I Spit On Your Grave

The impulse to remake any even moderately successful horror movie of the ’70s and ’80s hits rock bottom with I Spit On Your Grave, which has the odd effect of cheapening one of the era’s rankest, most notorious pieces of exploitation trash. Shot with the plain, day-lit, marginally competent horror-realism of Last House On The Left, the 1980 original is a rape-revenge story stripped down to its raw essence: Woman travels alone to a backwoods cabin to do some writing; woman gets assaulted, physically and sexually, by five men (one mentally retarded), who leave her for dead; woman survives, then gets her revenge by luring them into traps and killing them off, one by one. (A hook from the trailer: “This woman will soon cut, chop, and burn five men beyond recognition, and there isn’t a jury in this country that would convict her.”) It’s not clever or multi-layered or stylized in an interesting way, and it doesn’t have a point, other than to appeal artlessly to the audience’s worst instincts.