There's been a recent surge in a peculiar little niche of the horror genre, a subset you might call "torture horror." Movies like Captivity, Hostel and even the popular Saw series have made torture the new fad in fright films. When distilled to their very essence, what movies like these are trying to do is convince you you're watching a snuff film. All of them are trying to equal the granddaddy of all pretend snuff films, Wes Craven's The Last House on the Left, but none of them has. There's one key difference between that original classic and the current new batch of unpleasant, endurance-test movies. The modern pictures are trying to entertain you; The Last House on the Left, on the other hand, seems to adopt the position that nobody could be entertained by this. It's job is not to amuse, but to upset. Instead of giving the audience what it wants, it points finger at the audience as they squirm more and more uncomfortably in their seats, and it fairly shouts at you: "You came here to be delighted by people being raped and tortured and brutalized and murdered? What in the fuck is wrong with you?" And that's ...