I SPIT ON YOUR GRAVE (2010) - A FILM GUTTER REVIEW

Dir. Steven R Monroe, USA, 108 mins

Having started I Spit On Your Grave month a fortnight ago and all the way back in 1978, it's fair to say that the franchise went quiet for a while – that is if you ignore the unofficial sequel, Savage Vengance, which I honestly suggest you do. But, given, the spate of remakes coming out of Hollywood in the last decade, why not this one? The reimagining of I Spit on Your Grave hit cinemas pretty mutedly in 2010, but still went on to spawn two sequels over the next five years. So, how does this version of the infamous film measure up?

The story once again focuses on A young Jennifer Hills, a writer who decides to go away to a remote cabin in the woods (is any of this sounding familiar?) to get some work down on her latest novel. Unfortunately she seems to have strayed deep into Deliverance country, and when she upsets some 'good ol' boys' at the gas station they decide to go and put a scare into the 'fancy city girl'.

I might sound like I'm being facetious in my terminology there, but the characters are basically that cardboard cut-out. The five 'rednecks' – taking in such absurd stereotypes as the hard-ass sheriff and the harmonica-playing weirdo – verge on caricature, and are actually significantly less believable than the original. Maybe it was the setting or the timeframe of the original, or maybe things are played up too much here, but I was much more disbelieving of these characters, which really jarred me out of the story and created a significant impediment to the movie as a whole.

Of course it's not long before things start to get serious and their efforts to frighten Jennifer turn distinctly nasty. What follow are some pretty unpleasant scenes of humiliation, degradation and gang rape. In fact there's over a half an hour devoted to this until Jennifer is able to make a final, desperate escape by flinging herself into the river.
 
The final 45 minutes or so of the movie make up the 'revenge' element of the 'rape revenge' storyline, as Jennifer survives (in some unspecified way) before making her way back to mete out retribution on her attackers. She has a nasty, creative solution to deal with each of her five attackers, whom she tackles one by one before we close with a shot of her faintly smiling at the carnage she has wrought. Most of those kill scenes are pretty overblown and hard to believe, although in one or two cases you have to admire the originality if nothing else. In the first movie they felt simpler, and as a result far more feasible.
 
Plot-wise, that's basically all there is to it. It certainly doesn't do much the original didn't, or offer any real expansion on those themes or indeed the milieu of rape revenge. It lacks the emotional core of other modern offerings in the subgenre, with characters that are little more than paint by numbers. I was a little surprised there wasn't somebody called Cletus in their number, that's how absurd the characterisation of our 'rednecks' was. There's no expansion on the Jennifer character either, which thirty-some years on in genre filmmaking you might have expected. The original was laying down the prototype, and I'm more willing to forgive a few flaws there than I am with a modern offering.
 
That might sound like I'm nitpicking, but if you want to elicit real sympathy for Jennifer then the more you tell me about her the better. I suppose in this the rape scene was longer, which maybe the director thought might elicit more sympathy, but it just comes off as gratuitous, especially with the addition of handicam. Then you throw in five of the most jarring and unbelievable characters in movie history and we have something that doesn't connect the way it should. If you don't have that strong sympathy early on, you don't have the support of the viewer when she goes to get her revenge. There's no real message about revenge either – the final shot here just implies 'you know what, revenge is great! More people should be out doing it.'
 
I could only recommend this to you if you just like seeing violence, be it sexual violence or torture, committed on your screen. There's little else to recommend here – Sarah Butler's performance in the lead isn't bad, given a lousy script, but the rest of the acting is atrocious and overcooked, the storyline is overly familiar and cliched and everything just feels too long and drawn out. An hour and three quarters just shouldn't feel this long – it's only a few minutes over the original, but that seemed to go by much quicker. Bottom line, it's just a movie that doesn't really do anything you've not seen done better many times before.

RATING: 2.5/10. This remake is absolutely by the numbers, and given how extreme some of the content is it somehow still manages to be horribly boring. There's not a shred of originality here, and some of the worst depictions of 'country folk' I have ever had the misfortune to witness. I only award it 2.5 because I thought our female lead was solid in the role and some of the death scenes were at least creative. That's all I can give it – 2.5/10. Your time would honestly be better spent watching the original, which at least retains its raw quality all these years on.