Fantastic Fest '10: Devin Is Cut, Chopped, Broken And Burned By The I SPIT ON YOUR GRAVE Remake!

I really love the original I Spit on Your Grave. One of the few legendarily edgy exploitation films to deliver as hyped, Meir Zarchi's film is both a grotesquely brutal work of sadism and yet also kind of a great bit of feminist filmmaking. Horrifically raped (in a sequence that takes about 25 minutes in the original - unflinchingly horrible) and left for dead, Camille Keaton (yes, Buster's granddaughter) returns to her attackers and delivers good old fashioned grindhouse retribution. Usually in movies the castrating woman is both metaphorical and villainous, but in Zarchi's fucked up film she's literal and heroic. Remaking I Spit on Your Grave seems pointless. The film is known for its nastiness, the sort of ugliness that we just don't see in our PC movie landscape anymore. Films like I Spit on Your Grave (originally titled Day of the Woman) were made for niche audiences, and were continuations of the roughie genre - weird S&M movies that appealed to Times Square perverts. Over time the roughies blossomed into the grindhouse fare we know from the 70s - violent, unpleasant, soaked in nudity and more than a little hostile to women. While I think Zarchi's film breaks that mold a little bit, it's definitely the product of an era where a retarded man could graphically rape a woman with a bottle and nobody would complain. These days... not so much. So kudos to director Steven R. Monroe, writer Stuart Morse and their producers for having the balls to make a movie as nasty, edgy and dark as this remake. While the rape scene isn't as graphic as the original, it's much more psychologically terrifying, with the group of redneck nasties humiliating our heroine again and again before finally gang raping her. And like the original the sequence feels endless; the film never lets you escape the moment. And this version is different enough from the original to make it have some identity. While I wouldn't have made the movie like this, I Spit on Your Grave 2010 eschews the seduce-and-slaughter methodology of the original (Keaton would get each of the attackers into a compromising position and then fuck them up) in favor of traps and EC Comics-esque ironic dispatches. It's a touch more Saw than I think anybody needs, but it works in context. One of the great mysteries of the original I Spit on Your Grave was the film's tagline - "This woman has just cut, chopped, broken and burned five men beyond recognition... but no jury in America would ever convict her!" It's a mystery because the film feature four rapists getting revenged, not five. Well, Morse, Monroe et al have solved this problem by adding a fifth dude to the gang rape festivities, and this time he's an officer of the law. It's a great addition to the story, and it actually makes some logical sense - the sheriff is the ultimate way to cover up any crime. The beautiful Sarah Butler plays a woman who has come to a remote cabin in the South to finish her new novel; Butler has a strong sense of intelligence about her and often reminded me of a better looking Kristen Stewart (or maybe just a less blunted out Kristen Stewart). She quickly runs afoul of a group of rednecks, some of whom are just about as beautiful as her. I didn't dig the Sawization of the end of the film, but I got it. Less obvious was the reason for casting handsome soap actors like Jeff Branson in the roles of backwoods rapebeasts. The male actors are fine - nobody really stands out as particularly great, but unlike most low budget horror schlock nobody is particularly terrible - but most of them look pretty good. Maybe the theory is that there's something scarier about seemingly normal guys going bad, or maybe Anchor Bay just thought that you needed pretty faces in film. Butler is the MVP of the movie. She gets put through the wringer, and I can only imagine that some of the days at work were tough. She's manhandled, abused, forced to deep throat a gun, beaten, and eventually raped and sodomized. One of the big changes in the remake is a change for the better - in the original the retarded rapist was left with the task of offing the victim, but he couldn't go through with it. In the new movie the victim escapes when she throws herself off a bridge rather than get shot by the baddies. It's one of many moments during the assault where the film lets her take action; every thing she does gets thwarted by the rapists, but she's not helpless and is doing everything she can to escape. It's a nice change. The revenge traps will satisfy the gore hounds in the audience, and most are interesting and well executed - except for one scene involving CGI crows eating a man's eyeballs out. Who thought that was a good idea? Are crows that hard to get? They look incredibly phony, which jarring coming towards the end of a film that maintains a certain level of realism. It also maintains a certain level of intensity; there are no real moments of lightness or levity, and the tone is unforgiving. When the gore comes at the end it's a real release, and Monroe nicely builds tension to each death. Unfortunately that's the only tension in the film. In the original it seemed possible that the revenge plan could fail, but in the remake Jennifer comes across as essentially omniscient and omnipotent. The traps are well executed, but they also strain some credulity. At the very least her timing has to be almost superhumanly impeccable, and the film never makes us worry that she'll screw up and get hurt or killed by the rednecks. It actually puts the rednecks in the unpleasant position of being semi-sympathetic. They're being hunted down by a Jigsaw or Jason Voorhees type who is all-powerful. The film, which apparently cost peanuts, actually looks gorgeous thanks to cinematographer Neil Lisk, who just passed away this week. But that prettiness - like the prettiness of the cast - is a problem. A movie like this needs to look grungy, not to production designed into grunginess. The film goes to the edge for what you'd see in mainstream work, but it always feels sort of mainstream. This isn't a cult movie, it's a take on a cult movie. The remake of I Spit on Your Grave is much better than it has any right to be. Brutal and often unpleasant, the film is unflinching and delivers the goods in ways I didn't expect to see in a modern American film. It doesn't really hold a candle to the impact of the original, but it definitely stakes out its own territory. I imagine a younger generation will find themselves drawn into the almost-depravity on display. -- Devin Faraci