By Mathew Kumar

We’re all sick of “torture porn” by now—and just as sick of using the phrase—so the new remake of The Last House on the Left shouldn’t even be worth mentioning as an “also playing…” in this column. Except we saw the trailer and—as much as we hate to say this—we were captivated.
Why? Well it featured Fuck Buttons‘ superb track “Sweet Love for Planet Earth” as backing. We’re well aware of music’s power to make things seem better than they are but we like the song so much we went temporarily mad and thought for a minute or two that this remake might be quite good—after all, the original version of Last House on the Left is (pretty much) Ingmar Bergman’s The Virgin Spring…
Of course, we’ve yet to see anyone claim anything other than the film is terrible, with NOW‘s Andrew Dowler especially damning, calling it a “safe-as-milk time-waster.”
There’s another remake this week too, Race To Witch Mountain, which gains a million points from us just for featuring the incredibly likable Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson. It’s received middling reviews, but at least it “sits well in the traditional Disney oeuvre” according to The Star’s Greg Quill.
Our pick of the week? Well, conceivably it should be Gomorrah, the reputedly excellent story of the crime syndicate that rules Naples, but we didn’t manage to catch that at TIFF. Instead our pick is 24 City (pictured above), playing as part of Cinematheque Ontario (starting tonight at 7 p.m.) along with Jia Zhang-ke’s latest short, Cry Me A River. We called 24 City a “truly beautiful film, [that uses] the documentary format to paint truths from fiction vividly.”
Also out this week: RiP: A Remix Manifesto and Crossing Over, while the Canadian Music Week Film Festival and U of T Film Festival continue, and this week’s Wright Stuff screenings at the Bloor are famous Monkees trip-out Head (on Saturday) and a double feature of Busby Berkley’s Dames and Brian De Palma’s Phantom of the Paradise (on Sunday).