I Spit On Your Grave (1977)
Posted on January 22, 2006
Filed Under Movies, Nasties, Serial killers, Slashers
It seems to have fallen to me to review many of the bloodier movies on this site, to the extent that it’s not uncommon for me to spend a couple of evenings a week watching eviscerations, disembowellments and other unpleasantness. For this reason, I occasionally wonder how desensitised I’m becoming to this sort of carnage, and whether I’m starting to lose objectivity - am I watching these films for their intellectual qualities or am I just bloodthirsty? It’s something of a relief, then, to report that I found I Spit On Your Grave pretty repugnant and gruelling, both for the film’s fairly sickening catalogue of violence, and for its total failure to put this violence into any sort of context. The plot - such as it is - tells the story of Jenny (Camille Keaton - Buster’s great-niece), an author who rents a house in some remote Connecticut woods in order to write her first novel. A city girl, she soon attracts the attention of four local rednecks, who gang rape and mutilate her and leave her for dead. Shellshocked, she plots her revenge, picking them off one by one.
Meir Zarchi’s movie is the sort of ultra-low budget snuff flick that would normally pass unnoticed by the world at large, but in the early 80s it was thrust into the limelight by Mary Whitehouse and the Daily Mail, who identified it as one of the key movies in their ‘video nasty’ witch-hunt. The film was only allowed a UK release in 2003, and even then it was heavily cut and re-edited to tone down its centrepiece, a forty (yes, forty) minute rape and humiliation sequence. Of the thirty-nine movies banned in the mid-80s, a handful of titles seem to have become synonymous with the debate over the censorship of home video, including Cannibal Holocaust, Driller Killer and I Spit On Your Grave. As such, the film has been allowed to assume an importance that it really doesn’t deserve: reviled by middle England, prized by those who would abolish all state censorship, the truth is that it’s really not a very good film, and one which seems to embrace a highly questionable morality.
The movie occupies similar territory to Wes Craven’s Last House on the Left (1972) in that it deals with the revenge-fuelled aftermath of a horrendous attack on a girl. Craven’s movie was flawed and also quite unpleasant to watch, but struck quite a sober and thoughtful tone in its depiction of how a cycle of violence can eat away at a person’s humanity. Zarchi seems to be striving for a similar parable-like tone, but his diagnosis of the human condition is trite and lacks depth. The film’s original title, Day of the Woman, indicates that it’s meant to have feminist overtones, and it’s pretty clear that our natural sympathy for Jenny means that we’re meant to be cheering for her as she plots and then carries out her revenge. Call me a prude, but I really didn’t get much of an adrenaline surge when this deeply scarred woman started castrating, hanging and chopping up her tormentors. In Last House, the vengeance of Mari’s parents is portrayed as being possibly even more shocking than the original attack on their daughter, as the revenge instinct turns a nice, mild-mannered couple into cold blooded killers. Instead, Zarchi heroises Jenny, fatally oversimplifying the issues that lie at the heart of any revenge drama. He seems to think that Jenny’s retribution is the making of her, rather than the (further) undoing of her, and this facile world view makes for queasy watching.
Zarchi’s often claimed that I Spit isn’t a snuff movie, but his feminist subtext fails to stand up to scrutiny, indicating that at heart he was more interested in pushing the envelope with violent imagery than offering up anything truly enlightening. If it’s violence you’re looking for, then this movie serves it up in spades; I found that forty (FORTY!) minute rape scene hard enough to watch in the cut / re-edited edition, so god alone knows what the full version’s like. My praise for films such as Last House and Cannibal Holocaust elsewhere on this site should indicate that I’m not against the presence of graphic violence and gore in movies as long as there’s sufficient thematic and contextual justification for its presence. This is certainly not the case here; this terrible film instead plays out like the warped fantasy of a fifth-rate director, and no protestations of its historical significance can save it. It looks cheap, the camera work and sound are appalling, and the acting never rises above serviceable. There IS a legimitate case to be made against state censorship (or its execution, at the least) but trash like this doesn’t help it: I’m more than happy for I Spit On Your Grave to be consigned to cinema history’s dustbin.
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