Just perfect...

Am i the only one who thinks........Average?

This film is so real. It treats its characters with so much care and sensitivity.

It really made me laugh, but for some moments I was tearing up because I could relate so much.

In 1972, Roger Watkins filmed this macabre picture about a disgruntled ex-con named Terry Hawkins who decides to kidnap four people and, with the help of his "crew" of movie makers, film their murders inside an abandoned building-turned makeshift studio. Originally running at almost three hours long, the film was re-titled numerous times and the original cut became a lost film, leaving us with the 78 minute "Last House on Dead End Street" as we know it today.Quite frankly, this is maybe the most nihilistic film I have ever seen. It parallels works like Wes Craven's "Last House on the Left" in both title and grisliness, but it's about ten shades darker because, unlike in that movie, there is no subtle humor here to provide even the slightest relief; there is no safety in this film. Like many have said, the entire film plays out like a bad dream, and even worse than that, it's a bad dream that looks like a Manson family home movie. The narrative is basic, almost skeletal, but that's not really the point of the film— what we have here ultimately is a stylish exercise in unease and demoralization. The film was made, literally, on less than a thousand dollars (Watkins admitted he used a great deal of the film's budget to buy drugs), and amazingly is not brought down by its budgetary shortcomings.The photography in the film is apt and sometimes borders on surreal, with the camera following Hawkins and his group of hippie auxiliaries; armed with hand-held cameras, they don sinister translucent doll faces and oversized Zardoz masks as they gallivant through the abandoned building, torturing and killing their abductees. The self-reflexive murder scenes are indisputably the hallmark of the picture, and they are grotesque; drills, amateur surgeries, and branding sticks— need I say more? It is horrendous and shockingly realistic even today, so it's no wonder that it was rumored to be real thirty years ago.If the trippy visuals and macabre murder sequences aren't enough to perturb, the nightmarish sound design is. According to the director, the soundtrack and sound design was comprised of stock music and soundbites which were purchased for less than a hundred bucks from a New York sound company. Had I not been made aware of this, I would have never had a clue, because the sonic makeup of the film is actually quite sophisticated. Granted, the dubbing is not great (yes, the film was dubbed), but the haunting choral score and orchestral musical accompaniment add a whole other layer to the film. The expansive, ethereal ambiance that is evoked from the score is in sharp contrast with the claustrophobic world of grit, grime, and grisliness on screen, and the film packs even more of a wallop because of it; the eerie score is punctuated by borderline-Socratic voice overs from Hawkins as he audaciously affirms his convictions.Given the resources used to make this film, it truly is an incredible achievement. In spite of the dirt around the edges, it is well-made and almost spiritually disturbing, but above all else, it is an unusually insightful film that has more substance than one would expect or demand from an exploitation flick. "The Last House on Dead End Street" is perhaps the most unnerving and haunting film I have ever seen, bar none. It is a living, breathing nightmare; a meditation on death and power, and an exposition of depravity. 10/10.

Reading the reviews here I can't help but notice there hasn't been a recent one for some time. Here goes. The plot is as follows: A newly released convict with a big chip on his shoulder against society ropes in a couple of old friends and some Manson Family type females to make snuff movies and proceeds to do just that. This movie has more than a few W.T.F scenes which easily place it higher than the usual grind house fare of the seventies, some of these scenes are just plain bizarre with the whipping of a young lady dressed in a maids outfit with her face covered in black and white mistral make-up by a dwarf!!!. The atmosphere of violent misanthropy and amphetamine abuse which this movie is saturated in is powerful to say the least, the rage filled moment when the lead character kicks a director to death while screaming "I'm the ******* director here" is particularly memorable. But what I came away with most from this movie was the sheer strangeness of it all. The very early primitive-synthesizer soundtrack really is creepily effective. The otherworldly behavior of the Manson family type girls is disturbing and the Greek Mythological masks the characters wear while torturing and killing their victims hint at something deeper, more thought provoking and just plain scarier than other movies of this ilk. Even the opening sequence/trailer with the revolving screaming head jumps at you. And this movies' history, where for almost 2 decades it was all but lost with the names in the opening and closing title sequences being pseudonyms leading to the idea that this movie really was a snuff movie help give this film it's undoubted uniqueness. Some of the oddness can be explained by the fact that in it's uncut form this movie was about 3 hrs long!!! and it's original title was the "Cuckoo Clocks from Hell" But unfortunately this version remains and will probably always remain lost. Ahhhh we can but hope it will turn up in a New York warehouse until then buy a 6 pack stick the DVD in your player and sit back and enjoy this hallucinogenic scare flick

