Of the the many ’70s and ’80s horror films that have been remade in recent years, the only one to offer a real opportunity for improvement is Wes Craven’s The Last House on the Left (1972). A remake could maintain Craven’s important, if not particularly pleasant, thematic undertones about the cyclical nature of human violence while rectifying his genuinely bizarre tonal range. While Iliadis’s new version offers better explanations for some of the story’s more strained contrivances, it dilutes the original’s thematic power in reworking the final third into a more conventional revenge thriller that completely discards Craven’s critical portrayal of vengeance as a zero-sum game. Now, rather than ending on a frozen image of defeat, the new version ends with a villain’s head exploding in a microwave. (Hollywood Jewel 16, Waco, TX)