10 Mean Films For Mean Times

A good way to blow off steam is to program a triple bill of movies with a mean streak, where anything can (and usually does) happen to the lead characters.

We’re not talking “torture porn” necessarily, and we’re certainly not going as far as screening the Guinea Pig films, we’re talking about movies that have no problem putting their characters through the wringer. After sitting through a triple bill of I Spit On Your Grave, New York Ripper and Cannibal Holocaust, you’ll realize that everything isn’t quite as bad as you feared.

Sometimes, a single movie will do the trick. At a festival screening of Martyrs in 2008, a crowd expecting a crazy French horror film in the tradition of Haute Tension groaned every time the lead character was abused onscreen. The groans became exasperated sighs and eventually the audience filed away into the night, grateful to return to the normal world.

For anyone lost in the horror show that is the modern world, take heart. You could instead be appearing in one of the following films.

Chaos opens with a text crawl that claims the movie is “based on actual events” and that the film’s depiction of violence is intended “to educate and, perhaps, save lives.”

Far from being based on “actual events”, however, Chaos is an uncredited remake/ total rip-off of Wes Craven’s The Last House On The Left (itself inspired by Ingmar Bergman’s The Virgin Spring), which it follows beat for beat.

Two girls are abducted, raped and murdered by a group of escaped convicts. When their van breaks down, the killers seek shelter at a house they don’t realize belongs to the parents of one of their victims. The moment the penny drops, mom and dad take a brutal revenge etc etc.

Wrestler-turned-director David ‘The Demon’ DeFalco only departs from Craven’s narrative at the end, changing it so that the main villain is the last man standing, howling maniacally before the end credits roll. If Last House was a movie about the dehumanizing effects of violence, then Chaos is a movie about….what, exactly?

Informing America’s teens that they’re all potential murder victims? Or does it just want to exploit the fear of crime in order to sell tickets?