it to you to go ruin it for yourself if you’re really that interested. The House on the Edge of the Park isn’t a grindhouse “classic”. It isn’t one of the most disturbing movies ever made. It’s a waste of space. DONE.
//jf 10.8.2022
Movie poster sourced from themoviedb.org. Screenshots author-obtained.
theory of a daskeman 