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Chaos
Theatrical release poster.
Directed by	David DeFalco
Produced by	Steven Jay Bernheim
Written by	David DeFalco
Starring	Kevin Gage, Stephen Wozniak Sage Stallone
Distributed by	Dominion Entertainment
Release date(s)	10 August 2005
Running time	74 minutes
Language	English
Budget	$1,000,000

The poster design for Chaos was also very similar in design to the The Last House on the Left film poster.

Chaos is a 2005 movie about the rape and murder of two adolescent girls. It stars Kevin Gage, Sage Stallone and Stephen Wozniak and was directed by David DeFalco.

Synopsis

Chaos is the story of two adolescent girls who, while vacationing at one of their parents' mountain homes, go to a rave party in the woods in order to get some ecstasy, and are then brutally raped and murdered by Eddie "Chaos" Cooper - the film's titular character - and his two accomplices, Frankie and Daisy.

This feature film is a remake of Wes Craven's film, The Last House on the Left, itself a remake of Ingmar Bergman's Academy Award-winning The Virgin Spring. However, the director of "Chaos" has played down any connection to these two movies, and neither Craven nor Bergman were provided a story credit. Some controversy stems from the film's postcard tagline and eventual theatrical release poster, "...it's only a movie...," which is borrowed from the infamous tagline of The Last House On The Left. The original 2005 limited theatrical release poster, however, provides its own new tagline, "The Most Brutal Movie Ever Released," which was followed by the similar 2006 DVD release tagline, "The Most Brutal Movie Ever Made."

The substantial difference between Chaos and the previous two films named above is the ending, where by Eddie Chaos Cooper eschews the questions its predecessors raised on vigilantism and revenge, and in stead seems to express simply that "evil exists."

Critical response

Chaos earned Rotten Tomatoes's rating of 7%,^[1] and its Metacritic rating is 3 out of 100,^[2], and is the third worst reviewed film on their site.[1]. Conversely, the sole positive review for both Rotten Tomatoes' and Metacritic's listings came from Ken Fox of TV Guide's Movie Guide, who gave it 2 1/2 out of 4 star and said, "Unlike so many other Last House on the Left rip-offs, this virtual remake is reasonably well shot and convincingly acted."^[3]

Roger Ebert

Despite general controversy, Chaos received most of its publicity from Roger Ebert's zero star review and the filmmaker's response. Ebert wrote in his initial review that "Chaos is ugly, nihilistic, and cruel -- a film I regret having seen. I urge you to avoid it. Don't make the mistake of thinking it's "only" a horror film, or a slasher film. It is an exercise in heartless cruelty and it ends with careless brutality."^[4]

DeFalco responded with a full page letter in the Chicago Sun-Times to ratiate the very existence of his movie, saying in part, "Mr. Ebert, how do you want 21st century evil to be portrayed in film and in the media? Tame and sanitized? Titillating and exploitive? Or do you want evil portrayed as it really is? 'Ugly, nihilistic and cruel', as you say our film does it?"^[5]

Ebert replied to DeFalco in the article "Evil in film: To what end?", with "In a time of dismay and dread, is it admirable for filmmakers to depict pure evil? Have 9/11, suicide bombers, serial killers and kidnappings created a world in which the response of the artist must be nihilistic and hopeless? At the end of your film, after the other characters have been killed in sadistic and gruesome ways, the only survivor is the one who is evil incarnate, and we hear his cold laughter under a screen that has gone dark. [...] Your answer, that the world is evil and therefore it is your responsibility to reflect it, is no answer at all, but a surrender." Ebert also argued that, "Your real purpose in making Chaos, I suspect, was not to educate, but to create a scandal that would draw an audience. There's always money to be made by going further and being more shocking. Sometimes there is also art to be found in that direction, but not this time."^[5]

Reference

External links

• Official Chaos website
• Chaos at the Internet Movie Database
• Chaos at Allmovie
• Chaos at Rotten Tomatoes