Poster for the 1978 film

I SPIT ON YOUR GRAVE-United States-2010

Sarah Butler as Jennifer

Jeff Branson as Johnny

Andrew Howard as Storch

Daniel Franzese as Stanley

Rodney Eastman as Andy

Chad Lindberg as Matthew

Directed by Steven R. Monroe

Written by Meir Zarchi (1978 Screenplay) and Stuart Morse (Screenplay)

The original I Spit on Your Grave was one of the most controversial films ever produced. To be honest I don’t think that’s going to happen with the remake. It’s a shame, really. It goes show just how desensitized and voyeuristic a society we’ve become since the release of the original film 34 years earlier. Everyone I know has some type of video device. Camera phone, digital camera, web cam, etc. A kid can get beat up at school and it’s on yahoo. On Failblog you can see numerous accidents and mishaps take place. There are websites with footage of the beheadings that took place in Iraq. Whether the footage is real or not doesn’t matter; we’ll watch it anyway. We have become a society of voyeurs and that is exactly the reason why the remake of ISOYG will no be controversial. In order for something to be controversial it has to be outside the normal realm of thought and occurrence. We are fed stories of rape, sexual assault, child molestation on the news, in the newspaper, the internet and therefore it’s no longer a controversy.

I’m not going into detail concerning the plot of the film. I reviewed the 1978 original and the plot is exactly the same. I will tell you that the acting is better and that the revenge scenes are gorier. I don’t know if that’s good or bad. The acting in the 1978 film lent a realism to the film that the remake loses from time to time. The photographic quality of the film is also a little too professional looking, too. The film makers  would have done better to shoot the film on a low quality film stock like 16mm. Better yet, they could have shot on 8mm to give it that snuff film quality.

Speaking of snuff films, I’ve been told that they don’t exist. But who knows, you may see one of those on Yahoo in the future.

Trivia

At the beginning of the film, Jennifer buys $19.78 worth of gas. 1978 is the year the original film Day of the Woman(1978) was released.

Roger Ebert gave this film zero stars as he did with the original film.

According to director Steven R. Monroe, the studio submitted an uncut version of the film to the MPAA to see if by chance they would get an R rating. The MPAA came back and said “look, you’ve got an NC-17 movie, but we don’t recommend that you cut it down because we feel like it’s really impactful.” They then decided against editing the film and released it as Unrated so it could play in more theaters.

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