Leofwine_draca As its re-titling suggests, LAST HOUSE ON THE BEACH is one of the many rip-offs that came out in the wake of Wes Craven's terrifying shocker LAST HOUSE ON THE LEFT. Each film is caught in a '70s time capsule of sleaze and perversion, depicting innocent young women being terrorised by ruthless criminals. There are two types of rip-off in this case: the low budget US grindhouse flick, and the Italian knock-off. LAST HOUSE ON THE BEACH is one of the latter and it's one of the most boring of the rip offs I've seen. I'd admit right away that these films aren't my idea of entertainment anyway; I'll watch them for the sake of completeness, but I'd rather watch a gore or kung fu flick than see women being raped.Of the ones I've seen, the little-known DAY OF VIOLENCE has been the best and has this one beat hands down. The problem with LAST HOUSE ON THE BEACH is that there's a lot of sitting around and waiting around in between the inevitable bursts of violence, and there's no tension or suspense to be had during these long, drawn out moments. There's a certain repetitiveness to the action which makes this one a chore to watch. For me, these types of hostage films should be all about the suspense but there's little to none here.Instead, what we do get are a couple of deeply unpleasant rape sequences which are played out in bizarre slow motion. It's as if director Franco Prosperi saw Sam Peckinpah's unique editing during the rape of Susan George in STRAW DOGS so decided to try and make his own rape scenes as unforgettable. It certainly highlights the cruelty of the criminals and one scene, involving a woman impaled on a guy's walking stick, crosses way over the line of taste and decency. The only good thing is that the film is far from graphic, keeping things off screen so the viewer uses their imagination instead, but in a way this makes the horrors only more effective. I don't think I'm spoiling too much to say that the trio end up getting their just desserts, but this is annoying as the punishment definitely doesn't fit the crime and is over all too soon (unlike in the Craven film).A few neat camera tricks – disguising the participants in the robbery to begin with, for instance – help to lift this one a little, and there's also a good cast of Euro stalwarts doing their bit. Lead Florinda Bolkan, subject to much humiliation here, was familiar from lots of '70s giallo flicks like Lucio Fulci's DON'T TORTURE A DUCKLING, as well as playing the title role in FLAVIA THE HERETIC (clearly the inspiration for her role as a nun here). Ray Lovelock is well known for his turn as the hero of THE LIVING DEAD AT THE MANCHESTER MORGUE, and he carved out a niche in quite a few crime flicks as well. Victims Laura Trotter and Sherry Buchanan starred in a couple of zombie flicks, NIGHTMARE CITY and ZOMBIE HOLOCAUST respectively. Director Franco Prosperi was no stranger to exploitation, having been the guy who kicked off the mondo genre with 1962's MONDO CANE. This is far from his best film.

