Indelibly scummy, Wes Craven's freshman shocker is less a rip-off of The Virgin Spring than a purposefully degraded update, with the medieval barbarism of the original cannily transplanted to Vietnam-era America. The plot's implacable arc remains the same: teenage birthday girl (Sandra Cassell) leaves the incubator security of her parents' home in the woods to attend a rock concert with more worldly pal (Lucy Grantham), and gets reeled into the pad of a gang of freaky pervs (presided over by David A. Hess) while trying to score some grass along the way. As the slimy quartet (which also includes Marc Sheffler, future porn don Fred Lincoln and skanky mother-hen Jeramie Rain) torture and slaughter the girls, Craven shifts the tone from John Waters raunchfest to Manson family gore-a-thon, his crosscutting pitilessly pushing the viewer's buttons -- the gutting of a torso and a protracted rape get intercut with the folks back home baking a cake and two Keystone deputies pratfalling off a chicken truck, a trope intellectually sadistic enough to suggest Michael Haneke. The crazies may get their jollies, but retribution's a bitch when they end up spending the night at the house of their young victim, whose parents (Gaylord St. James, Cynthia Carr), once clued in, turn into chainsaw-toting, throat-slashing, cock-biting avengers. As in The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, the decade's other seminal horror piece, the film shatters hippified complacency via the sledgehammer of a polluting horror all the more disturbing for being homegrown. The crudeness of Craven's mise en scène denies the moral sturdiness of the Bergman original -- for a respectfully middle-class family, it is only one step for the parents to equate and outdo the animalistic bloodlust of the killers, with only viscera and desolation (rather than a miracle) greeting them by the end. Produced by Sean S. Cunningham.
--- Fernando F. Croce
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