La settima donna

This may not be quite as explicit or in your face as, 'House at the Edge of the Park', but it is still seriously nasty affair and most compelling. I found the pacing tight and the action fast moving. 'Action', of course includes, stripping, raping and torturing the various youngsters who are in a desolate house practising a play for their catholic church school with their nun. Florinda Bolkan does very well in her role as the nun, at first stoical and gradually coming around to a more vigorous defence of herself and her girls. Ray Lovelock is excellent as the more charismatic of the baddies who intrude upon the ladies, but everybody helps to make this a most entertainingly brutal and sexy outing. 'Guilty pleasure' I think is the apt description.

Not a surprise that The Last House on the Left would have remakes. This is one of them with a twist - it is also a nunsploitation film.

Florinda Bolkan (Flavia the Heretic) is Sister Cristina, who has some Catholic schoolgirls in a beach house rehearsing a play when some dastardly evildoers crash the party.

The maid (Isabel Pisano) gets killed almost immediately and this serves to terrorize the group. When they strip the nun and make her put on her habit, the camera is on everyone but her. They even rape her off-camera. They did brutally rape one of the schoolgirls (Sherry Buchanan - Zombie 3), and raped and killed another with a stick.

Sister Cristina has had enough. As one of the thieves is suffering and pleading for help, she put him out of his misery. She then shows her capability with his gun. All the girls join in and have their fun with the last one.

Not nasty enough to be banned by Britain, but nasty enough.

As successful as Wes Craven's "Last House on the Left" was, it was such an unpleasant and notorious film that it didn't spawn too many imitators in American. Italy, however, was a whole different story, There "Last House" and its home-grown, pseudo-sequel "Late Night Trains" spawned an entire subgenre (albeit a pretty small one) known as the "terror film". These films usually fell into two categories. Some are flat-out sexploitation films like "Terror Express" and "Escape from a Woman's Prison" that are pretty hard to take seriously, where others, like "Late Night Trains", are pretty disturbing but are also usually much more stylized and less graphic than the infamous American film (the one exception to all this was Ruggiero Deodato's "House by the Edge of the Park" which might even be MORE harrowing than the Craven film).

This movie falls more into the latter category. It is a more-or-less serious film about three fugitive bank robbers who rape, murder, and generally terrorize a nun and a gaggle of Catholic schoolgirls at an isolated cottage by the beach. The violence is pretty nasty, but not especially graphic. There are three rapes, including a fatal one involving a walking stick, but they are highly stylized and/or take place mostly off camera. There is a general lack of character development,however, so that even the strongest actors like Florinda Bolkan and Ray Lovelock are not as effective as they could have been (having seen "Flavia the Heretic" and "Let Sleeping Corpses Lie" I would have expected more from a face-off between nun-heroine Bolkan and bank robber/villain Lovelock). The girls are all nubile but not particularly young or innocent looking (Sherry Buchanon, for instance, had been playing abused schoolgirls since "What Have They Done to Your Daughters?" in 1974). This is somewhat appropriate, however, since the movie seems unsure at times whether it wants to pity them or sexually exploit them.

The ending is interesting although I'm not quite sure what to make of it. Neither the best nor the worst of its kind.

While my copy reads "The Terror", the Italian translation "Last House on the Beach" clearly identifies this as a tribute to (or rip-off of) Craven's early 70's Last House on the Left. Both films involve the revenge victims inflict on their kidnappers and tormentors.

I had high hopes for this film as I enjoy the stylistic violence of Italian horror. Wes Craven, however, was more creative with his movie. The Terror may take the torture to extremes, but it's a less powerful film. Craven's cast was also more convincing.

The camera work is excellent and the movie is well directed. Still, I was left unmoved at the conclusion and maybe that was because I'd seen it done better before.

Another vile and rapidly edited Italian exploitation effort that just mildly succeeds in cashing in on the enormous 'popularity' of Wes Craven's horror landmark "Last House on the Left". Three bank robbers drive up to a remote beach house where they plan to hide from the police after a successful heist. Staying at the house at that moment are an attractive nun and five teenage girls under her supervision. The schoolgirls become the objects of violent torture games, vicious rapes and eventually murder. Bloody vengeance by the remaining girls and the nun is the inevitable consequence. What can be said about this type of cinema that hasn't been said a thousand times before? It's mean-spirited, sickening and not the type of film to watch if you already feel a bit depressed. Peculiar, however, is that the victims of these rape-flicks continue to get younger and more innocent. I suppose it's some sort of competition among the directors to be the sickest bastard of all? How else do you get the crazy idea of exploiting sexual aggression towards teenage girls? The girls in "Last House on the Beach" barely look 15 years old, so mission accomplished for director Franco Prosperi, but the overall tone of the film isn't half as offensive or shocking as Ruggero Deodato's "House on the Edge of the Park" or Meir Zachi's infamous "I spit on your Grave". Not recommended, unless of course if you're on a sole mission to watch every rape/revenge flick ever made. In that case, you can watch this one on par with "Late Night Trains" and "Terror Express", which are equally bad.