I SPIT ON YOUR GRAVE
Directed by by Steven R. Monroe
Produced by Lisa Hansen & Paul Hertzberg
Written by Stuart Morse, based on the 1978  film by Meir Zarchi
Released by Anchor Bay
USA. 107 min. Not Rated
With Sarah Butler, Jeff Branson, Daniel Franzese, Rodney Eastman , Chad Lindberg, Tracey Walter & Andrew Howard
 

With producers now resuscitating the likes of The A-Team and Nightmare on Elm Street, it must have been inevitable that they would somehow come to I Spit on Your Grave. Unless there’s a Garbage Pail Kids Movie reboot in the works, it’s safe to say this is the bottom of the barrel.

I Spit is a more than unusually pointless remake of the 1978 schlocker that caused Roger Ebert, in a notorious review, to lose his faith in humanity. To get a taste of it: the line that became its catchphrase, “Suck it, bitch,” was used both in a scene of forced fellatio and a later one involving an outboard motor and a man’s mouth. Despite some hand waving from director Meir Zarchi that it was a feminist parable—he says the studio nixed the original title, Day of the Woman—this is the kind of movie that, if found in your boyfriend’s collection, should prompt you to look under his floorboards.

Like the original, the new I Spit on Your Grave essentially serves up a young woman’s rape and humiliation for entertainment. Its plot, such as it is, sticks pretty close to the trail paved by Deliverance—a terror of the countryside so ludicrous a friend of mine thinks it was invented by a cult of urban planners trying to encourage people to stay in cities. It goes like this: an attractive young writer, played by a sympathetic but let’s say not literary-seeming Jennifer Hills (Sarah Butler), heads out to the country. She holes up in a cabin for the summer so she can have peace and quiet to write her second novel. But once there, she attracts the attentions of a crew of rednecks, who break into her house one night, torture and gang rape her, and then leave her for dead. Unbeknownst to them, she survives the attack and sets about getting her revenge. 

Director Steven R. Monroe, whose previous films mostly went straight to the Syfy channel, actually has a decent eye, lensing the countryside in a way to bring to life its textures and mists. But the cast of unknowns who play the rednecks don’t have the talent, or interest, in lifting them above scriptwriter Stuart Morse’s clichés: they pop beer tops, grunt, torment a mentally handicapped kid, and work in a gas station (the brand is conveniently peeled away). As this isn’t the 1970s, the plot is also saddled with a cell phone that has to be disposed of as implausibly and quickly as possible.

If anything, I expect exploitation fans will watch this with a sense of loss since the world, in some ways, is less permissive than it was 30 years ago. For a queasy indulgence in man’s creepier emotions, the film actually holds back. For one, Hills doesn’t seduce the rednecks before dispatching them as in the original—arguably the most ridiculous, and repulsive, element of that film, and one that made its claims of being some kind of feminist celebration of vindicated womanhood impossible to take seriously. Instead, the remake owes much to torture porn and the Saw franchise. Its real concern is setting up inventively gruesome traps for Jennifer’s enemies. These scenes do achieve a kind of pulpy catharsis, which I suppose one should judge in a Fangoria sort of way. How cool are they? They’re OK. One involves crows, fish guts, and eyes forced open by hooks. Can I assume you’re not going to watch this? Brendon Nafziger
October 10, 2010