I Spit on Your Grave

Exploitation film can be a real nasty, dirty, fucked-up thing. Usually exploitation is lumped in with B-movie: some silly slasher romp through bubble-headed bimbo territory complete with too-absurd-to-be-believed blood-letting. While exploitation cinema is usually B-movie cinema, the opposite is not always the case. Earth Girls Are Easy is a B-movie; Ice Pirates is a B-movie. Neither is exploitation.



A movie like Evil Dead 2, campy as it is, is exploitation of a sort: a lighter, kid-friendly fare. I'll argue (I have and might again on this blog) That real exploitation is a mode: not a genre itself, but a collection of genres (horror, crime, science fiction, drama) that were borne out of specific temporal and cultural consciousnesses (Vietnam War era America) and is hard-pressed to be duplicated outside of this consciousness. Exploitation captures the consciousness of conflict; a cynical, realistic attitude that conflict is the natural state of the world and civilization is the abnormality.



If exploitation is about the real, the nasty, and the fucked-up: I Spit On Your Grave is one of the nastiest and most fucked up of exploitation films.



I Spit On Your Grave is about a writer, Jennifer Hill: a liberated, successful novelist from Manhattan who retreats to a cabin in the woods to write her second novel. She's beset by four locals who proceed to attack and rape her repeatedly. The attack is roughly one-third of the entire movie, with the last third dedicated to Jennifer's healing, planning, and eventual revenge. Castration is the order of the day.



The film's plot is an old one for exploitation films (Last House on the Left, Fight For Your Life, et al.), but the way in which Spit engages its audience is what makes it an exploitation masterpiece. The film punishes its audience for even wanting to see the depravity it puts on display. As I mentioned, the rape is a large portion of the actual film, even just knowing a 30-minute rape scene exists is not one aspect any sane audience would even seek out to view. The director, Mier Zarchi, makes it worse but stripping as much of the artifice as he can out of the scene. The camera is set and left alone; for long takes this poor woman, Jennifer, is subjected to pain and horror as these four men take turns raping her.



The audience feels no respite as the voyeur aspect of exploitation cinema is dragged out and laid bare. Exploitation audiences seek out depravity, revel in the voyeur aspect of sexuality and nudity, with I Spit On Your Grave, it's rammed down their throats. The only escape is to turn the movie off and completely sever the relationship. The actress playing Jennifer Hill (Camilla Keaton) may have gone through hell for her performance (and what a performance it is; Keaton is a fabulous actress who takes the thinly written character and creates a complex show of emotion that puts a real face on the horror that is so prevalent in these films), but the true hell is reserved for the audience, their voyeurism is taken, perverted, and turned against them.



Like all good exploitation, Zarchi takes an important social function, gender relations, and re-interprets it as an apocalyptic conflict. From a feminist standpoint, oppression fills the frame in every scene and even Jennifer's stated freedoms as a successful writer and speaker cannot make her the equal to the men in the movie. The ideological fight for equality becomes physical conflict as the logical conclusion: violence is the only way men and women can relate.



I never have, and never will, overtly recommend this film to anyone. It is completely depraved, which as an exploitation film is completely what it should be. Social instance, social issues re-interpreted as conflict; active use of the gaze, voyeurism turned back on the audience, this is what exploitation cinema has always been about, if not as horrifically done as it is in I Spit On Your Grave.



**** out of ****