Last House on Dead End Street

Terry Hawkins has just been released from prison after spending a year incarcerated for drug charges. An amateur filmmaker, Terry claims to have previously made stag films that he was unable to sell. Convinced that modern audiences crave more extreme content, Terry decides to make a real snuff film. After choosing a large abandoned college as the setting of his film, Terry secures financing from an unsuspecting film company run by an openly gay film executive named Steve Randall. Terry rounds up a group of disparate women and men— some of them amateur filmmakers— who are willing to help make his film. Among them are filmmaker Bill Drexel; untrained actresses Kathy and her friend Patricia; and Ken, one of Terry's longtime acquaintances and a former pornographic actor.

For their first scene, Patricia and Kathy, wearing translucent plastic masks, lure a blind transient to the building. The women fondle him before Terry, donning a Greek tragedy-like mask, strangles the man to death while Bill films the murder. Meanwhile, pornographic director Jim Palmer, a peer of Steve's, waits anxiously for a party he is attending to end; his wife Nancy, done up in blackface, is whipped repeatedly in front of party guests as part of a sex game. Jim complains to Steve that people's tastes are becoming "hard to satisfy." The next day, Terry arrives at Jim and Nancy's home, and finds Nancy alone. He introduces himself as a mutual friend of Ken, with whom Nancy has previously appeared in adult films. Terry quickly seduces Nancy before showing her the footage of the blind man's murder in an attempt to convince her to ask Jim if he will invest in the picture. She is shocked by how realistic the footage looks; Terry confesses that it is in fact real, and rapes her.

The following morning, Terry calls Steve and asks him to stop by the building to visit the film set; he also inquires about a young actress named Suzie Knowles for a part in his movie. Steve arrives later that night, and is confronted by Terry and his crew inside the building, all of them wearing masks. Steve is knocked unconscious, and awakens to find himself tied up alongside Nancy and Suzie. Terry and his crew brand Suzie across her chest with a hot iron before Terry slashes her throat. Later, Terry goes to meet Jim at his office and kidnaps him. Back at the building, Terry and his crew beat Jim to death while Bill again films the crime. They then take an unconscious Nancy and tie her to a large dining table. She awakens to Bill filming her, while Terry uses a hacksaw to dismember her legs before they eviscerate her with gardening shears. During the mutilation, they periodically revive her consciousness with the aid of smelling salts before she bleeds to death.

Terry and his crew confront Steve with the corpse of the blind transient they killed earlier, and welcome him "back to the edge." Steve flees through the building, and is confronted in the basement by Terry, who tackles him to the ground. Bill emerges from a dark corridor with his camera while Kathy and Patricia taunt Steve. Patricia removes her mask and takes off her blouse, exposing her breasts. She unbuttons her pants, revealing a dismembered goat hoof she has held between her legs. As the group taunt Steve, Terry forces him to fellate the goat hoof. Steve escapes, but is cornered in an empty room, where a row of spotlights suddenly light up. Terry and his crew, armed with a power drill, approach Steve, plunging the drill bit through his eye socket, killing him. One by one, they slowly back away from Steve's body and disappear into the darkness.

As the scene fades out, a voiceover states that Terry, Bill, Ken, Patricia, and Kathy were apprehended and are in a state penitentiary.

Some film scholars have noted Last House on Dead End Street's unique preoccupation with and self-reflexivity regarding the aestheticization of violence.[5] In Holy Terror: Understanding Religion and Violence in Popular Culture (2010), film scholars Gerry Carlin and Mark Jones point out the film's similarities to the Manson family murders, and note its religious undertones, which are amplified by the film's choral soundtrack: "Though principally a metafilmic commentary on cinematic perversity, the [lead character]'s gnomic pronouncements, and the excessively ritualized evisceral 'sacrifices' allude to a debased if fundamentally unrepresentable religiosity."[6] Horror film critic and scholar Chas Balun echoes a similar sentiment, writing in 1989 that, "Last House on Dead End Street proves especially unsettling in the manner in which it blurs the lines between recording, inciting and participating in an act of violence. Other films...  have similarly broached the subject, but none have been so alarmingly forthright and worrisome."[7]

