Florinda Bolkan defies Disney attorneys to challenge her right to wallpaper the duckling in LAST HOUSE ON THE BEACH.
LAST HOUSE ON THE BEACH
La settima donna “The Seventh Woman” aka TERROR
1978, Severin Films, $19.95, 89m 48s, DVD By Richard Harland Smith
Hostage movies go back at least as far as THE PETRIFIED FOREST (1936). It’s tempting to speculate that this claustropho- bic suspense subgenre was de- rived from the Old Dark House mysteries of the 1920s and ’30s. Popularized by the suc- cesses of THE BAT and THE CAT AND THE CANARY (which, like THE PETRIFIED FOREST, enjoyed past lives as stage plays), these chillers confined their characters to a tense night or two in strange and in- variably lethal company. Mid- century, THE DESPERATE HOURS (1955, also based on a pre-existing novel and play) and TEEN-AGE CRIME WAVE (1955) reflected a relaxation in cinematic standards regarding
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onscreen brutality while such true crime hostage situations as the 1959 Clutter Family mur- ders (which inspired Truman Capote’s IN COLD BLOOD and two film adaptations) and the 1969 Tate-La Bianca slayings (which prompted a handful of films that hewed to the facts with varying degrees of accu- racy) provided exploitation film- makers with a wider range of heinous acts from which to draw inspiration.
Although its Italian title is La settima donna, this Franco Prosperi (Mondo cane) film is known in the United States as LAST HOUSE ON THE BEACH, an obvious allusion to THE LAST HOUSE ON THE LEFT (1972). While Wes Craven’s landmark shocker (which took its cue from Ingmar Bergman’s 1960 Medi- eval revenge drama THE VIRGIN SPRING) is not an end-to-end hostage film per se, a hostage situation in the first act yields to horrific depictions of physical vio- lence before an equally grisly third act resolution. The triple
dog dare of LAST HOUSE... was answered first in Italy, where Aldo Lado’s L’ultimo treno della notte (NIGHT TRAIN MURDERS, 1975) varied the formula only slightly. (Mario Bava set a hos- tage scenario inside a moving car for the duration of Cani arrabbiati [RABID DOGS/KID- NAPPED], but as the film was shelved unfinished in 1974 and remained unseen for twenty years it had no direct market in- fluence.) LAST HOUSE star David Hess even enjoyed a working European vacation tak- ing hostages in Autostop rosso sangue (HITCH-HIKE, 1977) and La casa sperduta nel parco (THE HOUSE ON THE EDGE OF THE PARK, 1980); conversely, he was one of the doomed Israeli athletes in the 1976 telefilm 21 HOURS IN MUNICH, the first narrative film depiction of the 1972 Munich Olympics massacre.
Certainly in Italy, where politi- cal kidnappings were front page daily news throughout the 1970s thanks to the Brigate Rosse (a
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