I like the 70s one, the remake sucked ass.
I spit on your grave: My advice? Stay away. Your opinion may vary.
|
 On 10/26/2013 at 03:34 PM by BrokenH See More From This User » |
So, I tried to watch “I spit on your grave”. Some horror fans might consider it a “cult classic” from the 70’s and it starts out okay enough. Jennifer is a writer and she leaves the city to pretty much relax amongst the splendors of nature. The actress who plays Jennifer actually does a great job. She’s likable, impressionable, and very believable.
Problems set in when the male characters are introduced. Most of them are a bunch of horny hicks and one of them is an awkward religious nerd who cites New-york as being “an evil city”. (He says this with a New-Jersey accent by the way. Derp!) Not only is the narration bad but all these guys ham it up to the point they are more caricatures than characters.
Apparently these bored guys with nothing to do decide it’s fun to harass random girls that come in to visit their small podunk town. They start this off by driving their dumb-ass boat in circles while hooting and hollering at Jennifer who is trying to relax in her hammock next to the river. Later these same idiots decide it’s a good idea to hijack Jennifer and her boat then drag it to a secluded area with high grass. This is where her struggle and nightmare begins in earnest.
Again, the problem is the male perpetrators don’t convince me they are actual people. They’re evil and stupid to the point that they must have grown up in a vacuum devoid of morality and logical reasoning. (Even though their town has a friggin church in it for crying out loud! While I‘m not overly religious myself I do at least appreciate how Christianity can teach people good ethics and amiable behavior.)
Maybe as an adult I simply have forgotten how dumb and cruel young guys can be when left to their own devices. So what’s my beef? Why are “country-folk” always painted this way in horror movies? As someone who grew up in a small town I can testify the worst you might get from the locals is a few curious or suspicious glances. (Hell, you get that same reaction when visiting certain neighborhoods in the city!) Beyond their initial anxiety, people from my home town would be nice and courteous. Sure, we had our bullies, racists, and drunkards but I never heard of an incident where a random female from the big city was dragged off and raped repeatedly just because the “good ol boys” thought it would be a fun side diversion!
This all leaves me with a perplexing conundrum. In my rpg I did have a scenario where one of my female characters went through sexual abuse. I honestly cannot say if the “male villains” I created who did this to her were any deeper or better thought out than the ones in this movie. “Rape” is a difficult issue to address in fiction because let’s be honest, we all want to skew things in favor of the victim and root for the under-dog. When I created the bad guys for my rpg I wanted you to hate them. I really REALLY wanted you to hate them. In retrospect, that seems like a bit of a cop-out. Like it or not, criminals are people too. We may despise what they do but it doesn’t mean they’re incapable of caring for others and expressing generosity in their own twisted fashion. The best villains usually have a couple sympathetic qualities to them and perhaps the pit-fall of this movie (and my rpg) is that overall the villains come off as having the depth of cardboard.
Yeah, sometimes a spade is just a spade. Sometimes a person really is a shallow,sadistic, and mean-spirited narcissist with no hidden layers underneath. I suppose I shouldn’t rule that out. Yet when you combine that truth with bad acting it’s difficult to ignore as a collective whole.
The best part of the movie is Jennifer’s revenge. Or so I’ve been told. I couldn’t even watch the movie beyond the point Jennifer was being held down and the guys were egging on the nerd to “lose his virginity”. Perhaps I simply don’t want to acknowledge people can be this vile or it made me reflect back on all the times in my youth when this sort of thing came up. I did have a childhood friend who supposedly had incestual sex with her brother and father. My first introduction to pornography was a snuff film where a woman was snorting cocaine while guys took turns having sex with her. When she no longer could perform they beat her with baseball bats and that scene was followed by a funeral procession. I don’t think it was “real” but the fact someone out there could potentially get off to even a simulated version of this scenario left me with a bitter taste in my mouth. I really wish my first porno would have been “Debby does Dallas” or “Tracy Lords in Spanky-vania” but I cannot travel back in time, the damage has already been done.
So is this a good horror movie? The actress who played Jennifer did an outstanding performance. The male actors? Eh, not so much. This is the typical “Person goes to a small country town and gets harassed by kooky rednecks” set up. I found it to be exploitative and sickening but your mileage may vary. Honestly, Deliverance probably did all this better!
Comments