La settima donna

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.

Well, Wes Craven's Last House on the Left sure was an influential film, as there's been a barrage of rip-offs released since 1972, and this is one of them. The Last House on the Beach tends to get put down, and certainly isn't one of the better rip-offs to be released since Craven's masterpiece; but still, I've got to admit that I have a penchant for films like this, and The Last House on the Beach hits the spot. The only real difference between this film and the rest of its ilk is that, as the title suggests, the action takes place close to a beach this time around. Director Franco Prosperi seems keen to capitalise on his film's only original element, as the beach setting is often sun-drenched, and the director has seen fit to implement several upbeat pop-rock songs into the mix...which actually works quite well. The plot is paper-thin as you would expect, and follows a bank robbery. On the run, the thieves decide to hide out in a nice house on the beach; which just happens to be where a nun is taking care of a bunch of teenagers rehearsing a Shakespeare play...rape, torture and murder ensue.

The main thing I like about these sorts of films is that the focus tends to stay on just one idea, which means that the audience is allowed to see into the situation. This film doesn't do it as well as, say, The House on the Edge of the Park, did; but all the actors play their parts well, and considering that there's barely any character on display; it is testament to their talent that we are actually allowed to feel for the characters. Then again, it's always going to be difficult NOT to feel for someone that is being brutally raped and humiliated. This film never received the notoriety of some of its counterparts, and that's hardly surprising as the violence is never particularly shocking and the rape scenes don't go on for long, nor do they occur often. The girls in this film are typically young, which gives it a lot more shock value; but the real problem here is that there isn't a lot of invention, and it ponders along, which may annoy some. I do have to say that I enjoyed the relaxed style of this movie, however, and since I personally found the action interesting; I am perhaps rating is a little above the rating that many exploitation fans would give it.

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.

A group of pretty, female Catholic school girls and their teacher, Sister Cristina (Florinda Bolkan), are terrorised by a trio of armed bank robbers (Ray Lovelock, Flavio Andreini and Stefano Cedrati) who opt to hideout in the beach-front property where the girls are studying (when they're not sunbathing topless by the pool).

Franco Prosperi's Last House On The Beach is, rather unsurprisingly, another Italian rip-off of Wes Craven's Last House On The Left, which wouldn't bother me one bit if only it wasn't such a tame affair, the director clearly wanting to disturb, but reluctant to get his hands dirty when necessary.

Rather than wallowing in the depravity that such films demand, Prosperi merely dips his toe in, withdrawing quickly whenever things start to get interesting. The rape scenes are extremely mild, the murders are tepid, and the power of the film's most extreme scene—the fatal penetration of a young woman by a large piece of wood—is severely diluted by a laughable POV shot of the leering thug brandishing the weapon.

I'm not saying that the film has to show every last graphic detail to be a complete success, but for the audience to be 'on board' with the revenge part of the film, they must first be shocked by the abuse suffered by the victims—and Prosperi repeatedly fails to do so.

4/10, bumped up to 5 for the song that sounds suspiciously like Roxy Music's 'Let's Stick Together', but with different lyrics, and for the scene in which the thugs watch my favourite part of dodgy giallo 'Eyes Behind The Wall' on telly (if you're given the choice, watch that film instead).

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.