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I Spit On Your Grave
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Day of the Woman, better known by its re-release title, I Spit on Your Grave, is a controversial Rape and revenge film. Prominent film critics lashed out at the film for its lengthy depictions of gang rape, and the picture remains controversial to this day.
The film earned an R rating upon its original U.S. release in 1978. Camille Keaton (grand-niece of Buster Keaton) won a Best Actress award for her role in this movie at the 1978 Catalonian International Film Festival in Spain.
Plot
New York magazine writer Jennifer Hills (Keaton) is writing her first novel, and decides to spend the summer in a cottage on a lake in the countryside, where she can write it undisturbed.
Three local men, two ne'er-do-wells and a gas station manager, are disturbed by Jennifer's independence, and periodically harass her by driving by her cottage in their speedboat, or making sounds at night.
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Encyclopedia
Day of the Woman, better known by its re-release title, I Spit on Your Grave, is a controversial Rape and revenge film. Prominent film critics lashed out at the film for its lengthy depictions of gang rape, and the picture remains controversial to this day.
The film earned an R rating upon its original U.S. release in 1978. Camille Keaton (grand-niece of Buster Keaton) won a Best Actress award for her role in this movie at the 1978 Catalonian International Film Festival in Spain.
Plot
New York magazine writer Jennifer Hills (Keaton) is writing her first novel, and decides to spend the summer in a cottage on a lake in the countryside, where she can write it undisturbed.
Three local men, two ne'er-do-wells and a gas station manager, are disturbed by Jennifer's independence, and periodically harass her by driving by her cottage in their speedboat, or making sounds at night. One day, while Hills is relaxing in her canoe, two of the men surprise her in their speedboat, grab her boat's towrope and tow her to shore. As she tries to escape, she's met by the other two men in their group and she realizes that they had planned this abduction. It appears they have done so ostensibly so their mildly-retarded friend Matthew can lose his virginity. Jennifer fights but is chased by the men through the forest. They capture her and brutally sodomize and rape her repeatedly in a lengthy and graphic sequence. After she crawls back to her house they attack her again. Matthew finally rapes her after drinking alcohol, but says that he can not climax with the other men watching. While she is being tortured, the other men ridicule her book and rip up the manuscript. As she passes out, the men order Matthew to stab her in the heart, and then leave. Matthew cannot bring himself to do this, and dabs the knife lightly in her blood so it looks as if he killed her.
In the following days, a traumatized Jennifer pieces both herself and her manuscript back together. She goes to church and asks for forgiveness, and then begins carrying out a plan.
First, she lures Matthew back to her cabin and entices him to have sex with her under a tree. As he becomes oblivious to the surroundings around him, she strings a noose around his neck and hangs him. She then cuts the rope and drops the body in the river.
She picks up one of the men at the gas station where he works—he thinks she is attracted to him and wants him. She then stops halfway to her house and turns a gun on him. She orders him to take off all his clothes. He tells her that what happened was all her fault and he feels no guilt—she enticed all of the men walking around with sexy legs and low-cut tops. She acts as if she believes him, and lowers her gun. She invites him back to her cottage for a hot bath. She manually stimulates him in her bathtub, and tells him she killed Matthew. He doesn't believe her. As he nears orgasm, she picks up a knife she has hidden under the bathmat (which she took from Matthew—he had brought it with him to kill her) and cuts his genitals. He screams and calls out for his mother while bleeding to death. Calmly, she leaves the room and locks him in from the outside. He dies from blood loss and she disposes of him in her basement. She burns his blood-stained clothes in her fireplace.
The two remaining men take their motorized boat to Jennifer's cabin, with an axe in hand. As they attack her, she escapes with the boat and the axe. She then swings the axe into one man's back. The other man swims up, grabs hold of the motor, and begs Jennifer not to kill him and tells her that none of it was his fault—it was the other guys' idea. She quotes back to him what he said when she asked for mercy: "Suck it, Bitch!" and turns on the motor, disemboweling him. As she speeds away, the credits roll.
Name changes
The movie was originally released under the title Day of the Woman (the title preferred by Zarchi), although it was also shown under the title I Hate Your Guts and The Rape and Revenge of Jennifer Hill. The title was changed to I Spit on Your Grave in a 1980 re-release.
