La dernière maison sur la plage

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.

A trio of obdurate bank-robbers who are barely evading the authorities hole up in an incommunicado beach house where several girls from a parochial school are having a field trip with their drama teacher. Instantaneously, the girls are sucked into a living nightmare of sexual assault, inexorable degradation, torture, and death. At one especially disturbing point in the course of events, one of the brutes becomes seriously injured, and callously demands to be cared for by the very people he has been so cruelly tormenting.

This film is often compared to LAST HOUSE ON THE LEFT, though despite axiomatic similarities in the general mien, little else between the two films is consonant. LA SETTIMA DONNA is an emotionally exhausting steamroller of tribulation, pathos, and senseless inhumanities...highly unpleasant, but effective, like a hard punch to the gut.

6.5/10

Last House on the Beach (1978)

* (out of 4)

Yet another Italian rip off of Wes Craven's Last House on the Left, which of course was nothing but a rip of Ingmar Bergman's masterful The Virgin Spring. A nun and her five students are practicing a concert in a house far away from anyone when three thugs, running from the police, break in on them. Soon the thugs are raping, torturing and beating the girls so the nun finally gets fed up and takes her own revenge. I've seen a lot of these rips over the years but this one here is without a doubt the worst of the bunch. If you're looking for a watered down version of the Craven film then this is the movie for you as the violence all takes place off screen and we're often just shown the aftermath. The rape sequences are very tame and often don't even feature any nudity. As with the Bergman film, this movie tries to use religion as an undertone but it never works. The entire film is very lazy but what makes the film unwatchable are all of the characters who are annoying from the start and only get worse. The performances are what you'd expect from a film like this but the direction is quite horrid as Prosper brings no energy, suspense or drama to the film. Florinda Bolkan, a Euro Horror favorite to many, plays the nun and does a decent job with the role.

Sister Cristina(Florinda Bolkan)plays a nun who takes 5 teenage girls in her care to a remote house where they rehearse 'A Midsummer Night's Dream'.Three bank-robbers(Ray Lovelock,Flavio Andreini and Stefano Cedrati)show up,brutally raping and terrorizing the girls,killing one by raping her with a cane,until Bolkan renounces her teachings and seeks bloody revenge."The Last House On the Beach" by Franco Prosperi is a typical Italian exploitation film.There are some nasty scenes of misogynistic sexual violence,but the action is slow and the characters are uninteresting.Still if you like terror cinema you can give this one a look.I still think that Deodato's "House on the Edge of the Park" or Lado's "Late Night Trains" are much more disturbing films.7 out of 10.

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).