About 40 minutes into I Spit On Your Grave you'll want to pluck your eyes out. It's not just because it's a bad film, it's because you'll feel really bad about yourself for watching it too. The fact that it's somehow spawned a franchise consisting of a remake, two follow ups and a reboot will make you wonder just who these films are aimed at? And how can you avoid the people who call themselves fans?
The seventies saw the birth of the rape revenge genre. Well no, the 70's is when the genre took off due to relaxed censorship laws and studios being more permissive in what they allowed their films to contain. Films from directors like Clint Eastwood, Sam Peckinpah and Michael Winner brought aspects of the genre to the mainstream and it wasn't long before directors started to indulge in their worst excesses with films like Lipstick, Death Weekend and Forced Entry cropping up and shocking audiences. in 1978 Meir Zarchi made and released I Spit On Your Grave and a video nasty was born.
Jennifer Hills (Camille Keaton, cousin of Buster, one for the fact fans) has ventured out of Manhattan and into Connecticut. She's a writer for a magazine but wants to branch out into books and so has rented a holiday home where the peace and quiet will inspire her. That serenity is soon shattered when a group of local men who she met at the store and garage attack and rape her three times before leaving her for dead. She slowly recuperates and puts together a plan and soon enough the Connecticut landscape is splattered red with their blood.
Three times. I mentioned that for a reason. The film spends way more time leering over Jennifer's victimisation than her revenge. For a good 30 minutes she's tortured and violated with the camera poring over her suffering and nudity every chance it gets gets. It's awful stuff. The director said he wanted to show the true appalling violence of the act but it's hard to take him seriously when his camera is zooming in on her genitalia while she screams and sobs. In latter years people have tried to reclaim this as a feminist thriller but I cannot wrap my head around that kind of thinking. It's prurient exploitation and it's no real surprise the BBFC took a genuine dislike for it.
Unsurprisingly it didn't get a cinema release in this part of the world but snuck out on VHS during the unregulated era of the early 80's. During the video nasty furore of 1983-1984 it was prosecuted for obscenity and existed only on pirated video cassettes until 2001 when it was released on DVD with a whopping 7 minutes sliced out of it. In 2020 it hit blu-ray with only 1 minute 41 seconds cut. Cuts described by the BBFC as compulsory, ie if the distributors disagreed the film was going to get banned, it's still that shocking. The Irish censors couldn't deal with it at all and it's been flat out banned here for almost 40 years, with it's last ban being back in 2010. The reasoning for it's ban is here
Did it deserve it's notoriety and it's place on the nasty list? Yup. No doubt. It's an appalling film with a real murky morality about it. A genuinely sleazy and disturbing rape revenge film that's way more interested in one part of itself than the other. Way more.
Next up - Island Of Death. A real oddity.
No comments:
Post a Comment