Binghamton native son, Nicholas Ray protege, and desperate amphetamine addict Roger Watkins's debut feature as a director is perhaps the most polarizing film produced during the '70s heyday of American exploitation cinema. Is it a secret avant-garde wonder, marrying a deeply cynical critique of spectatorship with a proto-punk sense of dirtbag poetics, or a woefully cheap, nihilistic drive-in slot-filler that only plays to the most perverted and gore-hungry sensibilities? That it manages to be both of these things, lobbing stink bombs at both the arthouse and grindhouse crowds, speaks to Watkins's peculiar, uniquely unsettling vision.

Mirroring the film's production, Watkins himself plays THE LAST HOUSE ON DEAD END STREET's lead, a pornographer recently released from prison out to shoot a low-rent snuff epic with his acne-scarred, Manson family inspired gang of miscreants and cinema fringe dwellers. Sold to an organized crime syndicate years after its production and shorn of its original title (THE CUCKOO CLOCKS OF HELL) and more than half of its initial 160-minute runtime (a great deal of the film's nightmare energy actually comes from its bewildering narrative lapses) THE LAST HOUSE ON DEAD END STREET has, through the decimation of original prints and countless substandard video transfers, not only managed to survive but also develop a reputation, justly earned, for being something special, an underground horror film as scummy as it is artful.

Presented by The Front Row