Film scholars Bill Landis and Michelle Clifford described the film as sticking to "a consistent, purposeful style that builds to the foulest mood imaginable, creating its own world of hate. In that unintentional exploitation way, it reproduces the Panic Theater extremes of surrealism, where evisceration is the metaphor for the sex act," likening it to the "bastard cousin of Otto Muehl."[8] Landis and Clifford also note the self-reflexive framing of the film, deeming it "a film within a film motivated by a hate of pornography and the swingers who create it."[9] Because of Terry's focus on murdering individuals connected to the pornographic film industry, Landis and Clifford herald the film as "the ultimate sexual revenge movie...  What goes around comes around in the underground porno world, and Terry Hawkins makes this code his law, filming his targets as they take their last undignified breaths."[9]

The original 175-minute version[18][19] of the film was titled The Cuckoo Clocks of Hell, inspired by a quote in the Kurt Vonnegut novel Mother Night (1962).[10][20] The film was screened under this title at the Cannes Film Festival on May 1, 1973, followed by the Berlin International Film Festival on July 14.[1] Watkins alleged that the film caused riots when subsequently shown in New York City and Chicago; it was apocryphally claimed that a theater in Chicago was burned down in a riot that occurred during a screening.[20][21] This version has been lost, with the original negatives either destroyed or missing.[22] Subsequent theatrical distribution was delayed after one of the actresses sued Watkins,[17][23] worried that a nude scene in the film would impede her chances of finding success as a Broadway actress.[12]

In May 1977, the film was released in a truncated cut as The Fun House, screening at drive-in theaters throughout Connecticut,[2] as well as in Shreveport, Louisiana,[24] and Millville, New Jersey.[25] It subsequently screened at a drive-in in Ithaca, New York beginning June 3, 1977, paired as a double feature with Mark of the Devil.[26] Independent film distributor Cinematic Releasing Corporation subsequently acquired rights to the film and had re-released it as early as March 1979 (Miami, Florida) under the title Last House on Dead End Street, a play on the title of the Wes Craven film The Last House on the Left (1972).[27][28] It opened in New York City under this title on December 28, 1979.[29] Vernacular historian Bill Landis note that, during the film's New York screenings—which occurred primarily in grindhouse theaters in Times Square—"people on the Deuce sat stunned and sickened, but unable to leave their seats."[9] In the United Kingdom, the film was banned by the British Board of Film Classification; Tobe Hooper's slasher film The Funhouse (1981) was also banned by association, as the films had almost identical titles.[30]

For over two decades following the film's theatrical release, the true identities of the director and cast were unknown to the public, as the names given in the credits were pseudonyms.[31] This sparked various rumors surrounding the film, the most well-known being that it had emerged from underground cinema circles in New York, and featured footage of actual murders.[32] In his 1995 book Killing for Culture, David Kerekes stated: "Any attempt to trace the names behind Last House on Dead End Street will lead no further than the credits themselves, all obviously false."[33] However, a review published in 1989 by critic Chas Balun, had in fact identified the film's director as "a young New York film student named Roger Watkins."[34]

In December 2000,[35] a contributor posting as "pnest" on the Internet messageboards of FAB Press (a publishing house devoted to cult movies), claimed to be the director, writer, producer, and editor of the film, "Victor Janos." The poster later revealed his identity as Roger Watkins.[3] After the release of Last House on Dead End Street, Watkins had had a career as a pornographic film director, under the pseudonym Richard Mahler.[31]

• List of American films of 1974
• Snuff films
• Exploitation films

• Last House on Dead End Street at AllMovie
• Last House on Dead End Street at IMDb
• Last House on Dead End Street at Rotten Tomatoes
• Last House on Dead End Street at the TCM Movie Database