In this series I’m taking a look back at the films that, in the early 1980′s, were caught up in the Video Nasties moral panic in the UK. When video first arrived in the UK it was not covered by our censorship laws, and that, combined with the reluctance of the studios to embrace the technology, meant that many of the early releases were lurid, uncensored, horror films.
The tabloid press mounted a campaign against the films, and with a new right wing government in power and the growing influence of pro-censorship campaigner Mary Whitehouse, the Director of Public Prosecutions was instructed to draw up a list of films liable to prosecution under the Obscene Publications Act. I’ll be looking at every one of the 74 films that made this list, giving you a snapshot of the controversy around each film before watching and reviewing it.
The Ban
Of all the films on the video nasties list, this is one that the BBFC have had real – and entirely understandable – trouble with. In 1981 they rejected it for a cinema release. In 1982, Skyline Video released it uncut, and the film found itself DPP listed in July 1983, eight months after its video release. Entirely unsurprisingly, House on the Edge of the Park stayed on every version of the DPP list, becoming one of the more collectible DPP 39.
In 2002, as the former nasties were beginning to sneak out on DVD, Protected Video got hold of the film and resubmitted it to BBFC, this time they didn’t ban the film, instead they asked for a few cuts, 11 minutes and 43 seconds of cuts – more than twice the running time of the cuts to director Ruggero Deodato’s other nasty; Cannibal Holocaust – and Protected actually released the film with those cuts implemented.
Fast forward a few years and it’s 2011, and House on the Edge of the Park has just seen another UK rerelease, this time from Shameless. Initially BBFC asked for 1 minute and 20 seconds of cuts this time, to just two contentious sequences, however, Shameless apparently made an informal appeal, and the cuts were reduced to 43 seconds from a single scene. The result being that this film now has fewer cuts in its UK classified version than I Spit on Your Grave (2:54 cut).
The Film
House on the Edge of the Park is Italian director Ruggero Deodato’s nine years later ‘me too’ version of exploitation classic The Last House on the Left, but where that film was – at least in its first half – skin crawlingly disturbing and dedicated itself to showing rape and murder as despicable and degrading acts, House on the Edge of the Park is one of the purest exploitation films ever made; it revels in degrading nudity, scenes of rape (most of which it is implied the victim enjoys), torture and eventually murder, all topped off with a twist so utterly illogical that it undermines any sense of glory in either vengeance or victory. It’s a terrible film.
The story introduces us to Alex and Ricky (Krug himself, David Hess and exploitation legend Giovanni Lombardo Radice). Alex is a thug – the first time we see him he pulls up next to a woman, then attacks and rapes her – while Ricky, who may have some sort of autism, is his simple minded accomplice. One night they fix a car for a rich couple, and find themselves invited to a house party. Soon Alex is taking over the party by force, intimidating the guests with a straight razor, beating up the men, raping the women, and goading Ricky to do the same.
It’s your basic home invasion narrative, pretty simple and, you would think, pretty hard to mess up, but Deodato manages it. Everything goes wrong here. First of all there’s the conflict; the script tries to give Alex some sort of motive by having him resent rich people, but it never sticks, first because we don’t know why Alex hates the rich and second of all because the people he is menacing are hardly aristocrats themselves, but that’s really just the tip of the iceberg. The big problem here is that the fight back never seems to start. Yes, Alex is a bastard of the first order, and the fact that he’s attacking and raping people would be intimidating, but Alex is also utterly inept, he takes his attention off the group of people he’s not attacking in a given moment over and over again, leaving them either unguarded or watched by the ineffectual Ricky. At times – particularly when Alex is stripping and cutting up a young guest – you are almost bellowing “for the love of Christ DO SOMETHING” at the screen. In a competent home invasion movie this doesn’t happen. Look at Fight For Your Life; William Sadler is so intimidating we get why nobody resists for a long time, here it feels like nobody resists because it’s in the script that they don’t. Which is only marginally less stupid than the actual explanation.
I’ve seen a LOT of sleaze in my time as a horror fan, and I can defend much of it at an artistic level (Deodato’s own, brilliant, Cannibal Holocaust is a notable example, so watch for the instalment on that film, coming soon), but defending House on the Edge of the Park is like defending an admitted serial killer; it’s only fair to do it if you can, but it’s hard to see the point. Yes, Deodato tries to impose some social commentary – even social satire – here, and he attempts to make us see Alex and Ricky, at least to begin with, as anti-heroes, but he fails miserably in both these endeavours, dropping the ball on the satire, and making the moral difference between Alex and Ricky and their ‘hosts’ so stark so fast that the anti-hero discussion is over before it begins, for crying out loud they’re rapists, not Robin Hood.
Outside of this weak attempt at commentary, House on the Edge of the Park is just a series of increasing unpleasantries, with an overwhelming emphasis on the exposure and degradation of women. That’s not unusual in the nasties, or even something that is, for me, beyond the pale if a film adopts the right attitude towards the characters involved. This film doesn’t. Large swathes of this film involve sexual assaults against women who seem, soon enough, to reciprocate. You could make the argument that the characters are just going along with Alex and Ricky in order that they aren’t hurt more, but, whether through incompetence or design, nothing in the performances suggests this (and again the twist makes their actions even less explicable). In the final analysis it just plays like an especially hateful rape fantasy.
The most hateful scene is the one in which an extra guest; a beautiful young girl who can’t be more than 18, arrives at the house and, instead of telling her it’s a bad time the ‘hosts’ invite her in, whereupon Alex strips, assaults and mutilates her. This is unambiguously done for the audience to enjoy, Alex even breaks the fourth wall, smiling at us as we implicitly nod him on. In a better film this might seem clever, like Deodato is making some sort of proto Funny Games and goading us about what we have signed up to watch, but the rest of the film undermines this idea, and instead it feels like the bottom of a deep and depressing barrel.
I hated this movie, I even feel pretty bad about having watched it, and it’s another reason to regret the existence of the DPP list, because it gave undeserved life to this puke inducing piece of crap.
2 / 10
Related posts:
- The House on The Edge of The Park II Release Date
- Two Awesome Posters for The House on the Edge of the Park II
- Video Nasties: Last House on the Left
HorrorMovies.ca
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