One question that tends to be overlooked when it comes to ISOYG is: 'is it any good?' For me, the answer is 'yes' as it has an extraordinary central performance by Camille Keaton, whose portrayal of the journalist that goes through possibly the worst thing that could happen to a woman, is utterly convincing and, even the revenge sequence at the end isn't beyond the realms of possibility. Clover's analysis of I Spit on Your Grave in her book Men, Women and Chain Saws: Gender in the Modern Horror Film is an extraordinarily reasoned piece that shows how important the film is to any discussion of gender politics in the horror films of the 1970s. The fact that such a prominent and respected film critic chose to write about the film in the Chicago Sun Times, describing it as "a vile bag of garbage" and a movie that is "so sick, reprehensible and contemptible that I can hardly believe it's playing in respectable theatres." It has since gone on to split opinion right down the middle with some people detesting the film and everything that stands for whereas others, like the academic Carol Clover, recognising that there is something extremely important in its gender politics and that it is a film worthy of academic scrutiny.
If it weren't for Roger Ebert, this would have drifted into insignificance along with so many of the other cheap films which played on 42nd Street in the 1970s.
#Reviews for movie i spit on your grave series
When Matthew doesn't want any part in this, the others decide not to let a good situation go to waste and, in a series of long, brutal and dehumanising scenes, rape her several times in different locations, including following her back to her house in a sequence that goes on for over 20 minutes (not 45 minutes as claimed by Kim Newman in Nightmare Movies). Letting her out and get away, they then hunt her down, strip her and pin her to the floor so that Matthew can rape her and lose his virginity. Taking Jennifer's dress sense and her comfort to sunbathe in a bikini as some sort of open invitation for unsolicited sexual advances, two men in a speedboat drive past Jennifer, who is sunbathing in a boat, and pull her along the river to a deserted spot near the end. Arriving at the gas station and asking how far it is to the cabin, she attracts the attention of the gas station attendant and, having arrived and ordered groceries, endears herself to the rather simple delivery boy, Matthew. Even with these cuts it is a big step forward from the last time that the film came before the BBFC when it was pre-cut by the distributor and even then had a further 41 seconds removed but, if you look back to 2001, the BBFC demanded over seven minutes of cuts resulting in many close-ups of a tree during the most serious rape scene.Īnyway, what is the film about? It follows a newspaper journalist, Jennifer Hill, from New York City who drives three hours to a cabin that she has rented in order to spend the summer writing a novel. It seems that things at Soho Square have moved on in the past 25 years or so, but not far enough and the BBFC still demanded 2 minutes and 54 seconds of cuts to comply with their own policies and guidelines and the Video Recordings Act (1984). 101 Films made the rather brave move of securing the rights to Meir Zarchi's infamous shocker and putting it before the BBFC in the hope, however slim, of releasing the title uncut for the very first time on the shores. Some of them, like I Spit on Your Grave, are still extremely problematic and still aren't available uncut in the UK. Of the original list of 74 titles, many have been rehabilitated and are rightfully recognised as classic horror movies from great directors. All of these films have become notorious because of their extreme content and are almost synonymous with the Tory government's move to clamp down on the home entertainment industry in the early 1980s. If you were to ask someone 'What is a 'video nasty'?', they will probably tell you that it was a film banned by the DPP in 1984 and come up with titles like SS Experiment Camp, Cannibal Holocaust and I Spit on Your Grave.
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