I Spit On Your Grave

By honing the jagged edges of Meir Zarchi’s cheap and nasty rape-revenge shocker into slick entertainment, this unwelcome remake improves technically on the 1978 original, while retaining all that was sleazy and repellent about his allegedly feminist movie. Jennifer, a ‘cock-teasing’ big-city writer rents a remote lakeside house, where she is humiliated, gang-raped and left for dead by the kind of slavering good ol’ boys familiar from ‘Deliverance’. A few weeks later, the traumatised Jennifer emerges from the woods to take her revenge, using fish hooks, garden shears, a flesh-peeling acid bath and a rifle barrel thrust where the sun don’t shine.
Monroe’s reworking introduces two new elements: an ambiguously motivated local sheriff and the attackers’ use of a video camera to record their actions. Unfortunately for the filmmakers, the BBFC felt that these voyeuristic video images invited the viewer to enjoy the eroticised, sadistic sexual violence, so less titillating footage has been substituted. Jennifer’s cruel, calculated vengeance, which ironically mirrors her own abuse, is also excessive – but it has the spurious defence of being justified.