By Damon Griffin, News correspondent

‘The Last House on the Left’ begins with an interesting enough scene.
A convict named Krug (Garret Dillahunt) is riding along in a police car, en route to a maximum-security prison, and is mocked by the driver and his companion. But we don’t know Krug is a convict, or sitting in the barred backseat of a department vehicle, until the driver shuts Krug up when he says he needs to pee. What makes this scene one of the well-crafted few in a generally slapdash, willfully idiotic movie, is both its clever establishment and its foreshadowing of the type of gangster-style humiliation that comes in spades the rest of the film.
Mari Collingwood (Sara Paxton) and her parents (Monica Potter and Tony Goldwyn) arrive at their summer house on an anonymous lake where they hope to spend a quiet vacation. On the first night, Mari decides to go to town and spend time with her friend Paige (Martha MacIsaac). At the convenience store where Paige works, they meet up with a shady teenage drug dealer, Justin (Spencer Treat Clark), then head back to his motel to smoke marijuana. But their evening plans are interrupted by Justin’s dad, who happens to be Krug, accompanied by Giles (Joshua Cox) and Sadie (Riki Lindhome).
They proceed to torture the two girls, first in the motel room and then out in the forest surrounding the lake, where the two girls attempt to fight back. This ordeal ends with Mari being raped and Paige being stabbed to death. But miraculously, Mari, an excellent swimmer, manages to escape and swim back to her parents’ house.
The problem is, by the time she arrives at the house, Krug and his gang have coincidentally arrived at the same house, had their own injuries treated and received an offer to stay in the guesthouse. Only when a barely-living Mari manages to knock on the door, and is revived by her doctor father, do the Collingwood’s realize exactly who they are sheltering; from there on, they proceed to give the gang an eye for an eye in a most brutal fashion.
‘The Last House on the Left’ is a remake of Wes Craven’s exploitation shocker from 1972, which itself was a remake of Ingmar Bergman’s ‘The Virgin Spring,’ based on a Swedish folktale. So this movie is possibly the only teen-slasher flick that can be traced to a Swedish folktale, but it also needs to be realized how important these folktale origins really are. A story like the one of ‘The Last House on the Left’ is a grim, word-of-mouth tale that these days people would be telling around the campfire if it had not made its way to cinema. Even still, the film should remain faithful, at least, to its folktale origins, and it is here where ‘The Last House on the Left’ makes a hash of itself.
In a campfire story, it is important to draw a clear line between good and bad, but one must still have sympathy for the good guys and be intimidated by the bad guys. It is hard to feel either way when most of the characters are presented as mind-numbingly brainless. Mari is a wide-eyed, unrealistically timid teenager who is played by Paxton as a cardboard cut-out of a teenage girl. Krug and his gang, upon entering the motel room, see the two girls, outwardly proclaim that they are killers being chased by the police, and then proceed to blame Justin for the girls finding this out.
‘ Justin himself is a spineless boy with dull eyes who you want to yell at every time his character is on screen. The dialogue the actors are given doesn’t exactly help, and the pettiness of several injuries the convicts sustain and make a fuss about is enough to make them look merely pathetic and brutal, not scary and brutal. This is amusing only in the way that a monster truck rally is amusing, not in the way a campfire story is amusing.
Interestingly, the one character who viewers may develop a sliver of affinity for is Paige, played competently by MacIsaac. MacIsaac played Becca in ‘Superbad,’ and she brings to this movie the same energetic spunkiness she brought to that movie. MacIsaac may turn out to be a fine actress who can rise above the material she is given, as she does here. But her character is the first to die; nobody with a personality lasts long in this movie.