When this was re-released in 1980, if you even SAW this movie, some considered you disturbed. If you LIKED it, you were considered SICK. In the alarmist early 80s, the fear-mongering press, parent organizations, and evangelists harped constantly about how rock music, Dungeons & Dragons, and slice-and-dice horror movies were turning youth into devil-worshipping, deviant, homicidal (or suicidal) freaks.
So, a movie that shows a woman being stalked, raped, and beaten for twenty-five minutes didn’t sit well with the moral crusaders. At all. They called I Spit on Your Grave vile, disturbing, distasteful, diseased, ugly, evil, irresponsible and misogynist.
Today, people still use many of those words in discussions of the film, but the critical tide has turned on the “misogynist” label. Now, you’re just as likely to see critics hold it up (rightfully) as a feminist piece that deals with a smart, strong woman, Jennifer (a New York City writer who retreats to a rented house in the country to work on a novel), who fights as hard as she can against a pack of hayseed rapist scuzzbuckets, but is simply outnumbered. The hayseeds have their way with her and then leave her for dead, but HOLD ON—the movie’s not even half-over, yet. She lives to personally take revenge, and, folks, it’s brutal. For these scenes, director Meir Zarchi rolls out the big buckets of red-dyed corn syrup. If you still think this is a misogynist film, notice how Jennifer gets the guys into compromising positions by taking advantage of how they’re all dumber than canned ham and easily manipulated. She strangles, slices, axes, and castrates, while the guys cry, cower, and beg in ways that she never did.
It isn’t a great movie, but it’s effective and absorbing. There’s not a shred of music in the entire film and almost no characters beyond the principles. Zarchi further keeps things stark with remarkably little dialogue. Jennifer spends a lot of time alone and the film moves on many sequences where only imagery and body language tell us anything. You could watch with this with the sound off, or dubbed in a foreign language, and still understand it.
Jennifer is played by the beautiful Camille Keaton, the grand-niece of Buster Keaton. The original title of this film was (tellingly) Day of the Woman, but like most grindhouse items, there were different titles depending on where it was shown and which version it was. I Spit on Your Grave was the title of the broad 1980 re-release and the name stuck.