Movie Review: I Spit On Your Grave
HORROR
I SPIT ON YOUR GRAVE (Anchor Bay)
STARS > Sarah Butler, Jeff Branson, Daniel Franzese, Rodney Eastman, Chad Lindberg, Tracey Walter, Andrew Howard
DIRECTOR > Steven R. Monroe
RATING > 3.5/5
OPENS > OCT 8
It has been said that 1978’s I Spit On Your Grave is the ultimate feminist revenge flick. Written and directed by Meir Zarchi and originally titled Day Of The Woman, the film’s protagonist is a young writer named Jennifer Hills (played by Camille Keaton, grand-niece of comedian and silent-film director Buster Keaton) who rents an isolated lakeside cottage to work on her first novel. Instead, she spends the first half of the movie being attacked and savagely gang-raped by four brain-dead yokels. Left for dead, she spends the second half picking off her attackers one by one with some of the most gruesome methods at her disposal. Because the rape scenes were so lengthy and disturbing and the subsequent murders so graphic, the film was banned in several countries, called a “vile bag of garbage” by Roger Ebert and named one of Time magazine’s “Top 10 Ridiculously Violent Movies.”
The question, then, is which of the other nine films will Steven R. Monroe’s 2010 remake bump off of the list? Resurrected and revamped with the full endorsement of Zarchi (who also serves as one of the remake’s executive producers), Monroe’s unrated take on I Spit On Your Grave ups the gore and brutality in every which way. A wispy CSI extra named Sarah Butler plays Hills, who endures merciless beatings and repeated rapes at the hands of the local sheriff and shit-heel gas-station attendants before jumping off a bridge to escape further abuse. Somehow, she returns to dispatch her attackers even more viciously—and poetically, if you get our drift—than any of the revenge scenes in the original flick.
A complete unknown until now, Butler won’t be toiling in obscurity much longer when her coolly triumphant performance becomes a matter of public record. She successfully flips the switch from pleading victim to stone-cold killer with total believability, and her impressive endurance in protracted scenes that required her to be naked, crying and roughly handled by her fellow actors should be more than enough to earn the admiration of even the most cynical casting director. Speaking of casting, the only character that doesn’t work here is Daniel Franzese as one of the rapists. Readers might remember him as Damian, the gay male outcast from Tina Fey’s 2004 comedy Mean Girls, the film that made Lindsay Lohan a movie star. Maybe it’s just because we’ve seen Mean Girls so many times, but it’s hard to believe that such an awkward teddy-bear type would squat-hump an innocent young woman against her will in the Louisiana woods.
Ultimately, fans of the original film will be in no way disappointed. Meanwhile, those who disliked the fact that Keaton’s character used sex—after she was raped—to lure her assailants to their doom will be pleased to know that Butler’s character does no so such thing. But make no mistake: she eliminates them with an efficiency that is as sadistic as it is satisfying. In the end, everybody gets exactly what they deserve.
