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According to urban legend, the Manson family not only conducted bizarre ritual murders, they also filmed them for posterity and somewhere deep in the California desert, its reputed that the canisters holding said antics are buried far beneath the sand, ripe for re-discovery by some hapless soul. I think Last House on Dead-end Street would prove to be an accurate primer of whatever was stored on those unholy frames, or at least a realistic portrayal of the mindset it takes to mount such a twisted home movie.

Terry Hawkins, freshly released from the big house, sets out to make snuff films and succeeds past his wildest expectations when he orchestrates the elaborately choreographed execution of his business associates for assuming the credit for his new underground film movement.

As its been said before & which I swear by, 'bad' movies can be sublime, achieving the indefinable in their steadfast refusal to play by the rules, getting surreal results 'good' movies can't touch with their off kilter rhythms. Such monstrosities & freaks-shows are best viewed in the arena of post midnight tribulation, when you can't sleep & celluloid out-of-body experiences are most likely.

A minor work of no-budget film-making, Dead End is one of the poorest, cheaply made pieces of celluloid I've seen, and it still works. All the pieces are put together in the wrong way but the twisted logic of it remains. It survives as pure atmosphere. Admittedly it starts off dire, drifting into the aimlessness of a bad grind-house experience, the type only improved with recreational narcotics & full Mystery Science Theater treatment, but somewhere along the way (probably once the 'rituals' begin) your conscious mind takes a back seat to the nightmare-in- progress. That out-of-phase dubbing especially begins to rub in exactly the wrong/right way, throwaway incompetence that seems to(deliberately?) mask something more disquieting.

I don't really know how else to describe it: initially coming off as laughable, if you stick with it, the mangled quality of this poisonous enterprise begins to hypnotize, initial disarming shoddiness allowing a seed of something greater to burrow into your head, a deeper vision that's not as easy to laugh off once that frigging creepy Greek tragedy mask comes out. It's like a midnight transmission from Mars, the kind of experience where you question the director's mental health.Watched in a disassociated daze, the jumbled noise activates parts of your brain long dormant. Cutting the distracting dialogue all together and just going on music & footage might've even strengthened it. There's something really weird going on here.

The combination of grainy gritty film stock, poverty row locations, claustrophobic framing and vile subject matter combine to make a unique, hallucinatory mood. Director Watkins was working with peanuts here and its forever apparent, from the awful sound to the non acting- this is a sweat and blood, true labor of twisted love. Believe me it shows: Hawkins must've been one cheesed off young punk when he mounted this exercise in despair because the suppressed animosity and bitterness of a seriously miffed youth vibrates throughout the lean-mean 78 minutes..... definitely a 70's curio. When Hawkins flies into a rage at one point during the shock murders of the film's latter half, screaming over and over, "I'M DIRECTING THIS F%$KIN MOOOOVIE!" you aren't quite sure where Terry ends and Rog begins.

The sheer grunge throughout is another thing; it accesses a depraved realism through its bottom barrel-ness. Amateurishness is key. Claustrophobia, feeling trapped in a crumbling asbestos-ridden rat hole is palpable, filth and decay leaking through the screen to infect viewers. One of those fabulous times at the movies that makes you want to take a scalding shower after.

Very much a work of its day when general disillusionment abounded, the loser characters who populate Watkins's film have not much further to sink in their respective depravity- they truly are dead-ends, mouthing empty hippie jargon, running on the fumes of something long dead, all sunken eyes & bad skin. What's shown is all that's going on in these empty heads. The paltry lot are all surface and eagerly jump on Hawkin's new idea without much deliberation-like any good ambitious American- which is purely for rich upper crust smut consumers who've grown weary with typical hardcore frivolity. Snuff: the next logical step in flesh-as-commodity ( no doubt such things exist). The plot isn't really that important to Last House though, its the stiflingly bleak presentation of a scorched earth populated by only perverts and freaks, which Watkins assembles with only 800$ and a lot of recreational drugs to his name. It packs a bite 30 years on. Only the tacked-on narration feebly attempting to provide the viewer with some sense of closure is a misstep.

Through the apparatus of 'bad movie' Watkins did with a shoestring what few directors could do with lavish budgets- communicate an unadulterated vision of tangible hell on Earth, caked with dirt, sleaze and ennui. It's a shame he only churned out a few pornos before quitting the scene altogether. I hope to check them out one day.

This is a bad dream, not a film.