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LAST HOUSE ON HELL STREET
Produced by John Specht
Directed by Robin Garrels and John Specht
Written by Robin Garrels
Edited by Eric Stanze
Director of Photography - Jeff AtwaterJessica - Leah Schumacher
Kyle - Schmack Virgin
Kyle's Mom - Robin Garrels
Kyle's Father - John SpechtRobin Garrels and John Specht are at it again. The team that gave birth to the experimental horror flick INSANIAC return with more of the same, or less depending on how you look at it. The same unconventional storytelling approach that drove home the themes of INSANIAC is amped up in LAST HOUSE ON HELL STREET to pad out a 30 minute short to a 70 minute feature. You think I'm lying? The opening credits alone run 8 minutes, and so do the closing.
Padding is something I've come to accept from the b-industry. Most Full Moon titles are padded to the max just to meet feature length standards and insure rental shelf space. But who are we kidding, there's no way in hell Blockbuster or Hollywood Video would ever approve a movie such as LAST HOUSE ON HELL STREET where the selling point is the torture and abuse of the film's heroine. So why pad and not just give more actual story? Or better yet, sell the title as a collection of extreme shorts. After all, there are two other superb short subjects included as bonuses on the disc that as good, if not better than the main feature.
What story there is revolves around Kyle and Jessica, two happy kids blinded by love and doomed to repeat the tragedy that befell Kyle's mother and father. Kyle was illegitimate and his father didn't like the idea of having a bastard hanging around so the abusive lout took a meat clever to the mother's skull. Going with modern-day theories surrounding hauntings, the intense emotions released during the slaughter were recorded by the house and replayed over and over, like a record. When Kyle and Jessica make their way to Kyle old homestead, he doesn't just trigger a replay, he channels the sprits through his own body. The second half of LAST HOUSE ON HELL STREET primarily consists of Jessica strapped topless to a door while Kyle relives his father's rage and tortures the poor girl.
Like INSANIAC before, Garrels and Specht use the material's darker elements to examine themes of love, from carnal and abusive to pure and true. Unlike INSANIAC, where the experimental execution reinforced the character's mental and emotional states, HELL STREET feels more abstract and wandering with its constant use of woodland scenery cutaways and video effects. Those devices are used so often in HELL STREET that it takes away from the piece and doesn't allow for any connection between the characters and audience and undermines the shock value of the movies more exploitative elements.
The DVD presentation of HELL STREET is rather skimpy compared to other efforts. There's no commentary or Easter eggs that I could find. Instead, all fans are treated to are the two short films I've already mentioned, a handful of stills, and 3 preview trailers. For a company that was poised to up the ante on independent DVD releases, Sub Rosa dropped the ball on this one. In today's corporate DVD market, a movie released sans commentary usually gets the special edition treatment within a year, but how many independent titles have had more that a single release. a simple commentary should be pretty much obligatory.
I fully appreciate what Specht and Garrels are trying to do by making a usually brainless subgenre as cerebral as possible, but with LAST HOUSE ON HELL STREET they are shortchanging their audience. An audience that's smart enough to know whey they are having the wool pulled over their eyes. LAST HOUSE ON HELL STREET could have been a great short with an awesome title, but as it stands it's a long-winded disappoint from two filmmakers that should have known better.