Day of the Woman aka I Spit on Your Grave (1978)

(In French, On Cable TV, October 2019) Sigh. I suppose that this is the basic exploitation movie trope in six words: Men rape woman, woman kills men. It doesn’t get any more sophisticated than this, and I Spit on Your Grave is indeed as basic as it gets with low-budget production values and a straightforward napkin-sized plot that only makes it to feature length because the violent scenes are extended beyond any reasonable length. The rape sequence alone lasts about thirty minutes, and the subsequent murders are equally interminable. If you can make a reasonable argument that conceptually, the film has excessive vengeance ideals but at least places its sympathies with the female victim, the sheer amount of relish through which the initial aggression and disproportional retribution are carried out brand I Spit on Your Grave as an exploitation picture and nothing else. It’s excruciatingly unpleasant to sit through even in the vengeance half of the film—As the plot stops for detailed depiction of sadistic killing, I found myself nit-picking the idiocy of the heroine’s excessively risky revenge plans and hoping that the film would perhaps play with the idea that she’s becoming a gleeful mass murderer. (But no.)  To be fair, lead actress Camille Keaton delivers a strong performance, and the film does have a raw unnerving naturalistic feel like many of the period’s trashiest horror movies. It does help explain why I Spit on Your Grave remains relatively well known today (even spawning a 2010 remake) while many bigger-budget studio movies of the era have been almost completely forgotten. But that doesn’t redeem much, not make the experience any more pleasant. Worth a look only for horror completists.