A vile bag of garbage named "I Spit on Your Grave" is playing in Chicago theaters this week. It is a movie so sick, reprehensible and contemptible that I can hardly believe it's playing in respectable theaters, such as Plitt's United Artists. But it is. Attending it was one of the most depressing experiences of, my life.
This is a film without a shred of artistic distinction. It lacks even simple craftsmanship. There is no possible motive for exhibiting it, other than the totally cynical hope that it might make money. Perhaps it will make money: When I saw it at 11:20 a.m. on Monday, the theater contained a larger crowd than usual.
It was not just a large crowd, it was a profoundly disturbing one. I do not often attribute motives to audience members, nor do I try to read their minds, but the people who were sitting around me on Monday morning made it easy for me to know what they were thinking. They talked out loud. And if they seriously believed the things they were saying, they were vicarious sex criminals.
The story of ''I Spit on Your Grave" is told with moronic simplicity. A girl goes for a vacation in the woods. She sunbathes by a river. Two men speed by in a powerboat. They harass her. Later, they tow her boat to a rendezvous with two of their buddies. They strip the girl, beat her and rape her. She escapes into the woods. They find her, beat her, and rape her again. She crawls home. They are already there, beat her some more, and rape her again.
Two weeks later, somewhat recovered the girl lures one of the men out to her house, pretends to seduce him, and hangs him. She lures out another man and castrates him, leaving him to bleed to death in a bathtub. She kills the third man with an axe and disembowels the fourth with an outboard engine. End of movie.
These horrible events are shown with an absolute minimum of dialogue, which is so poorly recorded that it often cannot be heard. There is no attempt to develop the personalities of the characters - they are, simply, a girl and four men, one of them mentally retarded. The movie is nothing more or less than a series of attacks on the girl and then her attacks on the men, interrupted only by an unbelievably grotesque and inappropriate scene in which she enters a church and asks forgiveness for the murders she plans to commit.
How did the audience react to all of this? Those who were vocal seemed to be eating it up. The middle-aged, white-haired man two seats down from me, for example, talked aloud, After the first rape: "That was a good one!" After the second: "That'll show her!" After the third: "I've seen some good ones, but this is the best." When the tables turned and the woman started her killing spree, a woman in the back row shouted: "Cut him up, sister!" In several scenes, the other three men tried to force the retarded man to attack the girl. This inspired a lot of laughter and encouragement from the audience.
I wanted to turn to the man next to me and tell him his remarks were disgusting, but I did not. To hold his opinions at his age, he must already have suffered a fundamental loss of decent human feelings. I would have liked to talk with the woman in the back row, the one with the feminist solidarity for the movie's heroine. I wanted to ask If she'd been appalled by the movie's hour of rape scenes. As it was, at the film's end I walked out of the theater quickly, feeling unclean, ashamed and depressed.
This movie is an expression of the most diseased and perverted darker human natures, Because it is made artlessly, It flaunts its motives: There is no reason to see this movie except to be entertained by the sight of sadism and suffering. As a critic, I have never condemned the use of violence in films if I felt the filmmakers had an artistic reason for employing it. "I Spit on Your Grave" does not. It is a geek show. I wonder if its exhibitors saw it before they decided to play it, and if they felt as unclean afterward as I did.
Roger Ebert was the film critic of the Chicago Sun-Times from 1967 until his death in 2013. In 1975, he won the Pulitzer Prize for distinguished criticism.
Exploitation pure and simple. But it's artistically redeeming exploitation. If you can handle it, see it.
Its straight-ahead rape, humiliation and ingenious revenge competently executed but not aestheticized, the essential grunginess never overly slicked up.
A little tedious in the setting up and most of the characters are unbelievable, but by the time the **** scenario is in full swing you get bucket loads of moralistic angst and a true emotional 'trip'. The plot falls flat in the second half of the film and is blatantly in-credible. This is worth a watch just for the gut-wrenching **** scene which is so charged with diabolical evil that it will have you wanting to turn it off.
