"Chaos"

BY DANN GIRE Daily Herald Film Critic
Posted Friday, August 12, 2005

Right after watching "Chaos," I wanted to storm the projection room, burn the print, then hunt down and kill everyone associated with making this movie, for certainly I would be divinely pardoned for ridding the world of the people responsible for creating this reprehensible experience.

This movie repulsed me.

This movie horrified me.

Then I started thinking. (This is the part that always gets film critics in trouble.) "Chaos" is a horror film. Shouldn't I be horrified?

As horror fans already know, the horror movie of late has evolved into the everything-but-horror movie. We have obtuse, atmospheric Japanese-inspired tales where the most frightening element constitutes stringy hair floating in the air or water. We have so-called horror films where the scares have been muted and marketed with the commercial safety of the PG-13 rating foremost in mind.

Now, along comes David DeFalco's unrated "Chaos," a blunt, brutal and artless enterprise that does something no modern horror film has accomplished since 1973's "The Exorcist": Reacquaints us with our humanity.

"Chaos" tells a simple story of two teenage girls going to a rural concert. There, they see a seemingly innocuous stoner named Swan (Sage Stallone) who says he has some Ecstasy at his house, a short distance away in the woods. They can all walk to get it.

Emily (Maya Barovich) doesn't want to go. Her friend Angelica (Chantal DeGroat) belittles her concerns and talks her into walking on the wild side. Once the girls arrive at the house, they realize their mistake.

They've walked into a trap set by Swan and his psycho father (Kevin Gage), a muscular monster who calls himself Chaos. He leads a gang of evil parasites: Frankie (Stephen Wozniak), Sadie (Kelly K.C. Quann) and Swan.

I won't go into specifics about what these human vermin do to the two girls. It suffices to generalize they are sexually mutilated, raped and killed by Chaos, and not necessarily in that order.

Emily's parents, a black mother and a white father, worry when their daughter doesn't return home and doesn't answer her cell phone. They set out to find Emily; instead, they come across Angelica's body. The parents call the local patrolman, an avowed racist who makes no secret of his disdain for mixed marriages.

Later, Chaos and his human hyenas knock on Emily's parents' door, pretending to be lost travelers. Emily's dad notices that Sadie wears his daughter's new belt around her waist. Forewarned, he prepares to take matters into his own hands. "Chaos" then races to a shocking, ultra-violent and seemingly nihilistic finale.

The raging violence in "Chaos" comes at us with such unrestrained intensity that the movie doesn't just cross the line, it leaves the line back at the horizon. While attacking the girls as the frightfully convincing Chaos, Kevin Gage reportedly broke down into tears between takes.

Horror fans will instantly recognize "Chaos" as a fairly faithful remake of Wes Craven's 1977 work "The Last House on the Left," a seminal tale so shocking that projectionists around the country chopped out parts they deemed too violent. Few, if any, copies of Craven's original movie remain extant.

The end credit saying "Chaos" was "based on an original idea by Steven Jay Bernheim and David DeFalco" is a joke. The original title to their movie had been "House in the Middle of Nowhere," in homage to Craven's cult film. Even the "Chaos" poster art and text have been modeled after Craven's work. (Craven can hardly claim his movie to be original either. He stole the rape-and-revenge story from Ingmar Bergman's 1959 "The Virgin Spring.")

Now, DeFalco, a tough, up-and-coming director who dresses like a WWE superstar, has refashioned this story into a horror film designed for a post-9/11 world.

Since 9/11, the stakes of what truly horrifies us have been raised. We have been victimized by the random brutality of terrorism. We live in a time when barbaric acts flood our newspapers and enter our living rooms via TV.

Humans being burned, hanged or dragged through city streets.

Beheadings of innocent people broadcast on the Internet.

Detailed confessions of the BTK ("bind, torture and kill") serial killer.

The horror of reality has long ago surpassed the horror of Japanese movies and PG-13 films inoffensive enough for high school first dates.

To keep up with the times, DeFalco cranked up the queasy factor. The ending of "Chaos" deviates significantly from "Last House." The racist cop, mired in pre-9/11 movie morality, won't let Emily's father kill Chaos during a fight scene. When it becomes clear that Dad intends to kill Chaos no matter what, the cop takes his Roy Rogers view to an extreme, which pushes Emily's mother to kill the cop.

To some, this movie has a nihilistic bloodbath finale, but I view it more as a warning:

When authority figures (parents and police) can't work together, when people allow racism to distract them, when we cling to an outmoded ideal of justice, Chaos triumphs.

That's scary. That's DeFalco's "Chaos." Blunt. Brutal. Artless.

Tragically, it marks the first real post-9/11 horror film.

And I never want to see it again.

Opens Aug. 12

Starring................As

Kevin Gage........Chaos

Kelly K.C. Quann........Sadie

Chantal DeGroat........Angelica

Maya Barovich........Emily

Sage Stallone........Swan

Stephen Wozniak........Frankie

Written and directed by David DeFalco. Produced by Steven J. Bernheim. A Dominion Entertainment release. At the Village Theatre in Chicago. Not rated by the MPAA; not for children. Running time: 78 minutes.