| Every subculture has one. An icon the size of the Hope Diamond that is shrouded in mystery and legend. The Bible has it’s Ark Of The Covenant, The Irish have their leprechauns. When it comes to films, there are a few bits and pieces of cinema history that have worked themselves into cult status as legendary accomplishments for one reason or another. In my world, The Last House On Dead End Street is kind of like the Keiser Soze of exploitation cinema. This fabled piece of trash came out in the late 70’s, but was filmed in Upstate New York in 1973. In Oneonta, to be exact. By a film student named Roger Watkins, who’s ego outshined his ability to make a movie that deserves it’s reputation as “the most vile and disgusting film ever made”. The plot of “LHODES” is second to the story behind making the film and it’s slow but effective crawl through the grindhouses of New York City in 1978. Written and directed by Watkins, who was pretty much a film student at the time (regardless of what he says or thinks he was on the DVD’s commentary track) as well as a speed junkie. After spending a whopping $800 to get the flick made (yeah, you read that right), Watkins cut it together and took it on the road. After losing it through typical exploitation channels, they cut up the prints and changed the original title “The Cuckoo Clocks Of Hell” (yeah, you read that right, too) into it’s current moniker. After playing a few sleaze joints in NYC and getting a roadshow tour of the southern states, the movie and it’s maker faded into relative obscurity. Then came the rumors that the slasher scenes were real. That it was “true snuff”. That it was an exercise in creative student filming gone horribly wrong. In the years before affordable home video, the movie became a miasma of rumors and hearsay. None of it could be backed up by a major studio or license behind it, so the movie became a big fat myth. “There’s this flick that is so over the top and gross that the government banned it!” That’s the first I ever heard of LHODES. It popped up again and again through my exploitation tirades in film school. And then I pretty much forgot all about it as my attention turned to H.G. Lewis and Dario Argento. Well, all that changed last week when I was surfing obscure film titles over at Amazon.com. It turns out a video company called Barrel Entertainment has released a 2-DVD ultimate release of LHODES. And it features the first fully-restored uncut and digitally remastered print of LHODES available. To a smut and grime connoisseur like me… it was like being told that the Holy Grail was on the edge of the table. Cut to this afternoon, when I open my mailbox and see the padded, oversized envelope cutting a diagonal chunk of space into the little cubicle. Oh heaven of heavens, the movie that they claimed would never be found is now mine! I have been warned about this movie. I had been told countless times by countless underground reviewers that this was the eye-popper of ‘em all. That I would be left so devoid of nerves and mettle by the end of this that I might give up my schlock-covered members card once and for all. I was assured that by the end of this screening, I would no only have a new outlook on life and death, but I would never tolerate folks who thought that Fulci and Lenzi cornered the market on gore and terror again. 78 minutes later, I wanted my money back. Last House On Dead End Street is about a pissed-off filmmaker and thug named Terry Hawkins (Watkins). He just got out of prison and he wants to get back at the jerks who put him in there. So for the next 4 reels of the movie, he raises a cult of followers (ok, 2 semi-fuggly girls and 2 goofy hippie dudes who wish they were making the movie instead of appearing in Rog’s) and they kill off a group of porn producers who ticked him off while filming it. He strangles a blind guy who owns the dump he and his ladies are squatting at, then he kidnaps and kills off the four filmmakers as they run scared through an abandoned dorm that is trying to look like a factory. This takes about 30 minutes, so before the killings happen Hawkins talks several real-life female students into doing a bit of artistic nudity, and he gropes and fondles one gal who has more guts than the rest to appear in his flick in a sex scene that is so devoid of artistic merit that I actually longed for porn. As for the killings, I was told that they were innovative both for their surrealism and their open-eyed, in-your-face reality. Anyone who has seen Blood Feast or 2000 Maniacs has seen better. hell, Bloodsucking Freaks did a better job of making me squirm... and the blood is PINK in that little gem. A girl who just sort of appears in this movie gets branded by a wiggly piece of iron. The porn director gets slashed open and stomped to death by the maniacal Watkins (while he shouts “I’M THE DIRECTOR! I AM! I AM!) and his googly-eyed accomplices. Then in the only genuinely well-framed but poorly edited sequence- the girl who plays the porn director’s wife gets tied to a table and disemboweled. Okay, this was a chilling sequence, I admit. But oddly enough the DVD print has had to find and restore that piece of film from another source! The original print they were working from to make the DVD had that piece cut, so it is looped into the film despite it being a different quality of stock. It might be this jarring juxtaposition of film quality that made the scene so harrowing. That and the constant cuts to an overhead shot of the woman writhing on the operating table with her legs lopped off and her intestines in a pile by her side. For a grand finale, we are treated to Roger forcing the final victim to perform a bizarre forced oral copulation on a deer’s hoof. Not strange enough for you? How about if the deer’s hoof is dangling from a stoner-girl’s jeans and she has another stoner girl behind her making “bunny ears” with a pair of additional deer’s feet? Yeah, I thought that’d grab you. After the forced Bambi foot fetish bit is over, out hero Roger comes at the guy with a power drill and performs some pre-laser corrective surgery on his eye. Well… a cow’s eye. In close up. Blurry. Hard to see. Get it? This is a very amateurish cross between a wannabe Orsen Welles, and Charlie Manson. It was made by a guy who knows a thing or two about shooting a scene, and might have had some creativity flow through if he had any sort of worthwhile vision. But I just didn’t see anything outstanding here. The idea, novel as it might be to make a shocker film about making shocker films, didn’t work because of the crappy acting and production values. Twisted shots involving each member of the family of nutbags wearing masks (including Roger’s wearing a Greek chorus’s white plaster head- obviously borrowed from the theatre department) and odd-framing of scenes are all lost. This might have been a shocker before Italian Cannibal movies came across the pond, but looking at it through the eyes of someone who has seen stuff that has been made since… I just wasn’t impressed. Some movie legends are kind of like magic tricks… they are more impressive when you don’t know how they got done |
| Last House On Dead End Street (1977) |
| Directed by Roger Michael Watkins. Starring Roger Michael Watkins, Ken Fischer, and Kathy Curtin. |
| Guest review by Shekfester |
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