Best movie of this year hands down!

You won't be disappointed!

Great movie. Not sure what people expected but I found it highly entertaining.

This is a small, humorous movie in some ways, but it has a huge heart. What a nice experience.

In 1972, Roger Watkins filmed this macabre picture about a disgruntled ex-con named Terry Hawkins who decides to kidnap four people and, with the help of his "crew" of movie makers, film their murders inside an abandoned building-turned makeshift studio. Originally running at almost three hours long, the film was re-titled numerous times and the original cut became a lost film, leaving us with the 78 minute "Last House on Dead End Street" as we know it today.Quite frankly, this is maybe the most nihilistic film I have ever seen. It parallels works like Wes Craven's "Last House on the Left" in both title and grisliness, but it's about ten shades darker because, unlike in that movie, there is no subtle humor here to provide even the slightest relief; there is no safety in this film. Like many have said, the entire film plays out like a bad dream, and even worse than that, it's a bad dream that looks like a Manson family home movie. The narrative is basic, almost skeletal, but that's not really the point of the film— what we have here ultimately is a stylish exercise in unease and demoralization. The film was made, literally, on less than a thousand dollars (Watkins admitted he used a great deal of the film's budget to buy drugs), and amazingly is not brought down by its budgetary shortcomings.The photography in the film is apt and sometimes borders on surreal, with the camera following Hawkins and his group of hippie auxiliaries; armed with hand-held cameras, they don sinister translucent doll faces and oversized Zardoz masks as they gallivant through the abandoned building, torturing and killing their abductees. The self-reflexive murder scenes are indisputably the hallmark of the picture, and they are grotesque; drills, amateur surgeries, and branding sticks— need I say more? It is horrendous and shockingly realistic even today, so it's no wonder that it was rumored to be real thirty years ago.If the trippy visuals and macabre murder sequences aren't enough to perturb, the nightmarish sound design is. According to the director, the soundtrack and sound design was comprised of stock music and soundbites which were purchased for less than a hundred bucks from a New York sound company. Had I not been made aware of this, I would have never had a clue, because the sonic makeup of the film is actually quite sophisticated. Granted, the dubbing is not great (yes, the film was dubbed), but the haunting choral score and orchestral musical accompaniment add a whole other layer to the film. The expansive, ethereal ambiance that is evoked from the score is in sharp contrast with the claustrophobic world of grit, grime, and grisliness on screen, and the film packs even more of a wallop because of it; the eerie score is punctuated by borderline-Socratic voice overs from Hawkins as he audaciously affirms his convictions.Given the resources used to make this film, it truly is an incredible achievement. In spite of the dirt around the edges, it is well-made and almost spiritually disturbing, but above all else, it is an unusually insightful film that has more substance than one would expect or demand from an exploitation flick. "The Last House on Dead End Street" is perhaps the most unnerving and haunting film I have ever seen, bar none. It is a living, breathing nightmare; a meditation on death and power, and an exposition of depravity. 10/10.

Personally I don't like exploitation and snuff films. I feel that they are grim and upset the viewer and impair his ability to discriminate between humane and animalistic. 'The Last House on Dead End Street' was released 5 years after Wes Craven's depraved exploitation classic 'The Last House on the Left', but this one surpassed the record of depravity that Craven had set 5 years before. I don't like praising this movie for it made me upset and empty for many months, but I need to be true while reviewing it. As I watched this flick, I kept repeating 'This is just a movie'. I confess I didn't do this when I watched Craven's 'The Last House on the Left', which bore the aforementioned tag line. Although an amateurish effort by all means and produced out of a budget sufficient only to buy a few sacks of potatoes, this film will rule your senses forever and will haunt you in your dreams. The film doesn't pick up instantly and waits until the viewer has grown suspicious about the actions of the misanthropes and begins thinking 'What are they up to?'. Their questions are answered when the protagonist begins showing his true color which is as black as death itself!The film begins with Terry Hawkins (Roger Watkins, who closely resembles Quentin Tarantino), who has just finished his jail sentence for drug charges and is now looking for a new livelihood. He meets two cheese directors and now wants to try his hands with film making. Terry claims that he had earlier made few porn films but was unable to sell them. Terry and the directors want to try their hands with the new sensation of horror, Snuff films. They soon begin luring victims to a derelict and abandoned palatial building, where they are hacked, cut, drilled, decapitated, tortured, sawed and finally killed on screen. Their methods are so elaborate that they would definitely cause the viewers to puke on their nastiness. This goes on with several victims, until the viewers come to know that police had received a tip about their vicious and depraved deeds and they raided the place and arrested all the culprits and perpetrators.This might look like a documentary of a failed man, but you must see it yourself if you have the nerves to watch and forget this stuff. I say again, you may watch it, but it will live with you forever. The murders and slaughterhouse scene may induce nightmares and arouse abhorrence. Yes, the protagonist wants that you should hate him. This is a hate worthy film, but I can't give it 'zero' on the basis of my own dislike. May be it was hard for me to throw this film out of my mind, but its penetrative and lingering nature is certainly something that keeps this one infinite miles ahead of the modern stinkers like Fred Vogel's 'August Underground Mordum' and Nick Palumbo's 'Murder Set Pieces'. This film actually lets you dive deep into the mind of a depraved killer and answers some of the questions like 'How are they different from us? and 'What is his motive?''. Roger Watkins is the guy who hides behind the name Victor Janos and many other pseudo names that show on the performer/production credits. It's said that Roger Watkins had a planned budget of $3000 to make this film, but he spent more than $2,200 on amphetamines alone during the shooting and what remained was used to make the film. Unbelievable? Believe it!

