The B movie genre lives on particularly on these streaming sites. The Last House has a reasonably decent idea for a story. A family has to survive inside their suburban home. The film sets up this situation but unsurprisingly can't really find a way to resolve it satisfactorily.
In brief, because the movie sure isn't. A family starts their day by getting ready to leave their home. The trouble is they can't get out of the house. The doors won't open and windows won't open. Even attempts to break the windows and doors down fail. The family is trapped inside of their home without an explanation. Not that I want to point it out but this is the same situation that arose in Luis Bunuel's The Exterminating Angel. However Bunuel's film was a satire of the upper class. The Last House is strictly a science fiction film with horror moments stuck in it and yes there are monsters involved in the plot.
At first the idea of being permanently trapped in your house is kind of a clever one. How do you survive when you start to run out of food. How do you communicate with your neighbors? How does this family keep from driving each other crazy? More importantly what will they do when they lose access to the internet Well you have close to two long hours to find out.
I really don't have a problem with B-movies like this. The premise can make for a fairly entertaining time killer of a movie. What I do have a problem with is the drawing out of the premise. In the good old days a director like Roger Corman could have taken an idea like this and knocked it out in 72 minutes.
The Last House just goes on and on until it finally has to find a contrived explanation of what is causing this phenomenon and then figure out a resolution for it. I'm fully aware that with a high concept like this there will inevitably be a let down with the explanation of the story. It's just the way these kinds of movies go.
The cast kind of does what it can in the acting department. In films like this the dialog isn't exactly Shakespearean, we are in the B-movie tradition of very lame dialog. There's lots of talk about what it means to be a family and how this situation bonds them together even closer.
The Last House's family situation kind of reminds me of the Space Family Robinson from
Lost in Space who only had each other to count on when they were trapped on an alien plane also loaded with strange monsters.
Is this film worth viewing? Well probably not. As usual this is just another made for streaming movie that will end up in the abyss of all the other streaming films that are viewed once and never heard of again.
The film was written by Mathew Robinson the writer of Love and Monsters who in this case is really just reworking the same plot as that film. The running time is 112 minutes.
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