RETRO ACTIVE: The House on the Edge of the Park (1980)
by Nick Schager 
What's new is always old, and in this recurring column, I'll be taking a look at the classic genre movies that have influenced today's new releases. In honor of the Nicolas Cage-Nicole Kidman home invasion thriller Trespass, this week it's Ruggero Deodato's 1980 skeezy The House on the Edge of the Park. How do you follow-up a work as controversial and instantly career-defining as
Cannibal Holocaust? For Ruggero Deodato, the answer was to ape recent grindhouse attention-grabbers?most notably
Wes Craven's 1972
The Last House on the Left?with
The House on the Edge of the Park, a home invasion thriller that sought to align itself with Craven's debut via both its general subject matter and its shared star,
David Hess. Never a master of subtlety (to put it lightly), Deodato's leaden mimicry goes a long way toward explaining why his film never made much noise at the box office or with genre aficionados, this despite the fact that it did eventually receive some notoriety in the UK, where its release was banned courtesy of a dreaded "video nasties" designation. A lack of originality, however, turns out to be a relatively minor shortcoming when compared to its litany of misguided conceptual convictions: that there's value in shocking for shocking's sake; that gratuitous T&A is enough to placate adolescent gore-hounds; and that giving niche audiences exactly what they want, when they want it, and without regard to creating any interest in the characters involved, is the surest way to elicit intense engagement.
Reportedly shot in only three weeks, boasting lousy ADR typical of the era's myriad Italian B-movies, and bestowed with a title that?since a park never factors into the story?makes little sense except to create connections with Craven's film,
The House on the Edge of the Park wastes no time getting to its prime concerns: glorifying monstrous villain Alex (Hess). Deodato's opening scene depicts Alex forcing a woman to stop her car so he can rape and strangle her, the camera drooling over her nude body and then stopping to admire her corpse strewn across the backseat. That pro-Alex perspective continues after he and his giddily cackling best friend Ricky (
Giovanni Lombardo), while working at a Manhattan parking garage, help fix WASPy couple Tom (
Cristian Borromeo) and Lisa's (
Annie Belle) car, and are rewarded by being invited to a shindig at a ritzy New Jersey home, where the rich guests (including a bald black beauty whose top winds up being repeatedly removed) laugh at dim Ricky's sensual dancing and take advantage of him at the poker table. Wiser to this class-based condescension, which extends to Lisa repeatedly coming on to him (on a kitchen counter, in the shower) only to then refuse his advances, psycho Alex responds by slicing Tom's face, beating and tying up arrogant Howard (Gabriele Di Giulio), and throwing around misogynistic and homophobic taunts while engaging in whatever sexualized mayhem strikes his fancy.
Deodato lingers on his "extreme" material in a vain attempt to court moral outrage, though truly offensive is the softcore-porn lameness of the eroticized proceedings, which sabotage any suspense by making its victims as repugnant as its victimizers. A scene in which Alex forces himself upon Lisa (whose short hair and stark lipstick make her look like the prototype for the women in Robert Palmer's "Simply Irresistible" music video) and she turns out to like it proves a strained stab at
Straw Dogs complexity. That sequence is indicative of
The House on the Edge of the Park's political interests, which, as in
Cannibal Holocaust, come across as tacked-on gestures aimed at elevating schlock to the realm of sociopolitical commentary. Given the general immaturity on display, the fact that the performances are lousy almost makes sense, though there's still something uniquely ridiculous about Hess' turn, which is often so garishly blunt and over-the-top that the film seems poised to tip into comedy. Certainly, veering into parodic territory would have benefited the action, which in its final incarnation?replete with leather-jacketed Ricky finding laughable true love with wealthy fashionista Gloria (
Lorraine de Selle)?plays like the extremely protracted rape-and-murder fantasies of a working-class fourteen-year-old burning with resentment toward snooty yuppies.
Posted by ahillis at October 14, 2011 1:16 PM
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