Last House on Dead End Street

Recently released from prison after serving a sentence for dealing drugs, Terry Hawkins wants his revenge on society. His medium is to be film.

Having gathering a Manson-type family – the psychopathic Ken, who spent six months in the asylum after being caught sodomising a calf at the slaughterhouse where he was working; the naive, easily manipulated Bill; and two stupid, greedy prostitutes, Terry sets to work.

With his gang he films the murder of a blind man, and uses the footage to convince some pornographers – looking for something new and different to whet their jaded customers' appetites – to back his real project. Hawkins invites them on set, then reveals that they are the stars/victims of the film. An orgy of violence ensues, complete with branding, amputation and dismemberment without anaesthetic, nipple gouging with pliers, power drill to the eyeball and… er, deer hoof fellatio.

For many years Last House on Dead End Street was a mystery film, its origins, cast and crew unknown. Some, whether through sheer gullibility or a perverse will to believe, even speculated it was a real snuff film, although the somewhat rudimentary nature of the effects work and the presence of reverse-angle shots impossible within a single camera set-up clearly indicated otherwise.

Then in 2001 the truth came out: The film had been written and directed by one Roger Watkins, who also played the part of Terry. Made on a budget of somewhere between $800 and $3000 – with much of the money going on amphetamines for Watkins – the director's original 1972 version of the film The Cuckoo Clocks of Hell had ran around three hours. It disappeared without a trace then resurfaced on the drive-in and grindhouse circuits half a dozen years later in an unofficial, unapproved, truncated form under the new titles, The Fun House and Last House on Dead End Street.

Inevitably some of the aura that gave the film its power – especially in those nth generation bootlegs – has now vanished as a result of these revelations. Yet Last House on Dead End Street remains a intense, perverse, deeply disturbing experience, certainly on a par with Salo and Cannibal Holocaust.

The film is quite simply out there, resembling something akin to the bastard offspring of Dziga Vertov era Godard, early John Waters and the (later) Cinema of Transgression. Or – surely the highest compliment one could pay Watkins and co. – perhaps the Manson family's home movies.

All the things that would otherwise work against the film – extremely raw, rough and ready visuals; amateurish performances; stock sound effects and scoring (parts sound remarkably like Gyorgy Ligeti's Lux Aeterna, as used on Kubrick's 2001); ad-libbed, stream of consciousness dialogue, and post-synched sound (one of the reasons Hawkins and his gang wear masks much of the time) – only add to the overall power and effectiveness of Last House on Dead End Street as a disorienting, nightmare journey into the mind of a psychopath.

When Hawkins/Watkins screams repeatedly "I'm directing this fucking movie" you cannot tell whether he is acting the part or has crossed the line between make-believe and reality. There is a palpable sense of danger in the air; that anything could conceivably happen.

There are insufficient superlatives in the language to describe Barrel Entertainment's two disc set of Last House on Dead End Street.

The image is grainy, scratchy and alternatively too dark and washed out while the audio is flat and hollow. But, being sourced from one – or the only – 35mm prints of the film extant and transferred under the supervision of the director himself, it is unlikely that it will ever look or sound better (is worse).

Nonetheless it's the extras package that really shines. At first, one is almost tempted to say that there's too much – certainly to take in at one sitting – but, with the exception of the Necrophagia tribute video directed by Jim Van Bebber, everything comes together to really put the film and its creator into context.

First off we get a full-length commentary between Watkins and Chas Balun of Deep Red magazine. It never lets up and ranks, in both terms of entertainment and information value, as one of the best I've heard, particularly when Hawkins is ripping into the "fucking idiots" who recut the film and outlining the differences between his and their versions.

The production is detailed in "at home with Terry Hawkins", a 70 minute compendium of behind the scenes footage and recorded phone calls, along with 20 minutes of out-takes/fragments from the Cuckoo Clocks edit, while A 60 minute 1973 radio interview with Watkins and actor Ken Fisher and a 1975 television appearance by Watkins and actor/film professor Paul Jensen give some insight into the film's distribution history.

Watkins pre-Last House work is illustrated by four of his early short films – Ron Rico (a 19 minute surreal religious allegory, in which Jesus returns to earth as a limbless dwarf and meets Hitler, dressed in a cassock); Requiem (an 18 minute tribute to a friend who died in Vietnam, which Watkins regards as his best work); Masque of the Red Death (a 3 minutes juvenile effort, predating Corman), and Black Snow (a 17 minute avant-garde piece liked by Jonas Mekas but regarded as a "piece of shit" by its director). The original music for these proved impossible for Barrel to license, so the films are instead presented with a director's commentary where Watkins talks about the scoring, references and general memories they evoke.

The package is rounded off by alternative Fun House credits sequences; the original trailer; an extensive stills gallery illustrating Watkins's career; 28 minutes of excerpts from a home movie style documentary from 1988, and a 36-page booklet of interviews by David Kerekes, an expanded and excerpted version of his Headpress issue on the film.

Unless Watkins's original Cuckoo Clocks of Hell version somehow shows up someday – the chances of which are probably on a par with those for Von Stroheim's cut of Greed being unearthed – this will surely serve as the definitive release of the film, not to mention a showcase for how to do a DVD special edition right.

Fans of extreme cinema need this disc. Fans of cult cinema more generally should still buy it to show their support for Barrel and encourage them to give other obscurities such a magnificent treatment. I know I will be checking out their Nekromantik discs ASAP…