???According to urban legend, the Manson family not only conducted bizarre ritual murders, they also filmed them for posterity and somewhere deep in the California desert, its reputed that the canisters holding said antics are buried far beneath the sand, ripe for re-discovery by some hapless soul. I think Last House on Dead-end Street would prove to be an accurate primer of whatever was stored on those unholy frames, or at least a realistic portrayal of the mindset it takes to mount such a twisted home movie.Terry Hawkins, freshly released from the big house, sets out to make snuff films and succeeds past his wildest expectations when he orchestrates the elaborately choreographed execution of his business associates for assuming the credit for his new underground film movement.As its been said before & which I swear by, 'bad' movies can be sublime, achieving the indefinable in their steadfast refusal to play by the rules, getting surreal results 'good' movies can't touch with their off kilter rhythms. Such monstrosities & freaks-shows are best viewed in the arena of post midnight tribulation, when you can't sleep & celluloid out-of-body experiences are most likely.A minor work of no-budget film-making, Dead End is one of the poorest, cheaply made pieces of celluloid I've seen, and it still works. All the pieces are put together in the wrong way but the twisted logic of it remains. It survives as pure atmosphere. Admittedly it starts off dire, drifting into the aimlessness of a bad grind-house experience, the type only improved with recreational narcotics & full Mystery Science Theater treatment, but somewhere along the way (probably once the 'rituals' begin) your conscious mind takes a back seat to the nightmare-in- progress. That out-of-phase dubbing especially begins to rub in exactly the wrong/right way, throwaway incompetence that seems to(deliberately?) mask something more disquieting. I don't really know how else to describe it: initially coming off as laughable, if you stick with it, the mangled quality of this poisonous enterprise begins to hypnotize, initial disarming shoddiness allowing a seed of something greater to burrow into your head, a deeper vision that's not as easy to laugh off once that frigging creepy Greek tragedy mask comes out. It's like a midnight transmission from Mars, the kind of experience where you question the director's mental health.Watched in a disassociated daze, the jumbled noise activates parts of your brain long dormant. Cutting the distracting dialogue all together and just going on music & footage might've even strengthened it. There's something really weird going on here.The combination of grainy gritty film stock, poverty row locations, claustrophobic framing and vile subject matter combine to make a unique, hallucinatory mood. Director Watkins was working with peanuts here and its forever apparent, from the awful sound to the non acting- this is a sweat and blood, true labor of twisted love. Believe me it shows: Hawkins must've been one cheesed off young punk when he mounted this exercise in despair because the suppressed animosity and bitterness of a seriously miffed youth vibrates throughout the lean-mean 78 minutes..... definitely a 70's curio. When Hawkins flies into a rage at one point during the shock murders of the film's latter half, screaming over and over, "I'M DIRECTING THIS F%$KIN MOOOOVIE!" you aren't quite sure where Terry ends and Rog begins.The sheer grunge throughout is another thing; it accesses a depraved realism through its bottom barrel-ness. Amateurishness is key. Claustrophobia, feeling trapped in a crumbling asbestos-ridden rat hole is palpable, filth and decay leaking through the screen to infect viewers. One of those fabulous times at the movies that makes you want to take a scalding shower after.Very much a work of its day when general disillusionment abounded, the loser characters who populate Watkins's film have not much further to sink in their respective depravity- they truly are dead-ends, mouthing empty hippie jargon, running on the fumes of something long dead, all sunken eyes & bad skin. What's shown is all that's going on in these empty heads. The paltry lot are all surface and eagerly jump on Hawkin's new idea without much deliberation-like any good ambitious American- which is purely for rich upper crust smut consumers who've grown weary with typical hardcore frivolity. Snuff: the next logical step in flesh-as-commodity ( no doubt such things exist). The plot isn't really that important to Last House though, its the stiflingly bleak presentation of a scorched earth populated by only perverts and freaks, which Watkins assembles with only 800$ and a lot of recreational drugs to his name. It packs a bite 30 years on. Only the tacked-on narration feebly attempting to provide the viewer with some sense of closure is a misstep.Through the apparatus of 'bad movie' Watkins did with a shoestring what few directors could do with lavish budgets- communicate an unadulterated vision of tangible hell on Earth, caked with dirt, sleaze and ennui. It's a shame he only churned out a few pornos before quitting the scene altogether. I hope to check them out one day.This is a bad dream, not a film.

It's not often I'm disappointed by a gritty, disturbing flick. Hell, I can probably count them on one hand. Well, looks like I got another one. Last House on Dead End Street, has been repped to me by a number of people. And I have no clue why. It may be one of the first snuff- based stories out there, but hell, that doesn't make it a good one.It's just so, damn, dull. It took me three attempts to finish it actually. Usually I enjoy the grit and the grime movies give off, but this is just something completely different. It felt like these people embodied grit. Sh!t, and I would be one to say that is a cool thing to say about characters in a flick. Man, I'm confusing myself. It was just a very uninteresting, and uneventful flick. When things took place, you didn't give a damn. Well, I didn't give a damn, or a sh!t.The movie wasn't a total bust afterall though. I did appreciate some of the camera-work. It was amateurish, but once in a while they'd hit this noir-type cinematography that looked pretty cool and stylish. But it was most likely just a fluke luck shot. And even though I disliked almost every single character I did like the lead, a little. The raspy voice, the alright delivery, the sketchy look...it worked.LHonDES is a hardcore flick. It's perverse, gritty, amateurish, and just a tough watch. But it's a tough watch for all the wrong reasons. And surprisingly, not a single scene of the snuff shots were even slightly disturbing. But again, it's a flick for a specific crowd. Even if you call yourself a fan of gritty exploit flicks, beware, this still may not be for you.