I Spit on Your Grave

Well I guess this is my first proper review as my Sanctum review was written in a sort of 'strike back' way shall we say. Anyways, here we go... be forewarned there are some spoilers below, but it shouldn't matter because you shouldn't watch this movie anyway. How's that for the first paragraph of a review? Read on...

I Spit On Your Grave has a simple plot, which I described ever so delicately in my plot synopsis above. Our heroine character gets raped numerous times by a group of twisted (and typical hillbilly) men and is helpless to do anything about it until, after about the fourth raping, it seems the men grow tired from all the sex and let her jump off a bridge and swim away. Either they were all sexed-out or they were just playing into the 'uhh durr' hillbilly mentality. I kid you not the scene plays out as follows. Girl gets up after getting gangbanged. Walks bare naked for about 5 minutes until she reaches a small bridge. Slowly starts to walk/stumble across bridge. The rapers (yes, the rapers) follow her about 15 feet behind her, also walking. The girl walks towards the edge of the bridge. One of the men with a shotgun walks right up to her and points the gun at her, tells her it was fun while it lasted and is about to shoot her. But she slowly falls backwards into the water while the man with the gun stares in absolute disbelief (like he forgot he was going to shoot her half a second ago) and then looks down at the water dumbfounded. "She's gotta come up sooner or later" he says. He doesn't shoot her while she's slowly falling, he doesn't shoot the water in which she just fell in, he doesn't even go up or down river to wait til she comes up. He and his hillbilly buddies just stand on the bridge staring at the spot where the girl landed in the water.

That's pretty much the turning point of the movie, the part where the raping ends and the torturing begins. And the point where I realized it wasn't getting much better. To break it down the first third is boring boring crap. "I think I heard something" moments and other inventive scenarios that show you all the main characters and demonstrate how shitty the acting and writing is. Once they get you comfortable with that that first third of boring shlock continues on for another 20 minutes until the hillbilly bad guys finally make their rather underwhelming presence known. From here the 2nd third of the movie focuses on the girl getting raped, then passing out, then getting raped, then passing out until we reach the wonderfully scripted bridge scene mentioned earlier. That's the point the last act starts... kinda. Well oddly enough, not really. Instead we get 10 minutes of the hillbillies trying to figure out what just happened, staring into various parts of the river and poking sticks in it and then another 10 minutes of them freaking out because they're dumb hillbillies. Then, finally, we get to the revenge part. Therein lies another glorious flaw in this movie. Apparently an entire month has passed since the girl got away and when we see her return she magically pops out of nowhere, with clothes on (all of her stuff was earlier burned by the men) and upgraded general hygiene.

So she's swam 6 miles down river, naked, in crocodile infested water... alright sure--whatever--I'll believe that. But then she returns a month later. Where did she go? How did she get back? Her car was taken by the hillbillies, there was apparently a town 6 miles away but if you recall she was completely naked when she jumped in the river, meaning even if she got to that town she had no money or anything to buy new clothes, or a car. The only logical thing you think she'd do is you know... get help, maybe tell someone she was raped, that sorta thing. Alas that's not the case and she's magically back looking better than ever and with a vengeance.

She picks off the 'billies one by one in brutal ways that were surprisingly not all that cool/shocking. Sure one guy gets his eyelids peeled back with fishing hooks and then crows peck out one of his eyes, but the scene was so ineffective and gave a beaming 'been there seen this before' feeling with 'oh hey look at that CGI', moving on. Another of the men gets his bell rung and wakes up suspended atop a bathtub full of some sort of acid, which he eventually dunks his head into after not being able to hold it up any longer. It's a neat little death scene with some cool makeup effects but in the end it's just like the last death (and the next two to come) in that you end up laughing at the end, not going 'oh my god!'. The movie continues until all the bad guys are helplessly picked off with none of them having a chance of screwing up her plans. The movie then ends with the girl after she's killed the last man sitting outside staring into nothing. She's probably thinking about what an ass she looks like, and how it sucks that she's now been impregnated by five hillbillies for over a month.

...And as for the morale of the story? City people are just as stupid as hillbilly people. I think that's what they were trying to say at least.

I Spit On Your Grave was a very disappointing flick, I couldn't turn it off cause I just kept hoping it'd get better, or at least have some fun gore but the gore that was there was for the most part pretty 'meh' with a lot of that previously mentioned been-there-done-that feeling. The acting was horrible, and the script was worse. Big plot holes like the ones described above didn't do much in the way of helping the movie and the gore wasn't good enough to save anything. I hate to be so harsh, but this isn't one of those so-bad-it's-funny movies. It's one of those so-bad-it's-not-even-funny movies. You want a flick like this that's actually good (and strangely similar) check out The Last House on the Left. At least that one keeps you entertained and is actually quite chilling and effective, AND has solid gore. Everything this movie doesn't have, now I need something to get this bad movie taste out of my mouth.