The alternative title is "I Spit on Your Grave" -- great title, along the lines of "I Dismember Mamma." Much better than "Day of the Woman." Camille Keaton is a novelist who rents a summer cabin in the woods in upstate New York, is assaulted by four maniacal rapists, and kills them all, one by one, in revenge.
I don't know where to begin with this thing. It's a pleasant location, around Kent, Connecticut. That's one admirable feature. Let me think. Nope. That's about it.
It's unimaginable that this film is controversial because it is supposed to endorse rape. It doesn't, anymore than "Hamlet" endorses fratricide. After all, of the four rapists, one is strung up by the neck until dead, and his body heaved into the river. (The heroine yanks his struggling body up off the ground with a line she's flung over a tree limb. He weighs twice as much as she does.) The next rapist has his member surgically removed in a bath tub and bleeds to death screaming. The third gets an ax in the back. The fourth has his genitals mutilated by a speedboat screw. That's not an endorsement of rape. But I doubt that the director, Meir Zarchi, is genuinely offended by that interpretation. As they say, a knock is as good as a boost. And now we have the Millennium edition of the DVD with two audio commentaries.
Camille Keaton is young, fair, slender, attractive, and can't act. But I don't want to pick on her. Nobody in the movie can act. I suppose saying that people "can't act" is kind of categorical, so let me say that you'd see equally good performances if you happened to stumble into a high school play in, say, Kearny, New Jersey.
I thrilled at the structure of the assault though. The four roughnecks haul Keaton into the woods and one of them rapes her violently. They leave. She struggles to her feet and makes her way painfully through the woods towards the cabin. She's hardly glamorous by now, naked but covered with blood and smeared with mud. She's half way home when she finds them waiting for her. This time they fling her face down over a boulder and sodomize her after beating her some more. They leave. Thoroughly debased, crawling through the brush on her belly, she manages to make it home, painfully picks up the phone -- and has it knocked from her hands. They're waiting for her. They rape her again and force her to commit oral copulation. Then they try to kill her but fail.
Let me summarize. The beatings, the rapes, the sodomy, the forced fellatio, are spread out over three incidents rather than one. Why? Because we get three thrilling scenes of sex and violence instead of one. And it pads the movie out to feature length. That's why Hamlet doesn't kill Claudius until the end of the play.
No sense sticking with high-falutin' references though. The rape is structurally necessary for the violence that follows. It's just an excuse. First the violent assault, then the violent revenge. It's a familiar structure. Clint Eastwood's "Sudden Impact" -- you know the one, "Make my day?" -- has an almost identical plot, though the structure is varied. Now, if you want to see an artfully done, and thoroughly gripping rape, try Bergman's "The Virgin Spring." For a scene of sodomy that will give you nightmares, see "Deliverance." The photography here is humdrum, but in context that's saying a lot. The director shows us the gargoyle faces of the psychopaths from the victim's point of view. They look like they're doing push ups over the lens. The sound is tinny, even in the Dolby Digital provided for the Millennium Edition. When an actor turns his face from the camera, his voice fades too. In a church, asking for a dispensation from God, Keaton makes the sign of the cross and gets it wrong, unless she is Greek or Russian Orthodox. And it's a Protestant church, with no images and no holy water. When she's holding an automatic pistol on a rapist and threatening him, she gets to cock it twice.
Why -- you, the experienced movie goer ask -- why doesn't she go to the police? They would certainly believe her story and collar the evildoers. After all, she's not a black man in Alabama in 1930. She's a young white woman in New York who has been beaten half to death and is dripping with sperm. Well, again, why doesn't Hamlet knock off his uncle? Or why don't the Indians shoot the horses of the stagecoach they're chasing instead of trying to pick off the passengers one by one? She doesn't call the police because if she did we'd be deprived of the scene in which she pulls a Lorena Bobbit on the cretin in the bath tub.
It's an execrable film, one which couldn't make up its mind which kind of movie it wanted to be, a fashionable feminist allegory ("The Day of the Woman") or a simple slice-and-dice gore fest ("I Spit on Your Grave"). I wonder who started the rumor that this was some kind of message picture. I'd guess the director did. And it IS a message movie. The message is, "It's exciting to see nudity, sex, and violence on the screen."