One of the best horrors of 2010. Brilliant movie will have to at edge of your seats. Only thing the **** scene was way too long. Other than that awesome movie.
What it doesn't have is the first movie's primal understanding of patriarchal violence and feminist rage, as both moral horror and exploitation gold. As a result, this is a much easier movie to watch.
Neither boring enough to qualify as pornography nor vital enough to generate a controversy.
Not surprisingly, the remake gussies up the grindhouse roughness of the first film, which makes it relatively more palatable-yet still vapid and repulsive-while also, in a perverse way, selling it out.
When every injury is repaid with interest, this self-destroying work has nowhere to go but to the credits. Such symmetry is a dismal, barbarian sort of perfection.
This despicable remake of the despicable 1978 film "I Spit on Your Grave" adds yet another offense: a phony moral equivalency.
For people like me who like their movies as brutal, shameless, sadistic, and as shocking as possible, this is certainly worth a watch, but it unfortunately pulls its punches in places you really wish it wouldn't. The **** scene is lamentably censored, with very little nudity or violence. I give it props for at least offering a new type of sadism between the rapists, each with their own perversions, and the whole "horse show" thing was entertaining. But when Matthew is forced to **** Jennifer, the camera shows us almost nothing, basically only implying that it's happening. The scene is desperate for some good acting between Jennifer's terror and confusion along with Matthew's own, but we don't get that. We don't get a good shot of their faces as this is all happening, which is kind of central to the whole point. It's better than most **** scenes are constructed in film, but it's definitely pulling its punches, and it couldn't be more obvious and detrimental to the piece. The sheriff is a nice addition to the mix, and becomes the central character in the entire ordeal. His violent **** of Jennifer is particularly special [and her creative revenge is appropriate]. The movie is paced pretty well; I didn't think the **** lasted too long, as others have been saying. I mean, it's mostly in real-time, and in the real world, some people like her are kept for days at a time being sadistically **** and abused, so thirty minutes isn't a big deal. The revenge sequences are creative and appropriately messy, and to my delight, were deliberately constructed for each rapist as for how they acted during the ****. Jennifer gets quite creative in her relentless hunt to take down each of them as painfully as possible. Unfortunately, while the murders themselves are good, she isn't a very good murderer. She lacks any kind of less-than-sane berserker rage that would naturally fuel her. She doesn't seem normal, or terrifying. Her acts are somewhat mechanical, done without much emotion, which is a shame, because her revenge fantasies are fueled by her lust for vengeance. She just looks too normal, too clean, to be what she is in this film. One of her choices is questionable involving the sheriff's family near the end. In all fairness, she had every right to murder them. She probably should have for their own sakes, with the knowledge that the sheriff is a sadistic rapist. What are they supposed to do afterward in a town like that? Either way, they're not getting a happy ending. Anyway, while some of the violence and **** is tragically censored for all the shock-value fans out there, and the realism gets a few points off for Jennifer's character not acting like a truly vengeful killer, it's nice to see someone try something like this and make it look pretty good. The scene when the **** is over and Jennifer is walking nude in a dissociated malaise is, thankfully, how a real **** victim would commonly act from the nightmarish shock, confusion, and pain of being ****. That scene in particular is pretty killer. Worth a watch, for sure.
I Spit on Your Grave s pretty cool horror. The main character gets involved with a couple of guys, and that's the whole movie. The scenes are really delicious and it's great to watch. There is one part that is predictable and the story is not masterful and overall it is such an above-average film for me. If you like rougher scenes, you should enjoy the film as much as I do, but if you prefer a real story, then I don't think this film is for you.
