I Spit on Your Grave ** (1978, Camille Keaton, Eron Tabor, Richard Pace, Anthony Nichols, Gunter Kleemann) – Classic Movie Review 11,413

‘This woman has just cut, chopped, broken and burned five men beyond recognition, but no jury in America would ever convict her!’

Camille Keaton (Buster’s grandniece) stars as Jennifer Hills, a fiction writer based in New York City, who is abused, raped and left her for dead by four backwoods locals in the Connecticut countryside and exacts her revenge by slicing, hanging and castrating her attackers.

Writer-producer-director Meir Zarchi’s very controversial 1978 I Spit on Your Grave [Day of the Woman] became notorious as a cause célèbre in the ‘video nasty’ debate, perhaps even more for its unremittingly nasty tone than for the shocking violence shown, but this is a serious exploitation film that has been redefined as a feminist film that takes the viewer into the horror of rape and then forces a militant response. Nevertheless, there is extreme graphic violence, in particular the lengthy depictions of gang rape taking up 30 minutes of the running time.

I Spit on Your Grave is undoubtedly extremely difficult to watch, and on one level sexist and degrading and disgusting, but it nevertheless deserves consideration in the debate on cinema’s treatment of intensely violent subjects.

Controversy (Time magazine put it in its Top 10 of Ridiculously Violent Movies) mixed with negative reviews (Roger Ebert called it ‘a vile bag of garbage’) at the time, and the film has maintained its status as highly controversial.

It is however safe to praise the performance of Camille Keaton, whom Meir Zarchi called ‘brave’ for taking the role. Zarchi put a casting call advert in Backstage magazine for a woman and four men in their 20s to star in a low-budget film. Camille Keaton was among more than 4,000 actresses who auditioned as Jennifer. After a series of auditions to test Keaton’s suitability, Zarchi found her an ‘experienced actress’, and ‘beautiful and photogenic’ and was convinced that she could play the role effectively.

Zarchi could not find a distributor and he distributed the film himself. It was released on November 22, 1978. It played a number of engagements in rural drive-in cinemas, but only for brief runs. In 1980, it was picked up for distribution by the Jerry Gross Organization, who changed the title to I Spit on Your Grave.

It was long banned in the UK, where the film was refused a cinema certificate by the British censors and did not have a theatrical release. However, since films on video did not need censor’s certificates at the time, it was released on home video, where the press called it a ‘video nasty’. It then appeared on the Director of Public Prosecutions’ list of prosecutable films. However, an 18 certificate version, cut by seven minutes and two seconds, was finally approved in 2001. Then in the 2011 release the cuts were reduced considerably to two minutes 54 seconds. It originally ran 102 minutes.

In 1974 Zarchi had met a young woman who was raped and beaten by two men at a park in New York City and was inspired to write the story but the idea did not begin to develop fully until the film’s cinematographer Yuri Haviv invited him to spend the weekend at a summer house he had rented in Kent, Connecticut, with an extension of the Housatonic River nearby, where. Zarchi ended up making the film.

He took four months to write the screenplay, mostly on his subway route to his office in Times Square and back home where his wife then typewrote the handwritten pages in the evening. That typewriter is seen in the film as one Jennifer uses to complete her manuscript.

Also in the cast are Eron Tabor as Johnny Stillman, Richard Pace as Matthew Duncan, Anthony Nichols as Stanley Woods, Gunter Kleemann as Andy Chirensky, Alexis Magnotti as Becky Stillman (Johnny’s wife), Tammy Zarchi as Melissa Stillman (Johnny’s daughter), Terry Zarchi as Johnny Stillman Jr. (Johnny’s son), Traci Ferrante as waitress, William Tasgal as porter, Isaac Agami as butcher, and Ronit Haviv as supermarket girl.

Forty years later, a sequel, I Spit on Your Grave: Deja Vu, was released in 2019 with Zarchi and Keaton returning.

It was remade in 2010 as I Spit on Your Grave, with two sequels: I Spit on Your Grave 2 (2013) and I Spit on Your Grave III: Vengeance Is Mine (2015).

It is Zarchi’s first film as director,  and he married its star Camille Keaton the following year (divorced 1982).

Demi Moore confirmed that she is the scantily clad woman with her back turned on the film’s poster.

© Derek Winnert 2021 Classic Movie Review 11,413

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