I Spit On YOur Grave

[polymorphikos]

I Spit On Your Grave / Day of the Woman (1978)

Dir. Meir Zarchi

3/5

It’s an annoying but common event in the watching of films, the Good Start To A Middling Feature. Take I Spit On Your Grave. The film opens with a smoothly-flowing series of scenes that show the heroine, Jennifer (Camille Keaton) departing New York and arriving at her rental house by the lake, and her encounters with the local service station attendant, Johnny, and the grocery delivery boy, the mentally-retarded Mathew, with the latter of whom Jenny strikes-up something of a brief friendship, and to whom she reveals that she is a writer come to find peace and quiet to work on her first novel. Mathew takes a shine to Jenny and tells Johnny and his two lay-about friends all about her when he stops there on the way back from the delivery. Over the next day or so the three misogynistic jerks get to talking, and start pestering Jenny by zipping by her house in their motor-boat and making lewd remarks and gestures.

Naturally, Jenny is annoyed, but tries to ignore them, although she can’t help thinking about that automatic in the bedroom chest-of-drawers from time to time. She manages to get down the first hundred words or so of her book – dealing with a young woman who departs all the unpleasant tangle of everyday life to a country retreat – and takes to drifting about the river in her canoe, lazing bikini-clad beneath the beautiful sun. Enter the aforementioned three misogynistic jerks, who’ve decided to get Mathew his first bit of tail, and promptly hi-jack Jenny’s canoe for one long, gruelling, chillingly-executed rape sequence in the forest that is extremely unpleasant to behold.

I won't go into details, but suffice to say that this is an extremely visceral, realistic, and grim sequence (and a lengthy one, two, lasting an entire act), and certainly hard to take as anything other than an absolute condemnation of the rapists' actions.

The first two acts of this film are shot with an attention to atmosphere, pacing and over-all look that the third act simply cannot live-up to. After having dragged us through such a confronting sequence, the makers begin to stumble, opting for the same approach that sunk the similarly-themed Last House on the Left – namely, chucking-in the deadly seriousness of the first two acts, with their presence of the conflicted Mathew struggling between his own banality, his shaky moral code and the bullying of his peers, and the gradual transformation of Jenny from a runner to a fighter (who becomes ironically less able to fulfil the latter role as she becomes more attracted to it), for a series of reasonably well-done but monumentally-stupid revenge-killing set-pieces. The antagonists in this film are utter morons (one of them congenitally, to be fair), and the idea that Johnny, Andy or Stanley might actually buy into the seductive ruse that is Jennifer’s primary tactic is laughable. No matter how much of a sexist, abusive, morally-bankrupt brute a person is, one would think that they might understand the basic concept of revenge. I mean, Johnny even has a gun pointed at him at one point; a shot fired a few centimetres from his feet; and yet is still perfectly willing to hop into the tub with Jenny and become the victim of one of the more famous castrations on celluloid. (Speaking of this castration, it’s really very over-rated, even if Jenny listening to opera to drown the off-screen screams is a nice touch, and relies mostly upon the target audience of post-pubescent males being almost morbidly-obsessed with their penises, which is a fair call considering a lot of them are).

On the subject of character idiocy, I should probably bring-up the fact Jenny nevers calls the cops. A lot of people complain about this, but it kind of makes sense (inside the film, anyway). When she gets back to her house, Jenny is ready to all the cops, and begins to do so, but then along come issues, and she is no-longer able to. By the time this section has finished, Jenny is no-longer interested in calling the cops, because the final attack has driven-out any remaining sense of objective justice. They’ve basically driven her all mad-like, and hence the frankly-bizarre methods that Jenny employs in her vengeance (the “Off Their Rocker” defence will never get old (at least, for the writers)).

Technically, this is a solid film, ranging from adequate to excellent in terms of shooting, and with an icily-effective performance from Keaton. Thematically, it suffers from a lack of focus, with the ideas on sexual politics expressed minimal, and coming-across as more of a method of justifying a nasty, nerve-rubbing little feature than as a bold statement on the condition of gender roles in late-‘70s America (something it’s more serious elements often lead a viewer to try and consider it as). It’s really sort of two films in one, and might have been helped by either stripping itself back to a swift, sharp thriller or turning itself into an over-the-top extravaganza of violence (preferable reducing the rape element in the latter process to avoid being even tackier than it already is).

So whilst I can’t say that I found I Spit On Your Grave fun (who would?), it did keep me interested, and the impact that the first two acts worth of set-up hold more than makes-up for the lack of an adequate emotional or thematic pay-off. This is strictly a 3 star film (originally a 2.5 -I really wish more effort had gone into the script, because if it weren't for the final act this would be a clear 4), but what works really works.