I SPIT ON YOUR GRAVE III: VENGEANCE IS MINE (2015) - a film gutter review

Dir. RB Braunstein, USA, 92 mins
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Well, that was a strange experience.

The final part of the recent I Spit On Your Grave trilogy goes some way towards rectifying some of my significant complaints and problems of the previous two movies in the current canon  – it explores some of the issues surrounding revenge and retribution and how it can make a person feel in a way that is more realistic than anything before it. True, this is heavy-handed, but I was encouraged to see it in the early part of this film. Then again, there are scenes towards the end of the movie that seem to deeply undermine that particular message, so it’s kind of a mess and very hard to know what to make of it all told.

In this movie we revisit novelist Jennifer Hills, the protagonist of the first movie, who has moved to a different city and is living under the assumed name of Angela Datrinka (don't quote me on the spelling, but according to this movie it's Czech for avenging angel. How coincidental!). She's trying to get her life back on track with a pretty unspecified job, therapy – lots of therapy – as well as a rape survivors group. It's there she meets the militant Marla, who has some pretty extreme views on what should be done to rapists and basically men in general. The two hit it off right away and it's not long before the two are out exacting a toll on the people who have committed crimes against the members of the group. But when Marla goes missing after visiting an abusive ex, things are about to kick up another notch for Jennifer as her rage and desire for revenge overtake her completely...

Apart from having the same character and having I Spit On Your Grave in the title, this movie really is the oddball of the bunch. It's much slower and significantly less violent for long chunks, although when it does get rolling there is some nasty stuff in here, make no mistakes. It makes an effort to explore the philosophical issues around revenge, but is pretty blunt in its effort to do so – then again, I Spit On Your Grave has never been much renowned for subtlety. The almost random killing spree that goes on at the end of the movie doesn't really sit comfortably with the other movies, which have always been about a very targeted and tailored revenge.

With all of the above said, I still think I prefer it to the first couple of movies for what it is trying to do. It's not wildly successful in all respects, but bits of this work well, and it does have a decent twist (although again it's not fabulously executed). The dialogue is sometimes awkward, the pacing can be a bit unbalanced, some of the acting performances lack a bit of sparkle but this was, certainly something weightier than what has come before, and that for me marks it as the best of the three – although that was never an exacting standard to beat.

RATING: 5.5/10. A slightly different spin on the rape revenge movie here, so it gains a point or two for trying something that breaks with the convention of its predecessors. With that said, it doesn't really deliver what could have been some interesting concepts all that well. The cod psychology of the therapy sessions gets a bit much, some of the dialogue feels forced and the pace of the piece is uneven, but for all that there was more here that made it work as a proper movie rather than the simple violence-fest of the classic rape-revenge feature. On those grounds I have to give it something a bit above its predecessors, but I simply can't stray too high for a movie with so many problems, so it remains a distinctly average 5.5/10 from me.

That's a wrap on I Spit On Your Grave month, and I'll be doing my best to dodge the rape-revenge motif for a while having sat through five movies in a row in the subgenre. But expect plenty more unpleasantness from Film Gutter in the coming weeks and months...
 
 Alex Davis