I Spit On Your Grave

I Spit on your Grave (a.k.a. Day of the Woman) is the story of Jennifer Hills (Camille Keaton who won a "Best Actress" award for the role), a writer from New York who's come out to live in a secluded cabin in the country and work on a novel she's writing.

Just before arriving, she stops at a local gas station where she meets four men. Most of them ignore her, she mostly ignores them, and then she leaves. Later that day, Matthew (Richard Pace), the mentally retarded brother of one of the guys drops of her groceries and has a friendly conversation with her for a few minutes before bicycling back to the store.



Later that night the 4 men are talking about women and decide that they need to find a girl to cure Matthew of his virginity. Matthew isn't all that enthusiastic and explains that he's only interested in someone special... and someone special is Ms. Hill.

The next day we see scenes of Jennifer lounging around the cabin writing, when she goes out to sit in the hammock by the lake, two of the men drive by harassing her, so she goes back inside.

Oddly enough, the day after the guys in the boat harass her, she decides to spend the day sunbathing in a canoe.


It doesn't take too long for the two men to arrive again, and this time they tie her canoe to their boat and pull it to a remote shore.

What follows is about 40 minutes of Jennifer being raped. It's one of the longest scenes of the sort in any film.

The depiction isn't really all that graphic actually. It's not nearly as shocking to see as Monica Belucci's scene in Gaspar Noé's Irréversible, so I guess in that way we modern audiences get off a little easier than those in 1978. Even so, it is long and really wears you down as it goes on and on.

Eventually though, it's over. The guys send Matthew back in with a knife to finish her off, but he backs down at the last moment and fakes it instead. The guys leave and two weeks pass.

Jennifer hangs out at the house making an effort to resume her life as before, but she's just not the same. Soon enough she decides to use the mens' lust against them to exact her revenge.

Matthew gets seduced and then hung.

The next guy gets seduced and taken out into the woods, at which point she pulls a gun on him and forces him to strip. The quick-thinking man explains to her that she'd asked for it the whole time... exposing her legs and such... She's seemingly convinced by his impressive rhetoric, and invites him back to her home for a hot bath... during which she castrates him and leaves him to bleed to death.


The other two are dispatched pretty matter-of-factly on the lake. One is axed in the back while he tries to swim away, and the other is disemboweled by the propeller on his own boat. The credits roll as she rides away.

The strength of this movie is its simplicity. There is no soundtrack. There is minimal dialogue. Similar to Cannibal Holocaust, the film plays out much more like a documentary than the sorts of shock genre gorefests it gets compared to. And that's why it's so effective.




Similarly to the last movie trailer posted (Leprechaun), these guys just can't get their story straight either. The trailer and ads speak of five men... but there are only four.

Available on Amazon: I Spit On Your Grave (Millennium Edition)