Truly Dreadful Film

Pretty Good

An old-fashioned movie made with new-fashioned finesse.

This is a coming of age storyline that you've seen in one form or another for decades. It takes a truly unique voice to make yet another one worth watching.

A must watch for true humans! So, it is definitely NOT for MRA's and misogynists.

After watching Siskel and Ebert's Women in Danger series, I was intrigued by how bad some of these movies exploiting women in danger were. "I spit on your grave" was worse than I can ever imagine. I am not voting on this movie, because even 1/10 is too high. "I spit on your grave" does not have an original plot. In fact, writer-director Meir Zarchi ripped off the plot of Igmar Bergman's "Virgin Spring" and then made some alterations. However, it would be incorrect to assume that "I spit on your grave" deserves to be in the same league as "Virgin Spring." To be sure, "Virgin Spring" has a scene where the innocent Swedish girl Karin is raped and murdered and a scene where her father (played brilliantly by Max von Sydow) exacts a brutal revenge against the rapists. Rape and revenge, therefore, are common themes in both films. Yet Bergman's filmmaking does not linger over the rape scene. Moreover, "Virgin Spring" has yet another scene where the woman, who is meant to protect Karin, is wracked with guilt and despair over doing nothing to stop the attackers and worse still secretly wanting Karin to be raped. She confides her sins to Karin's father and tells him who raped and murdered his daughter in a truly powerful scene.With "I spit on your grave," we get the exact opposite of Igmar Bergman's elegant film. Unlike "Virgin Spring," "I spit on your grave" focuses and exploits one element of the plot: the rape itself. Some of the reviewers here estimated that as much as 40 minutes were devoted to showing a woman being raped multiple times. In addition, there are scenes encouraging the audience members to look forward to the girl's rape before it starts. What Meir Zarchi and the others connected to this travesty of filmmaking do not seem to understand is that libidos are aroused by consensual sex. That's what makes the Emmanuelle movies appealing and the same could be said for Lina Wertmueller's Swept Away where the young lady turns out to like being dominated and having sex with a dirty sailor. Yet Meir Zarchi does not have nearly as much class as the directors of the Emmanuelle films. He seems to have embraced the logic that rape is sexy and that most audience members relish the opportunity of spending more than an hour watching a young woman being violated. There is also another major difference between "I spit on your grave" and "Virgin Spring." As mentioned earlier, "Virgin Spring" is primarily a film about the human condition. We see Karin's mother worry over her daughter's long absence. We see another woman blaming herself for Karin's rape and death. We see Karin's father with visible signs of anguish on his face. We then see a moving funeral scene where the family tries to move on after burying their young child. The "Virgin Spring" is really a film about intelligent human beings experiencing complex emotions as a result of going through adversity. By contrast, "I spit on your grave," is devoid of any of this humanity. Meir Zarchi did not allocate more than an hour to the foreplay scenes and then the rape by accident. He clearly wanted the film to be about those things. Moreover, he made a conscious decision to leave out the human dimension even of the rape victim herself. We get no real insights into what the rape victim feels inside, because the director is more interested in hyping the concept of the rape itself than creating any sympathetic characters. Then toward the end, Meir Zarchi does something cynical: he films very briefly the rape victim's revenge against the rapists. This was done deliberately so that Zarchi could claim that he was not using rape as a form of entertainment at all. Yet I was not fooled by this cynical hedge for a second and neither should you. 0/10

Bruised, beaten and left for dead, a gang rape victim exacts revenge in this controversial horror film, famously cited by Roger Ebert as the worst film ever made. With some truly second-rate acting, inexplicable slow motion shots and a plot that takes over an hour to warm up, 'I Spit on Your Grave' is hardly the classiest film ever made, but there is also a lot more of interest to it than one might expect. Most notably, the protagonist seems so foolish at first, deciding to stay alone in the wilderness to write her novel where she is clearly vulnerable - and yet, with many shots capturing the serene beauty of the wilderness and her relaxation when boating, what the film really does is force us to question how ugly human society is that it is simply never safe to be alone by oneself in the beauty of untouched nature. Scenes of the rapists telling her that she was 'asking for it' further shine a dim light on the way human beings tick; this is really a film about how vile human nature can be. All that said and done, the slow-moving first hour is somewhat of a chore to get through with the film only really becoming enticing as our heroine imaginatively takes revenge. The final half-hour of the film though is very intense - and the final shot works especially well for a motion picture about a woman deciding to assert herself and embrace living next to nature without fear.

You know, I started thinking about this movie against my better judgment and I wondered how a movie like this ever got made. I wondered how the director Mier Zarchi (let's mention all the names, no one gets away from this mess) pushed this story.How do you convince a crew of people: "Okay, we're going to make a movie about a woman who gets raped and beaten five or six times, then cuts the men up one by one". How do you tell your lead actress Camille Keaton that the scene requires her to walk through the woods naked and then get sodomized by three men? What does anyone hope to gain from a project like this? I'm not a prude but I do have my limits on what I will tolerate on screen and this isn't it. This is a movie that supposedly gets revenge on rapists but all it does is show the depths of what some people are willing to put on screen. Think of the thousands of ideas and stories that can be told and ponder why on earth someone settled on this.I choose "I Spit On Your Grave" as the worst movie that I have ever seen and I guess the director would deem this as a compliment, but in my estimation he should be ashamed of himself.