Movie Details
| Title: | I Spit on Your Grave | |
| Director: | Steven R. Monroe | |
| Year: | 2010 | |
| Genre: | Revenge | |
| Times Seen: | 1 | |
| Last Seen: | 09.25.10 |
Other Movies Seen By This Director (0)
| Date Viewed | Venue | Note |
| 09.25.10 | Alamo South Lamar | This Screening is part of event: FantasticFest 2010 Again with the Wrong Turn 2 ethos in mind, I approached this one with hope. The original - or rather the box art for the original - is pretty important in my cinematic history. I remember spending hours at the local video store when i was in middle/high school (B&B Video, later Hilltop video) looking at literaly every movie they owned. Some were just too overt to even trying to pass by my mom. Slumber Party Massacre was one. Stripped to Kill was another. But perhaps the one movie that I most wanted to see and that I most knew there was no way my mom would let me rent was I Spit on Your Grave. The title alone... but add to that the image of a woman walking through the woods in torn underwear, one ass cheek showing, holding a knife... no way. too much. And to my surprise, when I moved to Austin and kind of re-ignited my love for all the odd and mostly crappy horror movies I saw at that age and rented it through netflix, The original holds up quite well. It's brutal and intense and maybe the most distilled entry in the rape revenge genre that I can think of (I often compare it to Last House on the Left just because they share castration but Last House on the Left is so muddled in tone and weak in plot that this one really stands above). Anyway, so I like the original quite a bit. So the producer of this remake really impressed me. She said they wanted to go for it right from the beginning and never considered toning anything down which I admire. I also like how they're trying to release theatrically unrated and it completely sucks that it will probably not work. I will say that this movie is way better than Hatchet 2 which seems to be making a huge thing about doing the same thing. So I liked the movie. I thought it was true to the original and suffered from modern sensibilities more than any kind of neutering or studio interference. That said, I do think it's not as good as the original due to the current state of horror. While it's true that there's still basically a 20-minute rape scene in this movie, it's nowhere near as uncomfortable or intense as the original. Where the movie really pales is in the revenge killings though. I can see why they wanted to change up from the woman having sex with her rapists before dispatching them (it does seem like a pretty male outlook) but the elaborate nature and poetic irony of each revised revenge strikes me as movie-ish and fake and therefore more unbelievable than the direct nature of the original. The original could be real, this was a movie. She can't just kill the dudes, she has to make satisfying statements akin to the pain they put her through... so the guy who filmed the whole thing has to have some sort of camera-related death and stuff like that. it would be stronger if she just took them out but whatever... movies aren't like that anymore. so in the end i was happy with this although it's not a classic or anything. Still, solid and could've been a million times worse. |