I don't know where to begin with this thing. It's a pleasant location, around Kent, Connecticut. That's one admirable feature. Let me think. Nope. That's about it.
It's unimaginable that this film is controversial because it is supposed to endorse rape. It doesn't, anymore than "Hamlet" endorses fratricide. After all, of the four rapists, one is strung up by the neck until dead, and his body heaved into the river. (The heroine yanks his struggling body up off the ground with a line she's flung over a tree limb. He weighs twice as much as she does.) The next rapist has his member surgically removed in a bath tub and bleeds to death screaming. The third gets an ax in the back. The fourth has his genitals mutilated by a speedboat screw. That's not an endorsement of rape. But I doubt that the director, Meir Zarchi, is genuinely offended by that interpretation. As they say, a knock is as good as a boost. And now we have the Millennium edition of the DVD with two audio commentaries.
Camille Keaton is young, fair, slender, attractive, and can't act. But I don't want to pick on her. Nobody in the movie can act. I suppose saying that people "can't act" is kind of categorical, so let me say that you'd see equally good performances if you happened to stumble into a high school play in, say, Kearny, New Jersey.
I thrilled at the structure of the assault though. The four roughnecks haul Keaton into the woods and one of them rapes her violently. They leave. She struggles to her feet and makes her way painfully through the woods towards the cabin. She's hardly glamorous by now, naked but covered with blood and smeared with mud. She's half way home when she finds them waiting for her. This time they fling her face down over a boulder and sodomize her after beating her some more. They leave. Thoroughly debased, crawling through the brush on her belly, she manages to make it home, painfully picks up the phone -- and has it knocked from her hands. They're waiting for her. They rape her again and force her to commit oral copulation. Then they try to kill her but fail.
Let me summarize. The beatings, the rapes, the sodomy, the forced fellatio, are spread out over three incidents rather than one. Why? Because we get three thrilling scenes of sex and violence instead of one. And it pads the movie out to feature length. That's why Hamlet doesn't kill Claudius until the end of the play.
No sense sticking with high-falutin' references though. The rape is structurally necessary for the violence that follows. It's just an excuse. First the violent assault, then the violent revenge. It's a familiar structure. Clint Eastwood's "Sudden Impact" -- you know the one, "Make my day?" -- has an almost identical plot, though the structure is varied. Now, if you want to see an artfully done, and thoroughly gripping rape, try Bergman's "The Virgin Spring." For a scene of sodomy that will give you nightmares, see "Deliverance." The photography here is humdrum, but in context that's saying a lot. The director shows us the gargoyle faces of the psychopaths from the victim's point of view. They look like they're doing push ups over the lens. The sound is tinny, even in the Dolby Digital provided for the Millennium Edition. When an actor turns his face from the camera, his voice fades too. In a church, asking for a dispensation from God, Keaton makes the sign of the cross and gets it wrong, unless she is Greek or Russian Orthodox. And it's a Protestant church, with no images and no holy water. When she's holding an automatic pistol on a rapist and threatening him, she gets to cock it twice.
Why -- you, the experienced movie goer ask -- why doesn't she go to the police? They would certainly believe her story and collar the evildoers. After all, she's not a black man in Alabama in 1930. She's a young white woman in New York who has been beaten half to death and is dripping with sperm. Well, again, why doesn't Hamlet knock off his uncle? Or why don't the Indians shoot the horses of the stagecoach they're chasing instead of trying to pick off the passengers one by one? She doesn't call the police because if she did we'd be deprived of the scene in which she pulls a Lorena Bobbit on the cretin in the bath tub.
It's an execrable film, one which couldn't make up its mind which kind of movie it wanted to be, a fashionable feminist allegory ("The Day of the Woman") or a simple slice-and-dice gore fest ("I Spit on Your Grave"). I wonder who started the rumor that this was some kind of message picture. I'd guess the director did. And it IS a message movie. The message is, "It's exciting to see nudity, sex, and violence on the screen."