I Spit on Your Grave (Day of the Woman) 1978

[baumer]

Discuss

[baumer]

I first got wind of this film when I was about 16 years old and I bought a book about horror films. The book discussed the best, the worst, and the most disgusting. I Spit..... made the list of one of the sickest and one of the worst. But this film was nowhere to be found in suburban Ontario. As it was in most places, it was banned. It's funny, Last House On The Left was still available in London Ontario at the neighbourhood Blockbuster and I Spit.... was banned. To me, Last House is a much more disturbing film but it was still there. It didn't make any sense. But that's how things were in the last 80's and early 90's. It took me years to track the film down (this was way before Amazon and Craigslist and so on) but I did. I had to order it off of the Internet, but I finally found some guy in Northern California that would sell it to me for almost $30.00 Canadian. Quite a hefty price for a film like this one, but when curiosity gets the best of you, it's hard to stop.So, was all the fuss warranted? I don't think so. Not only is this film really not all that sleazy, it really isn't much of a horror film and it is not as horrific as people will have you believe. Where all the controversy comes from is that the woman gets raped six ways till Sunday in the film by some local idiots, one of them who happens to be somewhat retarded. So people get up in arms about it and say how bad it is and how determental towards woman's rights and the woman's movement and so on. When really what should have happened is, if people really wanted this film to be ostracized from the annals of film history, they should have just left it alone. I can guarantee you that if there wasn't such a push to ban this film, then no one would really give a damn about it. After all, it really is a poorly made film. In all seriousness, anyone with a video camera could have made this. It's really just soft core porn and then it transgresses into a sloppy revenge piece. There is no suspense, no drama, no shocks. What we have here is a woman that gets raped for a half an hour and then recovers enough so that she can extract revenge on her rapists. There is one scene that everyone talks about as being hard to stomach and that is the castration scene. But there is nothing to it. Just like there is nothing to any of the other killings. You don't see anything, all you get is a prosaic take on what is happening to the rapists. By the time this happens in the film, you are at least thinking her revenge for her. You are plotting all the things that she could do to the perverts and then she actually does some of them but you get no satisfaction in the action. You have to think and imagine what is happening. Now I can enjoy a film like Blair Witch and Texas Chainsaw Massacre and even Halloween where you have to use your imagination to some extent. But those films were at least scary, this one isn't.I Spit On Your Grave is an over-hyped film given it's reputation by stuffy, repressed, people that are just looking for a reason to hate something like this. I don't think this film is good but that does not mean that I think it should be banned. People should be able to make up their own minds and decide whether or not they want to watch it. After all, it is only a movie. 6 out of 10