Marc Sheffler Movies
- 1984
In 1979, The Runaways were scheduled to star in a low-budget comedy about an all-female rock band called "We're All Crazy Now." The group broke up before shooting began, but guitarist and singer Joan Jett agreed to star in the film, with three actresses standing in for her departed bandmates. The plug was pulled on the project halfway through shooting, but in 1984, after Jett had become a major star as a solo act, producers were looking for a way to make use of the footage from the uncompleted film. Alan Sacks, who was a producer and writer for the television shows Welcome Back, Kotter and Chico and the Man, took on the project, and the result was this one-of-a-kind cinematic crazy-quilt. Dubeat-E-O (Ray Sharkey) is a perpetually wired film director who is working on a movie about Joan Jett. However, he's borrowed money from a notorious gangster to finance the project, and now his "investor" has announced Dubeat-E-O must have the final cut of the movie finished in thirty-one hours - or else. Dubeat-E-O holes up in his shabby studio with his editor, Benny (Derf Scratch), and Sharon (Nora Gaye), a woman who happened along by mistake, and we're treated to a mind-bending collage of Dubeat-E-O's rants, still photos, footage of Jett and the fake Runaways (among them Cheryl "Rainbeaux" Smith), performances by The Mentors and Joanna Went, random images of sex and violence, and much, much more. Meanwhile, Sachs and a group of friends (including El Duce of The Mentors) offer a running commentary on the film in progress. Tex and the Horseheads and Social Distortion are also featured prominently on the soundtrack; Jett would make her proper acting debut in 1987, in the drama Light Of Day. ~ Mark Deming, All Movie Guide
- Starring:
- Ray Sharkey, Joan Jett, (more)
Wes Craven's first film was a crude but shocking horror opus that, like George A. Romero's Night of the Living Dead (1968), became a grind house hit largely because it went much further than terror films before it had been willing to go. Often compared to Ingmar Bergman's stark medieval rape drama The Virgin Spring (1960) (though one wonders whether this was influence or just coincidence), Last House on the Left follows a group of teenage girls heading into the city when they hook up with a gang of drug-addled ne'er-do-wells and are brutally murdered. The killers find their way to the home of one of their victim's parents, where both father and mother exact a horrible revenge. Like Tobe Hooper's The Texas Chainsaw Massacre two years later, Last House on the Left was an unrelievedly dark vision of contemporary horror that inspired many future films which copied its effects without achieving its visceral impact. ~ Mark Deming, All Movie Guide
