![]() ![]() Submissions containing no review, or one-liners along the lines of 'it was great, everyone should see it' will be removed by the moderators. Against all odds, this old, sloppy rape-and-revenge movie not only became a cult sensation passed down through generations of horror fans, but it also expanded into its own grimy little empire that could well carry on for decades to come.Please include a short review of the movie with your submission. The Video Nasties list, and Siskel and Ebert’s "women in danger" campaign, inadvertently caused a Streisand effect back in the day: if these people were so insistent that nobody watch such movies, there must be something worth seeing in them. His children, Tammy and Terry, even made small cameos like they did as children in the original. The most recent, I Spit On Your Grave: Deja Vu, saw the return of Meir Zarchi and Camille Keaton, marking the former’s first directorial effort since 1985. So the steady stream of low-budget sequels that followed was quite unexpected. When the remake came out in 2010, Roger Ebert hated that too, and it performed poorly at the box office. ![]() Even the title implies that the story is told from the perspective of the wronged female, cursing her aggressors, although such a lurid moniker was not what Zarchi wished for his picture. Jennifer is, for all intents and purposes, the fairer sex. Whether it shows in the final product, the time and circumstances of the movie’s production - not to mention the narrative itself - seem to suggest an allegiance with women, while the men are presented as mindless, carnal beings. When Zarchi conceived the movie, it was under the title Day of the Woman. Of course, the decade was rampant with social and political strife, and the women’s liberation movement was in full swing. As he tells on the Blu-Ray's audio commentary, in the mid-’70s, he happened to encounter a woman in a park who had been beaten and raped, and he helped get her medical and police attention. Zarchi’s intent with the film is a story in itself. Meir Zarchi on the other hand, seemed to set the camera down, roll it, shout "action," and hope for the best. Despite being an absolute beginner with no permits, barely any money, and formal training only in teaching and philosophy, Wes Craven clearly knew how to tell a story visually, and did a good job with his limited resources. The leafy Connecticut location and general subject make it easy to draw comparisons to Last House on the Left, but the differences between the two are a basic lesson in competent filmmaking. ![]() Firstly, it was grizzly in its depiction of violence towards a woman, and secondly, it was just a plain bad movie. Most critics, including Ebert, agreed on two real issues with I Spit On Your Grave. They seem to have no regard for authorities catching up to them. At the end of each separate attack - there are three of them, back to back - the men simply wander off, leaving Jennifer brutalized but still very much alive. They just become aggressive rapists overnight. For starters, there is no explicit inciting event that leads the men from leering at Jennifer to lengthily pursuing her and eventually attacking. Horror movies are not often the turf of rational thinking, but the thought processes of the characters in I Spit On Your Grave lead a viewer to wonder what kind of world these people are living in. By the time I Spit On Your Grave finally secured its US release nearly a decade later, however, Ebert was not happy with what he saw. Indeed, his positive review of Last House on the Left in 1972 caused outrage and brought the film to wider attention almost overnight. With its release came the attention of none other than Roger Ebert, the Chicago Sun-Times critic. Whereas many of the titles listed by the DPP were older movies that had already been and gone through their theatrical releases, I Spit On Your Grave was just staggering off the starting line when the Video Nasties moral panic commenced. This particular title found itself in a whirlwind of media attention. Among these titles was I Spit On Your Grave. It was with this in mind that, in the UK, the National Viewers’ and Listeners’ Association joined forces with the Director of Public Prosecutions and conservative mouthpiece Mary Whitehouse (who had vocally protested the boom of the pornography market in the 1970s) to compile a list of 72 films they deemed to be in violation of obscenity laws, and another 82 that could be legally confiscated. Such a labyrinthine network had evolved that often, filmmakers themselves weren’t sure where their work ended up and consequently struggled to get paid all they were entitled to. With video distribution companies popping up easily and frequently, authorities were engaged in an incessant game of Whack-a-Mole in their efforts to police what people could watch at home. The 1980s presented wholly different issues. ![]()
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