Fucking Frank and Eleanor Perry and their horror films that aren't horror films at all. Have you ever noticed that they film every story they have to tell into a horror film, even when the movie is something like David and Lisa or Diary of a Mad Housewife? (Obviously Mommie Dearest is the most glaring example.) Well, Last Summer is one of these, and it's, frankly, a terrifying portrait of rich white youth.
Barbara Hershey and Richard Thomas are really excellent in this, if reprehensible, and Catherine Burns is phenomenal. The plot of the movie, though, is quite disturbing, and Perry's gaze doesn't help. He seems most interested, after all, not in the people who have been harmed by the three reprehensible young people at the film's center but in the so-called best of the three, the one who might have had the chance to be a human. This is an odd place to land one's gaze, to my mind, but it is definitely where the Perrys' film finds itself.
Oh! There is this very strange little gay scene in which Barbara Hershey and Bruce Davison are spying on two people kissing on the beach and they look like a man and a woman but then one of them rolls over and it turns out to be two men. Davison's character wants to leave, but Hershey's character declares that she wants to stay and watch. It is, I suppose, a hint of things to come, as the movie moves further and further into territory where Hershey's character wants to watch worse things.
P.S. Now that I've seen The Battle of Neretva, The Happy Ending, and Last Summer I've seen all the films that were nominated for Oscars in 1970. (There actually aren't very many years before 1995 when I have seen all of them.) It's sometimes really hard to find these old movies to finish out the list. I found The Happy Ending and The Battle of Neretva on YouTube. For Last Summer I had to acquire a bootleg copy.
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