I Spit on Your Remake. All over it.

I can't wait to tear into this one. 

The other night we sat down to watch the remake of the 1978 I Spit on Your Grave. When I first heard that they were remaking this film, besides thinking it was totally unnecessary to remake it, I figured Hollywood would find some way to fuck it up and completely miss the mark. And guess what, they sure did. They did everything that they could do to try to top the original film- releasing it uncut right away to try to achieve some shock value and focusing way too much on creating Jigsaw worthy, intricate kills that are purely there for the gross-out factor that the Saw generation of kids has come to expect. A waste of time if you ask me.

Steven R. Monroe directs the 2010 remake of I Spit on Your Grave and it's not surprising to find that he's most known for camera operation and has mostly just directed TV movies (what you might call, a director for hire). This remake follows the same basic plot as the original- Jennifer (Sarah Butler) is a writer who comes to a remote cabin, deep in the southern backwoods, to get away from the city life and write her next novel. Unfortunately for her, she catches the eye of a nasty group of male locals who pursue her and proceed to rape and beat her in an extremely gratuitous fashion. She escapes and gets her revenge.

I'm really not even sure where to start with this one. First of all, I didn't get anything out of Sarah Butler's portrayal of Jennifer. She was a weak character, one that they overplayed as flaky and somewhat mindless. The supposed character development that much of the first part of the film  focuses on really showed us nothing more than some typical city girl that's clumsy, naive and probably only capable of writing Confessions of a Shopaholic during her writing retreat. I don't feel anything for her which immediately makes the film feel pointless. There's nothing interesting or at all special about her or her mediocre performance. This made all the rape scenes just feel like the most base kind of exploitation, rape for the sake of entertainment, and to set up for some overly explicit kill scenes. That was what made this film feel so wrong and off base with the original. It misses the point of exploitation films of 70s and takes it a step too far and in the wrong direction.

We are then somehow lead to believe that this girl, after being quite abusively raped, was able to jump into freezing cold water, fully nude, and hold her breath long enough to swim completely out of sight of her captors. It would be pretty impressive for anyone to do that in peak physical form but after the exhaustion of what had just happened to her, just minutes before, that's pretty goddamn amazing. This is where all the terrible plot holes start coming in to play. In the original, they leave her to go back to her cabin in her beaten down and degraded state and make no mention of killing her because it isn't really necessary. They show her going back and cleaning herself up, dealing with what just happened to her and becoming stronger so that she can get her revenge. This takes about a day and is pretty effective in my opinion. Now in this remake, we don't see what happens to her for a while. A whole month in fact. Uh, right. Instead we get an overly drawn out look at the lives of these detestable men in what I guess is an attempt to make us loathe them even more which, trust me, was pretty easy when we saw them raping her. So basically, this girl, who can't even hold her phone without dropping it in the toilet, was able to somehow survive in the woods for an entire month, living off what they briefly allude to as rats that she caught herself (oh yeah and apparently she can catch fish with her bare hands...), and somehow procuring some clean new clothes. Hell, she could have walked all the way home in that time! All of this defies all possibility of belief and reality. I don't see how we are expected to believe that this girl is capable of any of this when we're given such a poor definition of her character in the beginning. That destroys the effect of the film and is what makes it feel so gratuitous and unredeeming.

The original film is all about drawing everything out, every shot and every scene, making it feel realistically voyeuristic and making you really feel everything- her torture, her rape and her revenge. This remake is drawn out in all the wrong places. Way too much time is spent focusing on the men in the movie and their sorry attempts at portraying believable country boys. Our lead asshole looked like something out of a jeans ad, you know, a really forced attempt at styling a city boy to make him look country. I also couldn't get past that chubby guy who played the gay guy Damien in Mean Girls and his crappy attempt at a southern accent. They also decided to throw in a new character, the town Sheriff, who gets in on some of the rape action. They spend A LOT of time drawing out his story, showing his family life with his daughter, all to give our main character some weak leverage to get to him. Yeah we get it, it's supposed to be uncomfortable to watch him behaving normally at home with his wife and daughter when he enjoys going out and raping women, and she uses his daughter to get to him. But then we don't ever find out what she actually did with his daughter and she doesn't even use her in some way in front of him which I think, would have been more effective. Instead, she had to do something overly elaborate, which brings me to the revenge kills.

What was so great about the original was the smart and effective ways that she went about killing the men and how much you could feel her pain from what they caused her. Not only that, they were simple. In this remake however, they've fallen into Saw/Hostel territory. Though yes, they are some pretty exceptionally gross and cruel kills, I give them that, but I just couldn't get over the improbability of them all. It also didn't help that they kept throwing cheesy one-liners for her to say that pushed this film further and further into cheesy, torture porn caliber film making. And even though they were trying so hard to think of the outlandishly clever and ironic kill schemes, I was bored watching them and waiting for her to carry each one of them out in her petty, unsatisfying way. They spent too much time trying to make her scary looking, using typical, used-up imagery like long dark hair hanging in front of her face and making her look dirty and menacing. She's not supposed to be Samara from The Ring, she's supposed to be a broken down woman who's angry, not demonic. It completely cheapened any humanity and pain that Jessica had to begin with, therefore canceling out any attempt this film ever made at female empowerment or really any point at all.

I went into watching this film very openly and I really tried to give it a chance but it just didn't deliver. I think that when you're remaking a movie, solely for the purpose of trying to make more brutal rape and torture scenes, something has been lost and doesn't feel right. Some of my favourite modern horror films are some of the most disturbing (Martyrs, A Serbian Film) but they have a point, an underlying message in them that makes the violence justifiable and significant. This film just gives audiences an excuse to indulge in some guilt-free sadism that no matter how hard they tried, really isn't justifiable.