After sitting through both Last House on the Left films, and The Virgin Spring (the film that inspired Wes Craven to make the original Last House), I was interested in seeing another version of this tale, and probably the most controversial of them all, David DeFalco's Chaos. Originally Chaos was intended to be a remake of Last House on the Left, but that concept changed early on in the production. I don't know what changed, and how it effected the movie, since Chaos still felt like Last House on the Left, just with a much bleaker ending.

Chaos opens up with a disclaimer that this film is intended to "educate and, perhaps, save lives." I don't know who this film is intending to educate, or whose lives are supposed to be saved by it. DeFalco seemed like he was determined on making the most unforgiving movie he could manage. And for the most part, he succeeds. But not in a way that is educating, or capable of saving lives.

Chaos has become one of the most controversial movies; mainly due to Roger Ebert's scathing review of the film. Maybe I've seen too many violent films in my lifetime, but Chaos didn't shock me as much as I thought it would. In fact, I wasn't bothered by any of the violence in the film. I'd like to imagine that I haven't become desensitized to violence, but that I wasn't troubled by it in this film because of how terrible (bad film-making, not shock value) of a movie Chaos is.

Chaos is just ridiculous in every way imaginable. The acting is terrible, except for maybe Kevin Gage as the title character Chaos, but he is far too evil to be taken seriously. Even when the girls are being brutalized, it doesn't seem real. And the other three people brutalizing the girls, Swan (Sage Stallone), Daisy (Kelly K.C. Quann) and Frankie (Stephen Wozniak) weren't believable. And all of them are just poorly conceived characters, and predictable horror cliches.

And then there is the writing! I guess it's hardcore now to have a lot of fowl language in a film like this, but it doesn't help the movie at all. I'm not against bad language, but it can hurt a movie when it is used in excess. With the character of Chaos, every other word out of his mouth was some sort of derogatory term against homosexuals. Again, I'm not against anyone using words like "faggot" "fag" or "gay" in a negative way, but come on! Your menacing character DeFalco, well, he seems more like douche in the end! And on another note, why is baseball a gay sport to Chaos, but he owns a baseball bat?

When the two girls, Emily (Chantal Degroat) and Angelica (Maya Barovich), are abducted and assaulted, all of it just felt exploitive. With The Virgin Spring and The Last House on the Left, the assault scenes weren't long and didn't attempt to shock its audiences in the way that Chaos tries to. Again, for a film that is supposed to "educate and, perhaps, save lives," Chaos enjoys crossing the line with its violence against the two female characters in the film, with no real merit to any of it.

And to top it all off, Chaos ends on what is quite possibly the dumbest ending I have ever seen. I won't ruin it for those who want to see this film, but trust me when I say that the closing moments of Chaos contradict any "education" this film intended to offer, and simply goes out on a dark note purely for shock value. Chaos is an ugly film, and not because it is brutal but because it is a lazy, cheap effort at shocking audiences and nothing more.