UNCOVERING A GRAVER GRAVE
ploitation work and arguably the most notorious entry in the rape/revenge subgenre, but nearly 30 years ago, it served as my introduction to both home video and extreme cinema. Camille Keaton stars as Jennifer, a budding
I
author who rents a country cabin for a summer to work on her latest novel. She attracts the at- tention of a trio of local yokels and a dim-witted hanger-on who brutally attack her after she brushes off their advances. The centrepiece is the infamous 25-minute rape sequence, in which Jennifer is violated over and over. (Keaton’s fear- less, full-frontal performance makes it absolutely harrowing to sit through.) Later, her character re- cuperates and exacts deadly retribution, but those scenes never capture the raw emotion so successfully mined in the rape scene. Notably, I Spit on Your Grave eschews tradi-
tional horror film conventions. The majority of it takes place in a sunny, sylvan setting, and the complete lack of music grants the film a cinema verité aesthetic. Given the distasteful subject matter and the
excessive violence and nudity, it would seem that this would be remake-proof. Of course, it wasn’t. When the remake was announced, I cynically ex- pected that this wouldn’t be anything more than a neutered, direct-to-video cash-in. In no way did I expect the cinematic bulldozer that is I Spit on Your Grave 2010. The remake faithfully follows the structure of
the original. Jennifer (Sarah Butler) rents the cabin, rebuffs the come-on of a local redneck (Jeff Branson), defacto ringleader of a trio of yokels and their dim-witted hanger-on, and is brutally raped before coming back to take re- venge. There are some surface changes – an effec-
tive ambient score and a cold blue-filtered visual aesthetic – and some more profound changes: the revenge scenes! The rape scene is as soul- crushing as in the original, but is handled differ- ently. In the first, the rapists merely taunt
RM114 HAVE A SPECIAL PLACE IN MY
WITHERED HEART FOR MEIR ZARCHI’S I SPIT ON YOUR GRAVE. Not only is the 1978 film a landmark ex-
I Spit on Your Grave (2010)
Jennifer before attacking her physically. In the new version, the rapists cruelly humiliate and de- grade her before the sexual assault, which doesn’t go on nearly as long as it does in the first. Where this film handily (or dubiously) trumps its
forebearer is in the ferocious revenge sequences. In the original, Jennifer seduces her tormentors before killing them. The new Jennifer incapaci- tates them, usually with blunt objects, then binds them in elaborate traps that guarantee a slow and nasty death while she turns their torment back on them. One man is tied over a bathtub full of acid in such a way that he can’t keep from dipping his face into it, an- other suffers heinous eyeball vi- olence, teeth are ripped out, a penis is cut off, and the most cringe-inducing scene features some shotgun sodomy. Slapping the torture porn label
on I Spit on Your Grave (2010) would be easy but unfairly reflex- ive. Certainly, cinematic sensibil- ities of the last decade are at play here, but as outlandish as the violence gets, it never comes across as gratuitous. The reports of people passing out at screenings at the Toronto After Dark Film Festival this past August and its premiere at the FanTasia International Film Festi- val in Montreal the month before are genuine. This
is a grim and relentlessly oppressive experience, the violence visited in the revenge portion so vi- cious that it engenders sympathy for the fates of these otherwise terrible men. The tagline on the poster for the original prom-
ised that “This woman has just cut, chopped, broken and burned five men…” Actually, there’s only four. This error is rectified in the remake through an additional character, Sheriff Storch (Andrew Howard). I asked producer Lisa Hansen about him during the I Spit on Your Grave panel at the recent 2010 Rue Morgue Festival of Fear. She explained that it is in- deed a bit of a nod to the origi- nal tagline of “five men,” but they also wanted to deal with some of the implications or questions that arose in the first film. “In today’s world, people go ‘why didn’t you go to the po- lice?’ A lot of people question that, even though most women don’t ever go to the police be- cause they’re put on trial just as
much as their perpetrators are. … I think we an- swered that in the remake.” I couldn’t agree more. The unrated I Spit on Your Grave (2010) opens
theatrically October 8 in the US and October 15 in Canada.
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