Here is the movie you always wished Meir Zarchi’s notorious 1977 original was when you endured it – cut or uncut – as a kid. Somewhat muting the arduousness of the rape angle (though it’s still agonizingly explicit and the impact is significantly larger) and amping up the revenge angle to post-SAW levels of inventive suffering, this is a far superior remake delivering the all-round professionalism the original could not, and firing on all cylinders from start to finish. Good looking and made with just the right amount of unobtrusive visual style, Steven Monroe’s retooling of a cause celebre has jaw-dropping brutality but, refreshingly, some excellent performances to accompany the grimness : Sarah Butler in particular is a stand-out playing one of the genre’s toughest yet most sympathetic female leads. She makes for an incredible root-worthy, devastatingly credible victim and an extraordinary emotionless avenging angel.
2010’s incarnation of I SPIT ON YOUR GRAVE sticks closely to the original’s set up : Butler, like Camille Keaton, is a writer staying for a couple of months at a remote woodsy cabin in the hope of completing some work. This time out, four local boys (including one, obligatory exploited retard) are joined by the local Sheriff (Andrew Howard), who is all too happy to join in on the rape and humiliation of a beautiful city girl in between caring for his pregnant wife and kid (Saxon Sharbino). Modernised touches include the prominence of cell phones and one of the rapists’ predilection for filming all the horror on his handycam. Tracey Walter props up the support cast nicely as a harmless local yokel, and the actors playing the rapists are exceptional : ELM STREET 3’s Rodney Eastman, MEAN GIRLS’ Daniel Franzese, memorable one-time X FILES villain Chad Lindberg (as the retard) and an extra nasty Jeff Branson are all credible and terrifying in very different ways.
Butler’s first hour ordeal is as powerful and harsh to watch as you would expect, without an over-indulgence in gratuitous detail. The British censor board, who have returned to the original movie on multiple occasions and cut it in various ways, had an issue with the use of nudity in this section, reducing it to avoid what they deem to be potential titillation for the more unsavory possible viewers. Cut or not, these scenes are as upsetting as they should be and achieve their mission of riling up the audience’s bloodlust to a degree that, for once, is followed through. As harrowing as the actual rapes are the fleeting moments of humiliation and callous brutality, as Butler’s mouth is penetrated by a gun and she is forced repeatedly to show all her perfect teeth ; the horrors perpetrated on her are cannily revisited during her second half revenge.
When the movie becomes, to quote an alternate title for the original, the Day of the Woman, with Butler returning as a determined force on one of filmdom’s most elaborately gruesome revenge-rampages, the movie becomes a brilliantly executed splatter movie par excellence, with some of the finest old-school gore FX in recent U.S. horror. This is hardcore, tough-to-watch yet perversely exhilarating stuff. Just for starters, Rodney Eastman is suspended above an acid bath ; Franzese is bound to a tree and forced to witness his own torment thanks to fish hooks through his eyelids a la A CLOCKWORK ORANGE ; Branson has his teeth pulled in excruciating close-up and fed his own dick ; and, in a memorably grim finale that plays like an Extreme version of a particular scene in MAN ON FIRE, the Sheriff is butt-fucked with his own shot-gun before losing much of his own face.
Technically first-rate and paced like a proper movie rather than a sub-SAW extended MTV horror video, this is a crowd-pleasing rape revenge movie that climbs to the top levels of its sub-genre.
– Steven West
- Interview with J.R. Bookwalter - January 22, 2015
- Interview with Andrew J. Rausch - January 22, 2015
- Interview with Rick Popko and Dan West - January 22, 2015
- Interview with Director Stevan Mena (Malevolence) - January 22, 2015
- Interview with Screenwriter Jeffery Reddick (Day of the Dead 2007) - January 22, 2015
- Teleconference interview with Mick Garris (Masters of Horror) - January 22, 2015
- A Day at the Morgue with Corri English (Unrest) - January 22, 2015
- Interview with Writer/Director Nacho Cerda (The Abandoned, Aftermath) - January 22, 2015
- Interview with Actress Thora Birch (Dark Corners, The Hole, American Beauty) - January 22, 2015
- Interview with Actor Jason Behr, Plus Skinwalkers Press Coverage - January 22, 2015
