I Spit on your Grave series – Christian Sauvé

I Spit on Your Grave (2010)

ByChristian Sauvé 2019-10-292023-03-19 Movie Review

(In French, On Cable TV, October 2019) I’m not going to excuse 1970s trash horror thrillers, but they did have a rawness that excused some of their excesses. If nothing else, you can rationalize the gore and nastiness by the thought that not that many people worked on the result. There’s something slightly more disturbing, however, in seeing the same trash plotting being executed as a slick nicely shot higher-budgeted contemporary remake. The exploitation intent remains the same, but clearly far many more people have worked to bring the distasteful result on-screen, and that’s somehow worse. Taking its cues from the paper-thin plot of the 1978 original, I Spit on Your Grave goes for the basics: Men rape woman, woman kills men. Despite a comparatively low budget compared to other horror movies, this remake is far slicker. It adds a lot more “stuff” around the bones of the plot (including an on-the-nose moment in which a character takes a few moments away from a gang rape to take a phone call from his teenage daughter talking about church), but little of it actually makes the film better: While it does fix some of the original film’s most dumbfounding moments, it’s still an exploitation film through-and-through. The heroine is far more sadistic in her revenge (at least she takes fewer chances with her plans), but the film doesn’t make a whole lot of mileage out of perhaps portraying her as a mass murderer setting up intricate traps and torture devices for her victims—it’s almost (but not quite!) enough to shift our sympathies. Still, the overall impression left by this version of I Spit on Your Grave is perhaps even dirtier than the original: There’s a deliberate attempt here to outdo the original and be as unpleasant as possible, and that’s unpleasant enough in itself.

Movie Review

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

ByChristian Sauvé 2019-10-292023-03-19 Movie Review

(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.