I Spit on Your Grave (remake)

Many years ago, Pauline Kael famously accused Sam Peckinpah of aestheticizing rape in his film, Straw Dogs.  Kael was conflicted about the film and, particularly, incensed by the use of balletic ("languorus" she said) slow-motion  for the punches that subdue the victim of a sexual assault.  Whatever his pretensions, Peckinpah was an entertainer, a director who cut his teeth on network TV, and he understood that if protracted scenes of violence are to be displayed, something must be done to make them pretty -- otherwise, the whole enterprise is just sadism inflicted on the audience, or, worse, an attempt to induce voyeuristic sadism in the viewer.  Film is an art form -- its violence is staged.  And, therefore, the manner in which violent events are staged must distance those incidents from viewers.  No sane person wants to watch a real rape or real murder.This is a lesson wholly ignored by whoever it was who made the direct-to-video rape-revenge picture I spit on your Grave.  (The 2010 picture is a remake of an exploitation film called Day of the Woman released in 1978 and renamed I Spit on your Grave.  It's part of a franchise -- there have been two subsequent versions, most recently one made in 2015.  Apparently, someone enjoys these films.) 

As a genre, rape-revenge cinema probably dates back, most disturbingly, to the interracial sexual assaults that Griffith stages in Birth of a Nation.  The modern form of the genre begins with a distinguished example of the form, Ingmar Bergman's uncompromising, if lyrical, The Virgin Spring.  That film was remade as a hillbilly exercise in gore, The Last House on the Left, by the late Wes Craven -- the pioneer of the low-budget Drive-in movie rape-revenge horror film.  Craven's picture was supposed to be nasty fun -- back in those days, using rape as a plot device to power-up a gory sequence of torture-porn eviscerations and incinerations was supposed to be entertaining.  (Craven, who was a literate man, would have argued that his films were Jacobean exercises in grand guignol.)  Although today no one would dare remark on this point, the rapes depicted in these films were designed to be titillating, mildly sexual arousing and fun.  This was the aesthetic approach that stirred indignation, but begrudging admiration for the director's talent, in Pauline Kael's response to Straw Dogs, probably the most artistically distinguished example of the genre.  I spit on your Grave is made in a different era and from a radically different directorial perspective.  Today, no one would dare to consider the depiction of a rape today as something "entertaining".  One would think that doctrines of political correctness would long since have retired the genre -- today's piety, however hypocritical, about sexual abuse, doesn't authorize an "entertaining" film about rape.  The joyless, extravagantly ugly I spit on your Grave proves this point.  Or, perhaps, the pointlessness because the principal question which the film raises is why such a movie would be made in the first place.

The first two-thirds of I Spit on your Grave is foreplay for the rape and its torture-porn consequences.  A lady-novelist, presumably from New York or Boston, rents a large cabin on a bayou in Georgia or Mississippi or Louisiana.  Inadvertently, she humiliates one of the local thugs.  With two of his buddies, and the obligatory mentally retarded man-child, the bad guys terrorize the woman.  She fights back and flees through the dismal-looking woods, encountering the local sheriff.  Of course, the sheriff is just a good ole boy himself and he becomes the ring-leader in the rape party.  The movie is surprisingly decorous about the rape -- no real sexual conduct is shown and there is no nudity until all of the filthy acts have been performed off-screen.  The girl is repeatedly forced to fellate various handguns as a surrogate for oral sex that the picture is unwilling to depict and her head is held under dirty swamp water for extended periods of time as a form of torture.  Mercifully, I suppose, the extended rape scene is just a lot of "before" and "after" with no actual portrayal of the assault.  The heroine ends up smeared with filth, naked, sprawled face-down in a puddle of mud on the edge of the lagoon.  Before the sheriff can gun her down, she falls sideways off a ramshackle bridge over the bayou and mysteriously vanishes.  At this point, it becomes unclear whether the woman is dead or alive and, when she reappears, her eyes are hollow, her face skeletally gaunt, and her hair long, disheveled, and inky black -- she looks like one of the avenging angels that haunt certain types of Japanese horror films, a specter similara in appearance to one of the abused girl-ghosts in movies like Ringu.  The last third of the movie is torture porn.  The heroine isolates the men that assaulted her and devises punishments customized to their role in her rape -- the voyeuristic hillbilly who filmed her defilement, for instance, find himself chained to a tree with fishhooks through his eyelids exposing his eyeballs to the predation of crows; the sheriff who anally sodomized the heroine gets a shotgun rammed up his rectum; the good ole boy who shoved her head underwater gets his face dipped repeatedly in a solution of lye which dissolves his tongue, eyes, and nose.  It's all shot unimaginatively, if effectively, and without any trace of suspense or, even, drama -- in fact, all the mayhem is more or less matter of fact:  penises are cut off and rammed into villains mouths and the heroine's vengeance in abetted by a tool shed full of all sorts of sharp and lacerating instrumentalities -- bear traps, chain saws, various kinds of hooks and clamps and metal restraints. 

The film is ridiculous and beneath contempt and, of course, the people who made this picture obviously couldn't justify the existence of the film to themselves since they make no artistic effort of any kind in production of the movie; there is no humor or suspense or, even, drama -- and there 's no acting either except the broadest caricatures of southern hillbillies, no supporting players, no subplots, in fact, almost no plot at all.   It's all complete artless and perfunctory.  One wonders what it was like to spend days filming scenes where the naked girl rolls around in mud while the good old boys insult her or or hours staging shots involving characters having to repeatedly pretend that their genitals are being snipped off with huge shears:  "let's do another take, and this time with more feeling!  That scream was a little lackluster."  Making the picture probably wasn't much fun since most of the principals likely had to spend hours, if not days, shackled to trees outdoors while spills of various bodily fluids were simulated around them.  Clearly, the people who made this thing had nothing but contempt for the material and the audience likely to watch the movie.  It's as if someone said:  Let's make this film in the most unimaginative manner possible and see if anyone will pay money to watch this thing solely on the basis of its subject matter.  And, since only vicious louts would watch a movie like this, let's punish them for their voyeurism by making every single aspect of the movie unappealing -- keep the rape off-screen but imply it to be as brutish as possible, keep the heroine unattractive and unappealing to keep anyone from getting their jollies from the rape scenes.  Put the torture porn front and center but film it in a completely uninvolving, quasi-documentary style.  It's as if the filmmakers set out to inflict injury on their audience on the basis of their detestation for the type of people who would spend their money to watch a thing like this.

Half-way through the film, I noticed something that has become a truism:  the only people that can be insulted with impunity in today's films are either Islamic fundamentalists or Southern white trash.  (And, most films featuring Islamic villains will, also, depict some kind of a "good Arab.")  Apparently, everyone hates Southern white men and they can be portrayed as thuggish, indolent, sadistic human-garbage without anyone's protest.  Here is a thought experiment:  what would I spit on your Grave be like if the five rapists were African-American males -- that's how the genre began with D. W. Griffith.  How would we experience the movie if Black men were cast as the Southern bayou-dwelling hillbillies?   No one would dare to make a film of that kind.