It’s not a revenge story per se, but everything else in the film is similar to the criterion in question. Wes Craven’s legendary exploitation film, The Last House on the Left, is a sensation.
Film critic Roger Ebert called it “a movie so violent and cruel that most people will find it unwatchable” because of the reversal of storytelling and the graphic nature of the images. With its story of a man seeking vengeance for his brutally raped girlfriend, the film achieves what it sets out to do while adding a touch of innovation. The film depicts violence in a brutal manner, and it’s generally very well-made (the best film on this list, in fact). Irreversible by Gasper Noe is a chilling revenge thriller that sparked outrage when it was released. There is a striking resemblance between their writing styles, which only serves to accentuate this. Mom and I Spit On Your Grave have a lot in common, even if you hadn’t noticed them before. It follows a mother’s quest to avenge the rape of her daughter during a party in the movie “Victim”. It’s a better-funded production with a better cast, including the late Sridevi and Adnan Siddiqui. However, the plot and style of filmmaking are reminiscent of I Spit On Your Grave. Compared to the other films on the list, I think this one is tame. 29 Vancouver and Calgary dates to be determined.This one is included for variety’s sake. I Spit on Your Grave opens in Toronto on Friday, Montreal on Oct. I Spit on Your Grave to the great expectorations it so badly desires. But, no, all that's as silly and wasteful as the picture itself, which is neither boring enough to qualify as pornography nor vital enough to generate a controversy.
Sure, we in the media may try to make it matter, as many will condemn righteously and a few will praise faintly and others will compare the levels of explicitness, then and now, in a vain wish to read the barometer of social change. The woman will suffer and then inflict suffering in kind - voyeurs will have their eyes plucked out, violators will be violated, the sodomizers sodomized.Īnd everyone will look and feel soiled, not least of all us. From there, the biblical vigilantism unfolds as it must. Of course, since even hicks pack a camera these days, the assault is videotaped in this version, an attempt to intensify our peeping-Tom complicity. Jennifer the city gal (Sarah Butler) ventures to a cabin in the woods, where the red-neck country guys lie in wait, four of them simply vicious and the other just simple-minded. All hail the second coming.Įxactly like the first, with a few narrative details altered but with the logical holes in the plot as massively absurd as ever.
Despite that superlative, the picture quickly disappeared, later to be semi-resurrected by the usual small cult of admirers/apologists, offering the usual arguments: The explicitness is disgusting because rape is disgusting, and (ain't it ingenious) the audience is meant to feel complicit in the offence.Īnd thus the film languished, awaiting its inevitable rebirth in this post-Abu Ghraib era of torture porn. Yep, as strategies go, that's transparent stuff, but it obviously worked on a disgusted Roger Ebert who, in high dudgeon, pronounced it the worst movie ever made.
In its chauvinistic attack phase, that movie salaciously stripped and humiliated an attractive female then, in the feminist counterattack segment, it ostensibly empowered the same woman, although only by having her embrace the very violence she endured. So it's not hard to spot the tactics in the original. Extremely exploitative because a lone woman, assaulted and raped by a gang of men, doubled as both the initial victim and the subsequent avenger. Extremely graphic because, as the theme ran its predictable course from victimhood to vengeance, the sex-violence meter got cranked up to awfully brutal, crude and explicit levels. Back in 1978,ĭay of the Woman pushed the then-popular vigilante theme to graphic and exploitative extremes.
More to the point, what was it? Specifically, this is a remake of a flick that many think shouldn't have been made in the first place.