I Spit on Your Grave

If there were a list of the most controversial movies of all time, and I'm sure there are several such lists, Meir Zarchi's I Spit on Your Grave is likely to be on each and every one of them. While some critics attacked the film upon its initial release as a vile and reprehensible film, others defended the film, arguing that rather than misogynist shit, this film was positively feminist, a position which has further support from the breaking of director/writer Zarchi's almost 25 year silence on the film.

The plot of the film is quite basic: Jennifer (Camille Keaton) is a New York writer who is beginning her first novel. To get going on it, she packs up her life and heads out to an isolated cottage in rural Connecticut for the summer. However, this dream vacation of solitude turns into a nightmare, as she is brutally raped by four local men in three different incidents. Rather than going to the police, Jennifer decides to exact her revenge on the rapists one by one. The second half of the film consists largely of Jennifer seducing only to then murder these scumbags in truly grisly fashion.

For us in the UK, I Spit on Your Grave remains one of the more controversial of the speciously named 'video nasties', and one of the disc's marvelous extras is a portfolio of newspaper clippings charting the raise of the 'video nasty' controversy in the UK (another of the extras is a similar portfolio charting the film's reception in the US). What was considered so horrendous in the early 1980s, when merely owning this film was an offence, are the extended rape sequences. In an earlier attempt to have the film certified by the BBFC, the film was submitted with much of these sequences fully excised, thereby making Jennifer's revenge seem almost motiveless. These rape sequences are utterly repellent, but essential to the film's logic, and to excise them 'rapes' Zarchi's film. However, the complete film, even today, is denied certification - effectively banning it in the UK. While this Hard Gore release is not 'uncut', it is (truthfully) advertised as a 'fuller version', with a running time of 96 minutes (approximately 4 minutes shy of the 'official' US running time, some of which can be explained by the differences between the NTSC and PAL video configurations). Instead, what Hard Gore have done is quite ingenious: they've left the soundtrack to the film intact, and then either slowed down the action in some places to stretch out an 'acceptable' image over the 'unacceptable' ones, or re-framed the image so the 'nasty' stuff is off-screen. While the result looks like shit, I think it deliberately looks like shit, constantly reminding us we're not allowed to see this properly, but trying to give us as much of the original impact as legally possible. A similar thing happens in the DVD of Dario Argento's Profondo Rosso: the 'unacceptable' image of the salamander with a pin stuck through it is still excised, but at the moment when the shot is to occur, Platinum Media pixilates the image slightly, so it looks like a flaw on the disc, thereby drawing attention to the cut. Unlike Redemption Video's otherwise impeccable video release from the early 1990s of Argento's film, where the excising edit is so smoothly done, you're not sure where the image should in fact be, Platinum's sloppy edit calls attention to the mandatory cuts, reminding buyers in the UK that we're still not allowed to see certain things.

The film itself, while certainly not a 'feminist' film, is a lean and very mean piece of exploitation filmmaking (despite Zarchi's insistence that it is not an exploitation film). The simplicity with which Zarchi puts the film together just demonstrates how 'overdirected' most movies are. Here's a case in point: Johnny (Eron Tabor) gets his pecker cut off in the bathtub by our avenging Jennifer. Zarchi handles the entire sequence in a simple A-B-A sequence of shots. Shot A consists of Jennifer and Johnny in the bathtub together, as she starts stroking his dick; this action is off-camera, obscured by the edge of the bathtub and under the bathwater (but we know what she's doing). Shot B is more of an insert shot, as Jennifer's right hand, reaches under the bathmat to fetch a large kitchen knife. We then return to shot A, where Jennifer manages to get the knife into the water (Johnny's eyes are closed, just blissing out from the handjob), and saws his dick off. Zarchi holds this shot as Johnny realizes what Jennifer has done, and pumps copious amounts of blood up from under the water. Simplicity. And damn effective. Because we know Jennifer has something planned for Johnny (we've just seen her fuck and then hang the developmentally challenged Matthew (Richard Pace)), there is suspense generated in anticipating what our heroine is going to do to this prick. The simplicity of Zarchi's direction in this sequence is positively Hitchcockian. To those who object to this comparison, arguing 'Hitchcock never filmed a sequence where a beautiful blonde naked woman chops a scumbag's dick off in the bathtub'; I retort, 'he would have if he thought he could get away with it!'

Yes, the film clearly shows its low-budget on screen, not to mention its age, and is in many respects quite typical of mid-1970s exploitation fare. But here is a film that is actually about something, a film that is trying to make a point (rightly or wrongly). In one of the DVD commentaries on the disc, Zarchi not only tells us the true story which inspired the film, but also quite interesting are the anecdotes he tells of a variety of crewmembers who needed to leave the set because the staging of the rape sequences were just too realistic. They were lead to believe that these sequences would be done coarsely and vulgarly, not with such realistic intensity. Another anecdote Zarchi tells relates how the local priest, who had authorized filming in his church for one sequence, heard a rumour that this was going to be a porn film, and demanded the return of all footage shot in the church. Zarchi made the priest a promise: if the clergyman would sit and watch all the footage, if he still thought the film was exploitation and pornographic, Zarchi would let him burn the film. Of course, the priest agreed the film wasn't pornographic (although clearly it is low-budget exploitation, but that doesn't mean it couldn't be sensitive too).

Hard Gore have produced the closest we shmucks in the UK are going to get to I Spit on Your Grave, and despite those edits, optical effects and reframings, which look like shit anyways, the extras on this DVD alone are worth the price. I've already mentioned Zarchi's director's commentary, but there is a second commentary by cult film reviewer Joe Bob Briggs, which is classic JBB! I've mentioned the two visual portfolios of UK and US newspaper clippings, and the usual photos and a variety of trailers. There is also an audio extra of an interview DVD Monthly reporter Jon Bruford did with Meir Zarchi, which runs over 90 minutes!

In short, despite the cuts, Hard Gore's I Spit on your Grave is an essential DVD, particularly as a time capsule on the 'video nasty' controversy, with Zarchi's film as a key example.

Review by Mikel J. Koven