Dir: Steven R Monroe, USA, 2010, 106 mins
Cast: Sarah Butler, Jeff Branson, Daniel Franzese, Rodney Eastman, Chad Lindberg
Review by Dave Hall
Like most of the horror movie remakes ground out over the past few years, this is an overproduced, sanitised facsimile of a film that in its day seemed to have crawled out of a primordial funk. The original I Spit on Your Grave (1978) was ordeal cinema in every sense, but in trying to reshape his ineptly directed and badly structured source material, Monroe has created a different set of problems for himself, problems that he compounds with some last act torture porn mechanics that smack of throwing in the towel.
Jennifer Hills ( Butler ) is a city-based novelist who rents an apparently idyllic woodland retreat to start work on her latest book. Stopping for petrol on the way, she encounters gas station manager Johnny (Branson) and his two waster buddies (Franzese, Eastman). All later invade her home, along with their mentally disturbed friend Matthew (Lindberg), and subject her to a brutal physical assault and rape. Eventually she escapes and appears to drown but her body is never found. Too late the men realise that she has survived and is intent on revenge.
Like many an exploitation film this is shot through with gender, class, and city/country tensions, and features at its centre a strong, independent single woman (though one who looks like she’s still to complete her high school thesis let alone a novel). The men meanwhile are mostly generic backwoods rubes with Neanderthal attitudes and lapsed personal grooming regimes, set up from the start for coups de grace that mirror their crimes in the film’s first act. In fact much of the dialogue designed to humiliate Butler ‘s character during the assault she later directs back at her attackers with gruesome irony.
The 70s version cloaked itself in a spurious mantle of female empowerment (its alternative title was Day of the Woman ) but succeeded only in demeaning attackers and victim alike. Mercifully the original’s notoriously extended rape scene is truncated here with much of the ordeal taking place off camera, but Monroe then throws out his own rule book with some full frontal, lip-smacking maimings and mutilations as victim turns vigilante. Why not be as graphic with the original crime? Or back peddle on the teeth pulling? A confused relationship with violence seems the obvious answer.
There are one or two interesting ideas here. Someone involved seems to have conceived the post-rape Jennifer as an avenging fury but Butler ‘s performance is too flat to carry the idea: mostly she just looks a bit cross. Monroe makes an effort to build suspense in the opening act but his subjective camera and shock reveals are strictly by-the-numbers, and other updates are equally yawn-inducing: mobile phones that don’t work, a character recording events through a handheld digital camera. Even the make up effects that take over once the torture porn element cranks up mostly fail to rise above the mundane, though the one exception does admittedly take on mythic dimensions. Talk about an eye for an eye…
In the end this is little more than a workmanlike trawl through some well dredged waters. Fanboys strap in, seekers of iconic horror look away now.