capkronos Wes Craven's 1972 shocker THE LAST HOUSE ON THE LEFT (itself "inspired" by Bergman's THE VIRGIN SPRING) was such a popular and notorious film during its day that it spawned a whole slew of wannabes, imposters and imitators, particularly in Europe. Some of these movies were actually rip-offs, while others merely tried to cash in on the familiar title but actually had little else in common with Craven's film. At one point, distributors even tried to pass off Mario Bava's REAZIONE A CATENA (aka BAY OF BLOOD), filmed a year before "Last House," as a sequel. There was also "Hitch Hike: Last House on the Left" (better known as simply HITCH HIKE), "The New House on the Left" (aka NIGHT TRAIN MURDERS), THE HOUSE ON THE EDGE OF THE PARK (1980), LAST HOUSE ON DEAD END STREET (1977), TERROR EXPRESS (1979) and many others. The formula was pretty simple - have a group of criminals/thugs/ killers/psychos take a random group of people (normally women) hostage and proceed to humiliate, abuse, terrorize, rape and kill some of them off before allowing the survivors to turn the tables on their attackers and get revenge. And that brings us to Franco Prosperi's 1978 cash-in LAST HOUSE ON THE BEACH, which was originally filmed as LA SETTIMA DONNA (THE SEVENTH WOMAN) and was also released under the more generic title TERROR. It follows the above formula pace-for-pace, plot point-for-plot point and though it's watchable for the most part, it brings absolutely nothing new or all that interesting to the subgenre.Florinda Bolkan (who is too talented to be appearing in ripoffs such as this one) stars as Cristina, a teacher and sister-of-the-cloth who is spending an extended weekend at a remote beach house preparing for a Shakespeare performance with five female students. Elsewhere, three thugs; Aldo (Ray Lovelock), Walter (Flavio Andreini) and Nino (Stefano Cedrati), have just robbed a bank and left several dead bodies in their wake. They end up needing a place to hide out for a few days and stumble upon the beach house, where they quickly murder the maid (with an iron to the head) and take Cristina and her nubile students hostage. From then on out, the films plays out basically as a series of sexual humiliations, gropings, beatings, attempted rapes and actual rapes. The captors do such nice things as making Cristina strip and change into her nun's habit in front of her students, sticking their hands down the girls panties to see if they're still virgins and forcing Cristina to watch one of her students get bent over and raped (in slow motion, no less). The guys finally send Cristina over the edge when they rape one of the more troublesome girls, Eliza (Sherry Buchanan), to death with a cane. The final revenge exacted by the women is almost as bland as it is predictable.Though numerous scenarios play out in an unpleasant way, the film isn't nearly as harrowing or impactful as it could have been. One reason is the stereotypically obnoxious portrayal of the three bad guys, which is so frequently OTT and one-dimensionally sleazy that it detracts from the overall realism of the film. Another is the portrayal of the anonymous wide-eyed schoolgirls, who aren't allowed even a glimpse of individual personality. These are simply evil oversexed bad guys versus virginal cowering good girls of the cardboard cut-out variety that don't make one care much either way about what's going on to whom at any given time. Bolkan helps out the best she can. She's the type of actress who is able to convey a lot in a subtle, quiet way - minus the hysterics - and she did a fair job contrasting the grating OTT male attackers to an extent.So while this film is basically a lesser copy of something better (and even sits in the shadow of some of the other lesser imitations), it's still fairly well scored and photographed for what it is. The beach house setting itself was pretty good setting, and there's enough nudity, sleaze and sexual violence directed toward underage-looking teenage girls for those wanting to see that. Personally though, I can't say that I was all that impressed. There aren't very many suspenseful or thrilling moments, just lots of progressively tedious attacks scenes leading to a predictable and ho-hum finale.

lazarillo 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.

Rapeman Here's another Last House on the Left cash-in, this one comes from notorious Mondo filmmaker Franco Prosperi.After pulling a bank robbery, three thugs (Ray Lovelock, Flavio Andreini & Stefano Cedrati) seek a place to hide out for awhile. They stumble upon an isolated beach house and decide to crash there for a few days. The house is owned by the nearby Catholic School, and Sister Cristina (Florinda Bolkan) and five of her female students are occupying it for a few days as they study for upcoming exams.The men break in and hold the women hostage, and while searching the house to make sure there's no one else around, one of them comes across a maid hiding in the basement – he slaps her around a bit then caves her head in with an iron, promptly killing her. Another of the men finds one of the girls in the bathroom getting dressed and makes unwanted advances towards her; she swiftly grabs a comb and stabs the pointed handle deep into his leg, crippling him for the remainder of the film.When we meet Sister Cristina she is dressed in civilian clothes but as soon as the men discover she is a nun they force her to undress in front of her students and put her habit on. Later on two of them viciously rape her in the wine cellar. The action pretty much never leaves the interior of the house and moves pretty slow as the men lounge around sunbathing and drinking wine (the wounded one even finds time to read a bit of William Faulkner!?).Eventually the ladies manage to do away with their captors as Sister Cristina gives the wounded man a lethal injection, shoots the 2nd man and one of her students blasts the last thug in the stomach with a shotgun. When he refuses to die all five girls beat him to death with sticks! Overall this flick isn't too nasty, shocking or even that entertaining, especially when compared to some of the far superior Last House knock-offs: House on the Edge of the Park, Last House on Dead End Street, Night Train Murders, etc. Although it does contain a few notable scenes: the creepy slo-mo rape of one of the girls set to a ''trippy'' acid-rock score, the violent - although non-graphic - rape-with-a-stick scene (again in slo-mo), a bizarre scene where the men force the girls to watch naked disco dancing on TV while they molest them (!?), and the aforementioned beaten-to-death-with-sticks scene.Some of you will recognize Florinda Bolkan from Flavia the Heretic, A Lizard in a Woman's Skin or Don't Torture a Duckling, Ray Lovelock from Let Sleeping Corpses Lie, Murder Rock or Autopsy and one of the female students as Susan Kelly from Zombie Holocaust. It also features a fantastic upbeat score from Roberto Pregadio (SS Experiment Camp, White Cannibal Queen, and SS Camp 5: Women's Hell). Recommended to rape / revenge completists and fans of Italian sleaze. 6/10