Movie criticism sometimes is automatic

My brother just called to share his – what?, outrage?, disbelief?, sense of incredulousness? – over the impending release of a remake of Wes Craven’s 1972 film “The Last House on the Left.”

During the early 1970s, Randy and I used to, on occasion, prowl the drive-ins of San Diego County to see films that even now I can’t believe I paid good money to watch. I do remember that, on one of our higher-class cinematic outings, we watched the double feature of “The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie” and “Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid.”

But that was an exception.

I saw Craven’s film with my then-girlfriend Lyn Hogan. We were living on a farm in Carlsbad, Calif. I was then in my senior year at University of Calif.-San Diego , and Lyn was taking a year off school, teaching elementary-school kids at a free school.

“The Last House on the Left” was playing at a drive-in in, I think, Oceanside. I can’t remember the other two films, though they probably were something with motorcycles or zombies or buckets of Herschell Gordon Lewis gore.

Anyway, there we were, in my 1967 VW Bug, when one of the movie’s bad guys starts stabbing the crap out of one of the young girls. And as I was trying to figure out whether Craven’s film was actually something daring and new, or just a steaming pile of monkey dung, I noticed that Lyn had thrown her head in my lap.

And she was screaming.

And there she stayed, her jacket pulled over her head, as I hurriedly threw the speaker out my window, clumsily started the engine, put the car in gear and drove away, all the while trying to calm her down before she tossed her cookies all over both of us.

I still feel guilty over that experience. And I regret not going, for Lyn’s sake, to another nearby drive-in where a couple of Disney films were playing.

At the same time, I can’t think of a better reaction to Craven’s film, then or now.

Below: Wes Craven, writer-director of the 1972 version of “The Last House on the Left,” will see the film’s remake released on March 13.

Associated Press photo