I Spit on Your Grave (2010)

zero stars

The fire started slowly and grew hotter and more intense as I Spit on Your Grave played out. It was an endurance test, orchestrated by filmmakers with questionable motives. Here is a remake that is every bit the movie its superior inspiration was accused of being, serving up improbabilities and clichés without any sort of noble purpose in mind. By the end of the movie, the fire had grown out of control, my blood boiling, putting to test all my efforts to continue watching. If I had stopped watching, I could not declare this the worst movie I’ve ever seen. I did finish and can therefore declare it so. I Spit on Your Grave is the worst movie I’ve ever seen.

The 1978 original by Meir Zarchi was hammered by critics, understandably due to its violence, rape scenes and cheap production, which gave it the aura of a sleazy exploitation film designed to punish the audience for walking into any theater playing it. However, there was a motive for its creation, which Zarchi has discussed at length ever since he resurfaced many years after I Spit on Your Grave’s release. His film is an expression of his frustration while dealing with what he perceived was indifference from the police towards a rape victim that he found wandering in a park and brought to a police station. What if a rape victim knew right away that she would run into such indifference? Would she take matters into her own hand? If so, how would it look?

Zarchi’s film is one possible scenario. In his film, a writer (played by Camille Keaton) rents a cabin in the woods and is raped repeatedly by four men soon afterwards. Zarchi’s approach was uncompromising. He showed rape for all its ugliness. That film’s strongest sequence took place after the rapes and before the victim’s revenge. She attempted to go on with her routine, typing her novel while the crime lingered in the back of her mind. She contemplated her situation. A walk on the railroad tracks revealed her sadness and hopelessness. To say that I like the original would be a mistake. I understand it. I admire its intent. Despite its production values, which are admittedly low, it’s a powerful film, one that makes sense once we factor in the director’s reason for making it.

Now here is a remake, directed by Steven R. Monroe. It tells a similar story. Jennifer Hills (Sarah Butler) travels to the countryside to write a novel. She visits a gas station, where the locals see her and immediately target her for destruction. Later in her cabin, the ordeal begins. The four cretins torture her, violate her, urge each other on, chase her outside. She runs into the sheriff (Andrew Howard) who is in on it. They take turns raping her. Shell-shocked and naked, she falls off a bridge and disappears.

Let’s stop here and examine what happened. First, one of the rapists, Matthew (Chad Lindberg), is retarded. He speaks with a stutter and is reluctant to go along, but he eventually participates. Lindberg’s performance is awful. Remember what Robert Downey, Jr. said in Tropic Thunder? You never go full retard. That was good advice, which Lindberg should have followed. Lindberg indeed goes full retard, playing Matthew the same way an ignorant high school kid might mock a retarded person. Couple that with whatever emotions Monroe wants us to feel during Jennifer’s rape scenes, and we have a toxic combination that is not only indescribable, but also out of place.

Secondly, Monroe’s interviews confirm that he wanted to make an updated version of the original film. He doesn’t possess Zarchi’s motivation, making his choices problematic. The rape scenes are so intense that their existence negates any objections regarding their purpose. The chief questions would be, how intense should a rape scene be? How much is too much to show? Does showing too little indicate that the filmmakers fear confronting the reality of rape? I suspect these are questions Monroe would ask of anyone who objects to the film, therefore ending the conversation right there. This is not leaving subtext to the viewer to ponder. This is copping out. Watch Irreversible, which also features a long and brutal rape scene, then observe what happens later and consider what came before. That’s a movie that justified its content. Let’s see what Monroe does after the rape scenes.

Jennifer disappears for what could basically be called the movie’s third act (out of four). The rapists try to find her but fail, eventually giving up and considering her dead. Then they see shadows in the dark. Is it Sarah? In typical horror movie fashion, she’s standing in the distance, then disappears. Was she really there at the edge of the woods, or were the rapists hallucinating? The rapists grow frustrated. Are they being stalked, like horror movie teenagers being stalked by a masked killer? You might see the pattern beginning to emerge here, and you would be correct if you conclude that this movie is morphing into a horror movie, complete with jump scares and stinger music. The original was not a horror movie in the traditional sense, and really doesn’t belong in the horror movie section of your local video store, or Netflix.

Monroe starts jerking us around. The sheriff is a loving father and husband, and he attends church. This is not an attempt to add complex layers to his character, since his character isn’t complex at all. This revelation serves one purpose, which is to make his eventual demise more satisfying. It isn’t enough that he raped Jennifer in the woods while his buddies held her down. He’s also a rapist who disguised himself as a God-fearing family man. Monroe did not have to make him worse, but he does so anyway to intensify the viewer’s bloodlust.

In the fourth act, Jennifer returns and picks off her offenders one by one, and in doing so confirms Monroe’s intent to transition his rape/revenge film into a horror film, and not just any horror film, but a film that falls into the torture porn category. Jennifer’s methods could be taken straight from the Saw series, as she devises elaborate and imaginative setups for the four rapists. At last, we have arrived at Monroe’s real purpose. The rape scenes exist not to examine how a victim might react under such terrible circumstances, but to provide an excuse to enter the crowded torture porn sweepstakes, of which Captivity was the worst example, until this movie came along.

Here’s where we stand. We have a movie that takes qualities that ought to belong to a good man and uses them to make the worst offender even worse. We have a movie that exploits a serious subject to position itself alongside Hostel, Captivity and the much superior Saw. We have the Jennifer character apparently surviving in the woods for a month living in an abandoned cabin, though her actual method of survival is never addressed. We have Chad Lindberg going full retard. Never before had I ever had so much contempt for the filmmakers of a bad movie. I suppose it’s possible to make a movie like this work. That would take a genius. Monroe isn’t one.

Meir Zarchi’s film was originally called Day of the Woman. It was renamed I Spit on Your Grave by the distributor. The latter title carries with it the baggage of an exploitation film. That isn’t fair. Zarchi’s film, Day of the Woman, was borne out of Zarchi’s frustration and experience. It meant something to its creator. When viewed through that lens, then Day of the Woman becomes something that transcends its reputation and separates itself from the tainted title of I Spit on Your Grave. If Zarchi’s film is Day of the Woman, then Steven R. Monroe’s film is indeed I Spit on Your Grave.

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