???According to urban legend, the Manson family not only conducted bizarre ritual murders, they also filmed them for posterity and somewhere deep in the California desert, its reputed that the canisters holding said antics are buried far beneath the sand, ripe for re-discovery by some hapless soul. I think Last House on Dead-end Street would prove to be an accurate primer of whatever was stored on those unholy frames, or at least a realistic portrayal of the mindset it takes to mount such a twisted home movie.Terry Hawkins, freshly released from the big house, sets out to make snuff films and succeeds past his wildest expectations when he orchestrates the elaborately choreographed execution of his business associates for assuming the credit for his new underground film movement.As its been said before & which I swear by, 'bad' movies can be sublime, achieving the indefinable in their steadfast refusal to play by the rules, getting surreal results 'good' movies can't touch with their off kilter rhythms. Such monstrosities & freaks-shows are best viewed in the arena of post midnight tribulation, when you can't sleep & celluloid out-of-body experiences are most likely.A minor work of no-budget film-making, Dead End is one of the poorest, cheaply made pieces of celluloid I've seen, and it still works. All the pieces are put together in the wrong way but the twisted logic of it remains. It survives as pure atmosphere. Admittedly it starts off dire, drifting into the aimlessness of a bad grind-house experience, the type only improved with recreational narcotics & full Mystery Science Theater treatment, but somewhere along the way (probably once the 'rituals' begin) your conscious mind takes a back seat to the nightmare-in- progress. That out-of-phase dubbing especially begins to rub in exactly the wrong/right way, throwaway incompetence that seems to(deliberately?) mask something more disquieting. I don't really know how else to describe it: initially coming off as laughable, if you stick with it, the mangled quality of this poisonous enterprise begins to hypnotize, initial disarming shoddiness allowing a seed of something greater to burrow into your head, a deeper vision that's not as easy to laugh off once that frigging creepy Greek tragedy mask comes out. It's like a midnight transmission from Mars, the kind of experience where you question the director's mental health.Watched in a disassociated daze, the jumbled noise activates parts of your brain long dormant. Cutting the distracting dialogue all together and just going on music & footage might've even strengthened it. There's something really weird going on here.The combination of grainy gritty film stock, poverty row locations, claustrophobic framing and vile subject matter combine to make a unique, hallucinatory mood. Director Watkins was working with peanuts here and its forever apparent, from the awful sound to the non acting- this is a sweat and blood, true labor of twisted love. Believe me it shows: Hawkins must've been one cheesed off young punk when he mounted this exercise in despair because the suppressed animosity and bitterness of a seriously miffed youth vibrates throughout the lean-mean 78 minutes..... definitely a 70's curio. When Hawkins flies into a rage at one point during the shock murders of the film's latter half, screaming over and over, "I'M DIRECTING THIS F%$KIN MOOOOVIE!" you aren't quite sure where Terry ends and Rog begins.The sheer grunge throughout is another thing; it accesses a depraved realism through its bottom barrel-ness. Amateurishness is key. Claustrophobia, feeling trapped in a crumbling asbestos-ridden rat hole is palpable, filth and decay leaking through the screen to infect viewers. One of those fabulous times at the movies that makes you want to take a scalding shower after.Very much a work of its day when general disillusionment abounded, the loser characters who populate Watkins's film have not much further to sink in their respective depravity- they truly are dead-ends, mouthing empty hippie jargon, running on the fumes of something long dead, all sunken eyes & bad skin. What's shown is all that's going on in these empty heads. The paltry lot are all surface and eagerly jump on Hawkin's new idea without much deliberation-like any good ambitious American- which is purely for rich upper crust smut consumers who've grown weary with typical hardcore frivolity. Snuff: the next logical step in flesh-as-commodity ( no doubt such things exist). The plot isn't really that important to Last House though, its the stiflingly bleak presentation of a scorched earth populated by only perverts and freaks, which Watkins assembles with only 800$ and a lot of recreational drugs to his name. It packs a bite 30 years on. Only the tacked-on narration feebly attempting to provide the viewer with some sense of closure is a misstep.Through the apparatus of 'bad movie' Watkins did with a shoestring what few directors could do with lavish budgets- communicate an unadulterated vision of tangible hell on Earth, caked with dirt, sleaze and ennui. It's a shame he only churned out a few pornos before quitting the scene altogether. I hope to check them out one day.This is a bad dream, not a film.

Last House on Dead End Street (1972) * 1/2 (out of 4) Infamous and notorious horror film that most people have only heard about instead of seen. This was put the rest with the DVD of course. A film student (Roger Watkins) gets out of jail and returns to the world of making porn but this isn't paying the bills so he, along with some twisted friends, decide to start making snuff films. The history of this film is actually a lot more entertaining than the actual film. The original version ran 180-minutes but couldn't find a distributor but the film was released behind the director's back under the current title to cash in on Wes Craven's film. This version ran just under 80-minutes and the longer cut is lost forever. Perhaps something more was in that longer cut but this one here is rather poor. In some ways I guess the film works since it was shot for $1,500. The bad acting, bad lighting and bad cinematography adds to a "snuff" film look but this is rather annoying and sometimes hard to watch. Director Watkins should have stayed behind the camera because he's very annoying in the lead role as well. The music score is very good and the gore scenes (some rumored to be real) are great but the film didn't do too much for me.