I Spit On Your Grave is a remake of the classic 1978 horror film of the same title (also known as Day of the Woman).  The movie is about writer Jennifer Hills (Sarah Butler) who rents a remote cabin for a few months to get some work done in quiet.  Not long after she arrives, she is the victim of a brutal gang rape by some locals and left for dead.  But Jennifer isn’t dead and she wants her revenge.

The original I Spit On Your Grave is one of my all time favorite horror movies.  It’s a vicious, horrifying movie that pulls no punches.  It’s violent and gory and actually hard to watch.  If you’ve never seen it I suggest you do.  So when I heard they were doing a remake I was immediately horrified.  This movie is sacred.  One of those special films you don’t see often.  A cult classic.  How badly would they ruin it?  Well they only wound up releasing this in a couple of theaters so until recently I didn’t get to find out.  But oh man did they screw it up.

The first major thing done wrong is they spend a lot of time with the male characters.  Through the whole movie.  In fact this movie is more about them then Jennifer.  In the original they were much scarier as these more little known characters who commit this horrible crime then just seem to forget about it.  Here we deal with covering it up and their lives and even beforehand we watch them sit around and talk.  The thing that makes this so much worse is that the performances behind these characters are horrible.  Every last one of the male cast, including Daniel Franzese who you might remember as Damien from Mean Girls, is horrible.  Just really, really bad.  And they’re not helped at all by the ridiculously bad dialogue.

Which is another place this movie goes wrong.  There’s a lot of talking. The original was a very quiet movie.  Apart from a few scenes the dialogue was confined to only necessary things.  Here it’s all talk and very little action, so to speak.

Which brings us to 2 other issues.  First is the big assault which was a hugely disturbing part of the original and a very memorable extremely disturbing scene. In this version it’s mostly build up.  Like I said, talk.  It’s still horrible, rape always is, but it’s nowhere near as bad as the original where you’d swear the actress was really being raped and beaten to death.  Here they even cut away from it and come back after it’s over, which kinda defeats the point in a way.  The point of it in the original is that the audience went through this horrible experience with the protagonist and then could understand her later actions.

After the rape we don’t even see Jennifer for a long time.  She just disappears, unlike the original where you get to see her healing herself and see the emotional switch and that thing just breaking in her mind where she decides that these guys must die.  Here she becomes like a ghost, or a Michael Myers or Jason character.  Mysterious things start happening to the guys and her body is just missing.

When she does return, she’s very much like a Michael Myers character as she performs these Saw like murders to get her revenge on her attackers.  This is all very odd and just wrong.  It just becomes bad torture porn at this point.

The one positive thing about this film is actress Sarah Butler who delivers a wonderful performance, when not being held back by script or direction.

This version if you wish to watch it is available pretty cheap on DVD and Blu-ray starting on February 8th. But I recommend skipping it and instead going for the original movie which is being re-released on DVD & Blu-ray on the same day. Links to that below.