The House on the Edge of the Park (1980)

Wes Craven's Last House on the Left (1972) is one of those exploitation movies that seems to have had a disproportionate degree of influence in comparison to its original conception as a piece of low budget exploitation.  Not only has it sparked much debate on the nature and effects of cinematic violence and depictions of violence against women, but it has also spawned a host of imitations, (not to mention a an anemic and mediocre remake).  Naturally, Italian exploitation producers were amongst those coming up with knock offs, with the two most prominent being Aldo Lado's Last Stop on the Night Train (1975)and Ruggero Deodato's The House on the Edge of the Park (1980).  Both of these films try to address one of the biggest flaws in the plot of the Wes Craven film - that the killers crossing paths with the families of their victims is down to coincidence.  In the Lado film the killings take place on the titular night train and the killers steal their victims tickets, meaning that they inevitably end up forced to get off at the stop where the father of one victim is waiting to collect his daughter and her friend.  What follows still involves a degree of coincidence, in that the father is a doctor and one of the murderers is injured, so the father offers to take them back to his surgery, at his home, to treat the injury.  Deodato's film, though, involves a more radical reinterpretation and restructuring of the original film's plot.  In The House at the Edge of the Park, the initial rape and killing, which catalyses the ensuing action, while brutal, involves only a single victim and single killer, is confined to the opening few minutes, rather than the protracted ordeal depicted at length in the other two films.

Instead, the lengthy ordeal of rape and violence now takes place in the home of the victim's family, with her family and friends becoming the focus of the killer and his sidekick's attentions.  Crucially, however, the connection between that first victim and the characters at the eponymous house are concealed from both the killer and the audience until the end of the film.  His meeting with the occupants of the house seems completely random, his subsequent actions seemingly triggered by his perception that they - who are all wealthy and middle class - are looking down on him and his friend.  But, as revealed at the film's climax, the whole set-up has been a trap, set up by the host and his girl friend, in order to avenge the murder of his sister - the girl seen being raped and murdered at the film's start.  As the host cold bloodedly shoots the killer, he explains that his plan all along was to lure the killer there, provoke him into violence and then kill him, so as to be able to claim self-defence.  In a later conversation with his girl friend, the host reveals that the other guests weren't aware of the plot, so, for them, the ordeal was very real.  He also observes that it didn't go entirely to plan, as it proved more difficult to get to his gun than he had anticipated, meaning that their friends had  to endure far more brutality than envisaged.

This final twist, of course, puts a whole different complexion on the issue at the heart of Wes Craven's Last House on the Left - the fact that 'civilised values' are only skin deep and can easily be stripped away when triggered by trauma and a desire for revenge.  Violent rage, under such circumstances, can easily erupt.  But in The House on the Edge of the Park, the violent revenge is premeditated and calculating.  The host and his girl friend, without any pangs of conscience it seems, are happy to manipulate their own friends, subjecting them to violence, rape and terror, in order to achieve their revenge.  Their friends are as much their victims as they are victims of the killer and his friend.  In involving them in their plot, the host and the girl friend ignite a murderous rage in at least one of their friends - Howard, who administers the coup de grace to the killer and has to be prevented from cold bloodedly killing the killer's wounded and helpless associate.  While it might be argued that as the host's friends were also his sister's friends, then, although unwitting participants in the plot, they had some sort of stake in taking revenge on the killer.  But the victim who suffers the most in the scenario is the teenaged neighbour, who is drawn in at random and, in one of the film's most harrowing scenes, has her naked body repeatedly slashed with a straight razor.  The host and his girl friend are entirely culpable for her ordeal.  

The moral lines are further blurred by the implication that the host and his girl friend actually derived a degree of perverse pleasure from the whole situation.  At one point the girl friend had taken the killer upstairs and had sex with him in order to distract him - at the film's end there is a clear indication that she perversely enjoyed the 'thrill' of the experience, seeing the killer as a 'bit of rough'.  Indeed, this class snobbery is present elsewhere, with the host's protracted killing of the murderer seeming to go beyond simply revenge, his motivation, in part, seeming to be a distaste for the 'lower classes', or 'criminal classes' the killer represents.  All through the film the clash of working class and middle class values is emphasised, indicating that the killer's belief that the occupants of the house are mocking and patronising him isn't just paranoia.  On every level, The House on the Edge of the Park presents a thorough interrogation of the assumptions underlying its model, Last House on the Left.  Most fundamentally, of course, it asks who truly are the villains of the piece?  The killer at least has the excuse of being a psychopath, whereas the host and his friends are supposedly civilised intelligentsia, yet some of them end up equally exhibiting psychopathic tendencies.  It all makes for a highly unsettling conclusion to an already disturbing film.

Deaodato constantly references Craven's film, most obviously in the casting of David Hess as the killer, effectively repeating his role from the earlier film.  Various scenes in House on the Edge of the Park also reference Last House on the Left: Hess pushing Howard into the pool and slashing him is a reversal of the earlier film's scene where Sadie - one of Hess' gang - is pushed into the pool and has her throat cut by Estelle, the victim's mother.  Likewise, Howard's shooting Hess in the head as he flails in the pool, already mortally wounded by the host, echoes Hess' killing of Mari in a lake in the Craven film.  Estelle's seduction of one of the gang in Last House is mirrored the the Deodato film by Gloria's seduction of the killer's friend, ut with very different consequences: Estelle bites off the gang member's penis, leaving him to bleed to death, while Gloria takes pity on the killer's friend, recognising that he is an easily influenced simpleton, uneasy with his friend's extreme behaviour.  Gloria's approach eventually pays dividends, as the friend is finally emboldened to stand up to the killer - resulting the killer slashing him open with the razor.  In Deodato's world, kindness, it seems, can sometimes be more effective than violence.  

Even after more than forty years, The House on the Edge of the Park still makes for a difficult watch, (as does its progenitor) - the violence is still brutal and raw and the rape and sexual abuse as disturbing as they should be.  Nevertheless, it is worth persevering with, still feeling relevant in its critique of cinematic depictions of violence, making the point that the sort of casual violence served up as entertainment, in reality, would only be perpetrated by psychopaths - whether they be villains of 'good guys'.  (Arguably, it represents a continuation of the themes of Deodato's previous film, Cannibal Holocaust (1979), in its emphasis upon the ease with which violence is used by the supposedly 'civilised' in order to exploit the less sophisticated).  It boasts a memorable performance from David Hess - one of exploitation cinema's greatest portrayers of scumbags and a score from Riz Ortolani which, with its emphasis on romantic, child like lyrics and melodies that contrast with the violence on screen, makes the film even more unsettling.

Long unavailable in the UK in its original form, (it was initially banned as a 'video nasty', with a heavily cut version later being issued on video in 2001, an almost full version in 2006 and a complete version released on DVD only in 2022), I finally caught it courtesy of the streaming channel NYX, which is currently showing a full, Italian language version with English sub-titles. (NYX is available via Channelbox through some Freeview receivers (not mine) or on Roku via the Distro TV app - they screen a variety of interesting horror and thriller movies, so are worth looking at).