Controversy and criticisms
As I Spit on Your Grave, the movie was censored and released in the United States in 1980. Many countries, such as Ireland, Norway, Iceland, and the former government of West Germany, banned the film altogether, claiming that the film glorified violence against women. Canada banned the movie for a long time; in the 1990s, the individual provinces were allowed to decide whether or not to allow a video release. Since 1998, some provinces (such as Manitoba, Nova Scotia and Quebec) have released the film, albeit with a high rating.
The film was originally released in Australia in 1982 with an R 18+ rating, though it was the censored US version; in 1987, the film survived a 1987 appeal to ban it. It continued to be sold until 1997, with yet another reclassification seeing the film banned in Australia. Even though Australian censorship law forbids the release of films that depict scenes of sexual violence as acceptable or justified, in 2004 the full uncut version was awarded an R 18+, lifting the seven-year ban. The Office of Film and Literature Classification justified this decision by claiming that castration is not sexual violence. In the United Kingdom the film was branded a "video nasty", and appeared on the Director of Public Prosecutions's list of prosecutable movies until 2001 when a heavily cut version of the film was released with an 18 certificate. This UK Cut version was released on DVD in New Zealand in 2001, with an R18 rating.
Film critic Roger Ebert wrote that this was one of the worst films he had ever seen, referring to it as "a vile bag of garbage...without a shred of artistic distinction," adding that "Attending it was one of the most depressing experiences of my life."
The initial criticism has recently given way to a second appraisal of the film among some viewers. Michael Kaminski's 2007 article for the website Obsessed with Film, entitled "Is 'I Spit on Your Grave' Really a Misunderstood Feminist Film?" argues that, when understood within the context in which director Zarchi was inspired to make it, the film may be equally appropriate to analyze as "feminist wish-fulfillment" and a vehicle of personal expression reacting to violence against women.
One of the most famous and influential reappraisals was made by Carol J. Clover in the third chapter of her 1992 book Men, Women, and Chainsaws. Clover notes that she and others like her "appreciate, however grudgingly, the way in which [the film's] brutal simplicity exposes a mainspring of popular culture." Clover further argues that the film's sympathies are entirely with Jennifer, that the male audience is meant to identify with her, not with the attackers, and that the point of the film is a masochistic identification with pain used to justify the bloody catharsis of revenge. Clover also wrote that the movie owes a debt to Deliverance.
Actor Richard Pace (Matthew) unintentionally worried director Zarchi when filming his death scene when he started to convulse while hanging. Zarchi initially thought he was just acting, but realized that something was wrong. Pace wasn't choking, but was afraid of heights and was having a panic attack.
Roger Ebert and Gene Siskel based their negative ("sick, reprehensible and contemptible") reviews on the uncut version of the film that was released by the distribution company with the R rating without notifying Zarchi. After the Motion Picture Association of America talked with Zarchi and found he wasn't responsible, the distribution company was reprimanded.
Zarchi's inspiration and responses to criticism
In the commentary for the Millennium Edition, Zarchi said that he was inspired to do the film after helping a young woman who had been raped in New York. He tells of how a friend of his and his daughter were driving by a park when they witnessed a young woman crawling out of the bushes bloodied and naked (he later found out the girl was taking a common shortcut to meet with her boyfriend when she was attacked). They took the girl with them, took his daughter back home, and talked with the friend on whether they should take her to the hospital or to the police. They decided to take her to the police first, which they soon afterwards discovered was a mistake — the officer, whom Zarchi described as "not fit to wear the uniform", delayed taking her to the hospital and instead insisted she answer questions about her assailants, even though her jaw had been broken and she could hardly talk. Finally, Zarchi insisted to the officer that they take her to the hospital right away. Zarchi said that soon afterwards the girl's father wrote him a letter of thanks for helping his daughter, and wanted to give him a reward, which he turned down.
In the same commentary, Zarchi denied that his film was exploitative, and that the violent nature of the film was necessary to tell the story. He described actress Camille Keaton as "brave" for taking on the role.
2009 Remake
CineTel Films has acquired rights to remake I Spit on Your Grave and has a planned 2009 worldwide theatrical release. The movie will be produced by CineTel prexy-CEO Paul Hertzberg and Lisa Hansen, with Jeff Klein, Alan Ostroff, Gary Needle and Zarchi as exec producers.
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