"A vile bag of garbage named "I Spit on Your Grave" is playing in Chicago theaters this week. It is a movie so sick, reprehensible and contemptible that I can hardly believe it's playing in respectable theaters, such as Plitt's United Artists. But it is. Attending it was one of the most depressing experiences of, my life...This movie is an expression of the most diseased and perverted darker human natures, Because it is made artlessly, It flaunts its motives: There is no reason to see this movie except to be entertained by the sight of sadism and suffering. As a critic, I have never condemned the use of violence in films if I felt the filmmakers had an artistic reason for employing it. "I Spit on Your Grave" does not. It is a geek show. I wonder if its exhibitors saw it before they decided to play it, and if they felt as unclean afterward as I did."
—Roger Ebert
i just watched this...it wasn't ALL that bad, but yeah, mostly...
7 comments:
Crazy. Alli and Matthew and I were JUST talking about this movie on the 4th. As a (fairly) rare instance of a female protagonist undertaking extreme violence. I was thinking that often when such representations occur, they are framed around the revenge motif--as they are with male protagonists too, I guess...
they had this movie in the horror section at the Video Depot in Kearney, MO. I watched it because Mike Nelson told me that it was the most violent film he had ever seen (13 yrs). I remember it freaked me out.
another one is Wes Craven's first picture Last House On The Left (LHOTL) made in 1971...LHOTL sort of set the mold for these kinds of woman-violated-woman-gets-revenge stories (ANd it has the first ever chainsaw murder on celluloid)...only in LHOTH woman dies and parents get revenge...i think it's based on a medieval german folk tale...
and then eli roth's new hostel movie is basically hostel part 1 but with girls...
i spit on your grave (or, day of the woman) (ISOYG) is pretty sadistic...i think roger ebert is usually an idiot and extremely prejudiced against the horror genre, but he's sort of right about this one...but what's worse is that the filmmaker's sort of try and paint this as a feminist tale (i.e. day of the woman as the original title, protagonist is a writer who publishes in "women's magazines" etc.)...but really it's just an hour 1/2 long rape movie.
OK, so we had this Video Movie Guide (not Maltin's) and as a perverted early teen, I went digging through for all the dirty movies in it. There were only a few, but "I Spit On Your Grave" was one of them and I decided then that I would try to see this movie.
Now, I work at a huge media center with 20K+ movies, including "I Spit..." Naturally, one day, I started watching it, but a little while in, I just felt too creeped out to keep going. It's kind of hard to watch, no?
yeah, it's def. hard to watch. LHOTL was more violent in a way, but the acting was so campy it sort of denuded the experience...
on the other hand ISOYG is pretty realistic with regards to sexual brutality, and it's long to boot, and the scenes were shot for the most part with one camera, so there's not too many cuts, in other words, the movie lingers on the violence in a really unsettling way...the actress who plays the lead (something keaton, buster keaton's great niece) is more than convincing in the role of the victim...
I agree with Ebert, that movie is disgusting shit. For some reason I owned it until a few weeks ago. I'm not sure how I ended up with it. While giving away old movies it was at the top of the stack.
Some bad films I did manage to keep: Day of the Dead, One Crazy Summer, The Toxic Avenger.
one crazy summer is NOT a bad movie...but wtf? w/regards to the I Spit On Your Grave poetry-kid-meme...seems like everyone was recently talking, watching, or thinking about this movie...
i've never seen it/ heard of it/ talked about it/ thought about it.
ever.
roger ebert had to realize that his denouncing of the movie was really an endorsement. if he didn't like it, he shouldn't have said it was the "most" anything. that "most" will always pique people's sick interests.
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