This film is the remake of an older film from the Seventies, which fell into relative forgetfulness due to it's brutality, very graphic and raw. The new film is very faithful to it's predecessor and tells, in essence, the same story. In the film, young writer Jennifer leaves the city and goes to the countryside, where her beauty stands out and attracts the unwanted attention **** of men who come together to arrest and sexually abuse her. Repeatedly ****, humiliated, beaten and wounded in her body and in her self-love, she is left to die by the group, which also belongs to the local sheriff, one of the most brutal rapists. Attempts to cover up the crime are evident, but nothing works: she survives and comes back to avenge herself, killing them all in a revenge that only a wounded woman would be able to do. The film is quite tough and violent, but the degree of rawness and brutality is much lower than it's predecessor of the Seventies. The older film was much more difficult to see, has a greater and more shocking degree of violence and its cast spends a considerable part of the film undressed, which is why I considered this film highly inadvisable for adults who are more impressionable [of course, it's an unthinkable film for young people or children]. More than ****, what shocks and disturbs us in this film is the way men who are perfectly inserted in that social environment and even has some prestigious positions - the sheriff's example - manage to be capable of those atrocities and have such awareness of their own impunity. Another thing that strikes us is the way she kills them, with refinements of cynicism and some pleasure, as we see in horror slasher films. The cast consists of a series of illustrious strangers. Still, I liked the work of Sarah Butler and Andrew Howard, both of whom are very committed to their characters. Technically, it is a film that does not stand out nor has much to present. Not having a high budget, it used what it had. There is a lot of blood, and the makeup work has been done quite well. The film uses a reduced and discreet soundtrack, which lets the plot itself to shine. Cinematography does not stand out, either the sets and costumes.
There is a lot to talk about here, so many things to discuss, so many mistakes, and lots of plot holes. To start with, I got that Jennifer Hills [age is not mentioned] is somehow in her early twenties and is WRITER! Did she even finish college? I wasn't really convinced, I guess that an older actress would be better, and I am not relating to the remake because I didn't watch it, I am judging this as a movie with no connections. There is a scene where she spills Whisky on her LEGS, why would she start washing her cloths the scene after This doesn't make any sense. Why would she kiss a stranger? Full of Dumb Actions, and that makes us care less for these characters due to their stupid actions/decisions. The characters are flat, just to carry the plot on, just veins, no digging the past at all, or anything else to make us care more for the character, and if the remade film is like this, they should have development. The whole movie is dull, although the **** scene is cruel shocking and disturbing, it is still dull and uninteresting, due to the flat characters that don't share feelings with the audience at all! Why? I don't want to spoil more, but there is some unexplainable things somewhere near the end [don't make any sense]. But I admit the third act is awesome, everything after the **** is pretty interesting, predictable but entertaining and shocking, it has that old school buzz to it, but it doesn't save it from getting negative response! The acting got better by the time. But on my own standards I won't recommend this to anyone, it is pretty sick, gross, disturbing and really shocking. No one wants to see anyone getting tortured especially seeing an almost innocent girl [she smokes weed] but still.
I hardly agreed with Roger Ebert, but He was right on this one! A bloody disgusting garbage! Pure sadisctic trash for the mentally ill, sadistic people. If you enjoy watching the suffering of other beings you are sick!!!
Is Spit on Your Grave a good movie?
The film and it's 1978 predecessor both deal with rape, savage torture and murder. Both films have been highly criticized because of this with critics like Roger Ebert giving both films a zero star rating and calling the original a "vile bag of garbage".
What is the point of I Spit on Your Grave?
I Spit on Your Grave [originally titled Day of the Woman] is a 1978 American rape-and-revenge film written and directed by Meir Zarchi. The film tells the story of Jennifer Hills [Camille Keaton], a fiction writer based in New York City who exacts revenge on her four tormentors who gang rape and leave her for dead.
What is the plot of the movie I Spit on Your Grave?
Jennifer [Sarah Butler], a writer, rents an isolated cabin in the country so she can work on her latest novel. The peace and quiet is soon shattered by a gang of local thugs who rape and torture her, then leave her for dead. But she returns for vengeance, trapping the men one by one. Jennifer inflicts pain on her attackers with a ferocity that surpasses her own ordeal.I Spit on Your Grave / Film synopsisnull
Is Jennifer alive in I Spit on Your Grave?
Herman manages to stop the rape and Christy runs away only to be chased by the gang. She manages to hide from them in the night. The gang go to the rapists' grave from the first film and celebrate their victory before dumping Jennifer's decapitated body into an empty grave.