Strong feminist statement or no, I Spit on Your Grave is **not **a great film. The writing, acting, and pacing are far too amateurish. I can hardly imagine enjoying it un-ironically.
Yeah, that’s the reason. And Starship Troopers is the 1990’s Casablanca, right?
Hostel II, when the dude’s junk gets cut off and thrown to a dog…I will never travel to Eastern Europe.
There’s more to a book than the paper it’s printed on, and there are a lot of great films lacking in one or more technical aspect. (Might make for an interesting thread: movies that greatly transcend the limits of their production values, or something along those lines.)
Among films I’ve seen in the last couple of years, Ichi the Killer (aka Koroshiya Ichi) was good and disturbing. Pretty much everything I’ve seen from the director, Takashi Miike, was pretty damn disturbing. If that’s your thing I highly recommend him.
His most disturbing might be Visitor Q.
I saw Freaks by some weird quirk when I was 8 years old. It was being shown at a neighborhood theater and I went (solo) and watched it. Community outrage lead to the theater ending its showing the very next day.
Not a really sick movie, but to an 8 year old in 1966 it was pretty weird.
More disturbing than Ichi? Yikes. I’ll have to check it out.
Though ISOYG is, on the surface, about a woman taking revenge on her male attackers, I wouldn’t call it feminist. The rape goes on too long, in too much loving detail, for it just to be there as fuel for the revenge sequence. It’s pretty obviously played to titillate a male crowd, just as the violence is played to horrify them in the same way other super violent b-flicks do. The woman is an object, either way, in that movie.
It ain’t no Kill Bill, even, in terms of feminism.
Deadgirl left me pretty disturbed for a while. Its about zombie rape.
I disagree entirely, vehemently. The rape goes on as long as it does clearly in order to rub your nose in it. In typical rape-as-titillation movies, the rape ends before it becomes too disturbing. The rape is so clearly intended to be a portrayal of the believe that rape is about violence, not about sex, that anyone who is titillated by it has some self-examination to do. It’s absolutely an act of violence, not an act of sex.
And to call an “object” is simply wrongheaded. She is very clearly the subject: after the rape, when she takes up arms, she drives the narrative, completely, singlehandedly. The rest of the film is her acting, not being acted upon. I can think of few clearer examples of a woman being subject, NOT object, in a film.
And the ugliness and grittiness of the film serve to emphasize the fact that it’s very much an any anti-rape film, not a rape-as-entertainment film. By contrast, the sexiness of the women in the Kill Bills undermines those fims: there’s an irreconcilable contradiction in the simultaneous subjetness and objectness of the female characters; Tarantino wants it both ways. Which, OK, interesting.
But there’s no such ambiguity in ISOYG.
So maybe to postpone this hijack to its own thread, my bottom line:
I understand of course that different people see this film in different ways. But to me it’s such an unambiguous punch in the gut indictment of your standard rape-as-titillation flick that I don’t think I will ever understand how anyone can see it any other way. I understand that they do; I don’t understand how they do.
I get that I probably won’t convince you to reconsider the film. Fine. But there’s simply no possibility that you will ever convince me to see it as anything other than one of the most brutal pro-feminist, anti-rape statements I can possibly imagine.
I have never seen a movie that really disturbed me, and I’ve seen most of the things listed here. The most disturbing thing I can remember ever seeing in any form of media was not a movie but an episode of Are You Afraid Of The Dark. It was called “The Tale of One-Eyed Jack” and it was about the search for a killer who had supposedly escaped from his cell. Towards the end of the episode it was discovered that he never actually escaped at all; he got stuck in a ventilation shaft and starved to death. They found his skeleton in the shaft. The idea of someone being stuck in there to slowly starve to death bothered me more than anything I have ever seen before or since, and I have seen a lot of stuff. I guess I’m pretty hard to get a rise out of.
I’m sorry, I just can’t resist it.
Carnac the Magnificent: Sis, boom, bah.
Ed McMahon: Sis, boom, bah.
Carnace the Magnificient: What is the sound of an exploding sheep?
Carry on.
I don’t have much experience in sick film, but I watched this is horror last year.
OMG.
Yeah, that’s right, I found the film sick because I was sympathizing with the rapists :rolleyes:
There are lots of ways for a woman to get revenge, even bloody revenge, for a rape. Some of the ways presented here are just sick, a la the OP’s request.
I suppose it’s possible for a sick film to also be great, but if that is possible, this is not an exemplar.
Roddy
That’s the film I was going to mention. It’s not bloody & gory, like many of the films mentioned here, but it’s definitely sick & disturbing. I saw it at a screening at Anthology Film Archives about 6 or 7 years ago. For those who are curious, the film includes:
A father having sex with his own underage prostitute daughter, a woman shooting gallons of milk from her nipples and a man raping the corpse of a woman he killed only to get stuck in her because of rigor mortis.
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This actualy happened to someone I was a passing acquaintance of, he broke into a club after hours and did not know the club was being closed for renovations. He got caught in the ductwork and was unable to free himself. To make it worse, he was Deaf, although he was not mute. He was found months later.
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The concept behind I Spit on Your Grave was interesting. It might have been a great film in the hands of a better filmmaker. In the hands of Meir Zarchi, it was pure exploitative insulting crap. He didn’t have the talent to do better.
Wow. I have had some of my posts misconstrued here before–there’s an entire cult of Dopers who make a point of it, in fact–but this strikes me as quite possibly the 180est interpretation I’ve ever been subject to. Where on earth do you get that out of what I posted?
Man Bites Dog is pretty out there. It’s a very raw look at violence and the people who enjoy watching movies about it.