Editor’s Note: This was originally published for FANGORIA on August 9, 2005, and we’re proud to share it as part of The Gingold Files.
Here we go again—another movie whose sole selling point is how “brutal” and “shocking” it is. After three decades or so of extreme gore in horror cinema, is there really still an audience for a film whose only appeal is the explicitness of its bloodshed? And more pertinently, since “shock” suggests “surprise,” can a movie engender that reaction when everything about it is derived from a cult favorite of the past?
From every detail of its plot to its advertising and promotional campaign, Chaos is a—oh, let’s not use that nasty term “flagrant ripoff” and call it a “total homage” to Wes Craven’s Last House on the Left. Most horror fans will know the plot: Girls headed for concert meet boy, boy promises drugs, girls meet boy’s evil “family,” family tortures and kills girls, family meets one girl’s parents, parents kill family. But some films’ notoriety and/or classic status is inextricably tied in with the times in which they were made, and Last House is one of them. That movie felt like a direct reaction to/reflection of the violence rising in early-’70s society, when parents feared that anything from those drug-addled hippies to the Vietnam draft might wrest their children from them, and presented a scenario in which even the most mild-mannered suburbanites could descend into savagery.
But Chaos behaves as if there haven’t been countless similar films made in the 30 years since Last House, and does little to update either its themes or its action. Yeah, the girls are going to a rave rather than a typical rock concert this time, but the only promise of a fresh angle involves the spotlighted parents being an interracial couple. Yet the film never really goes anywhere with this idea beyond setting up a tension between the two and a racist cop (itself an idea that seems left over from the ’70s). Apparently, writer/director David DeFalco (the credits have the gall to claim his script is “based on an original idea by” DeFalco and producer Steven Jay Bernheim) believed that the only ploy necessary to up the ante for modern times was to make the specific acts of violence even more extreme.
Depressingly, he chose to do so in the basest and least imaginative way: by sexualizing them. One girl’s nipple is cut off and fed to her in graphic detail, while the other is violated in her nether regions with a large knife; that scene isn’t as explicit, but it is no less queasy. So what separates this film from good movies like The Devil’s Rejects and Wolf Creek, which are just as vicious and relentless in the way they treat their onscreen victims? Simply this: Chaos couldn’t care less about its characters except as pieces of meat to be violated. As hideous as Rejects and Creek become, they also allow us to get to know both the villains and victims as people, whereas in Chaos, it’s only their sadism and suffering that matter.
DeFalco hasn’t even bothered to come up with an original plot to serve as a framework for the acts of butchery; he has simply appropriated wholesale the plot of another film and called it a day. And Chaos’ colors really show themselves when the parents discover the crime and set out to avenge it, which should at least somewhat justify the girls’ murders by allowing some kind of catharsis for them. Instead, DeFalco rushes through the final action (the movie is only 68 minutes long, plus credits), which is risibly conceived and awkwardly staged—as if now that the girls’ violation—the true point—has been wrapped up, nothing else really matters.
All that said, in the name of objective criticism, it should be noted that the movie is not badly put together on a craftsmanship level, and that Kevin Gage, as the eponymous lead villain, gives a scarily convincing performance. It’s evident that a certain amount of technical and performance effort has been put into a film that is empty at its core. The sole aim seems to have been to sicken people out of their seats, and advance publicity has gleefully noted the number of viewers who walked out on the premiere screening. DeFalco clearly has yet to learn that the real trick is making a movie dramatic and intriguing enough to keep people watching no matter how horrifying the sights on screen become.
