Roger Watkins managed to make The Last House on Dead End Street a surprisingly effective horror flick, given a cast of amateur film students and a $1500 budget. There's not much of a story to summarize. A drug dealer who served a year in prison starts making snuff films. That's about it. No points for the screenplay, but extra credit for an unsettling atmosphere and some genuinely horrifying torture scenes. In one of the most gruesome, he uses smelling salts to keep a woman conscious while he saws her limbs off.

Watkins directs everything with stark lighting and foreboding shadows. The 16MM film format enhances the grittiness. Watkins also plays the lead. He kinda looks like Bill Hader if he lived in a dumpster behind CBGB.

I got a little curious what Watkins could have accomplished with a more ambitious script and a bigger budget. Unfortunately, we'll never know. He died in 2007. Most of his other credits are adult films under the name Richard Mahler. Looking at their descriptions on IMDB, I have to admit, some of them sound pretty ambitious for porn.

4 out of 10.

Seen on Tubi.