As many of you may know, this is possibly the most infamous of the notorious 1970s revenge movies. For those without the proverbial clue, these so-called “revenge movies” are flicks in which an innocent and vulnerable female lead is beaten/raped/forced to change long distance providers, and takes a brutal revenge on her victimizers that makes men everywhere cringe and feminists shout, "Is that all?! You can do better then that sister! Work the BALLS! WORK THE BAAAAAAAAAAAALLS!!!". That's about when they crack me in the face with a combat boot before crushing my genitalia and marching off to get their buzzcuts straightened.

Anyway, the movie centers around a semi-attractive young writer from Manhattan named Jennifer Hill (played by Camille Keaton) who's taking a sabbatical to the wildermess (yes, that's an 'm') of New England, to a summer home she's purchased on the Hutsatonic River. When she stops for a bit of petrol to feed her motorcar, she's already caught the wandering eye of one of the "pleasant" local merchants, i.e. a pump jockey. Upon arrival at her little hole-away-from-home in the armpit of the Northeast, Jennifer does something most sane people wouldn't think of doing when staying in a strange and unknown surrounding: she drops her dressings and hops in the murky waters of the Hutsatonic for some skinny dipping… who does she think she is, a bubbly-headed college girl at an abandoned summer camp frequented by a lunatic in sports equipment?

All the socially wrong things about this little taboo of hers aside, she has no idea what could be swimming in that cesspool! She's just asking for a very private and very unpleasant Squirm moment. Meanwhile, the pump jockey and his 2 equally ignorant, unsanitary and backwoodsy compadres hang around getting trashed off homemade toilet wine, all boasting about how they're going to conquer every piece of poontang within 50 miles of them once they leave the confines of East Bumblefuck and head for the urban sprawl. Yeah guys, there's nothing hotter to a city girl that a hairy, greasy, shirtless guy in coveralls ("that don't quite cover all") with a horse-like overbite and a far from masterful understanding of the English language, who thinks he's God's gift to the female of the species and thusly uses this delusion to fuel his suave "if you don't fuck me I'm gonna rape you anyway" attitude toward dating… gimme a second to rest my fingers…

Also hanging with this trio of humanity's biggest failures is the local village idiot Matthew, who's content with delivering groceries to his neighbors and fantasizing about boobs. The drunkards are determined to get their little walking punchline laid though. The lucky girl? Yep, that's right, it's little miss bean pole, Jenny. Though she might take pity on Matt after he delivers her groceries the rest of the summer and let him cop a feel on her ass or flash him some nipple, it's not too likely she's about to open up for the guy (after all, the law could look at that as corruption of an imbecile), so it's going to take more than a few mispronounced words and stuttered sentence fragments to woo this distinguished broad, but the good ol' boys already got the solution: rape. Yes, it's the solution to any redneck quagmire (which, by the way, is a word that no redneck would understand to begin with): forcing sexual acts upon a less than willing target. Your wife won't bend over for you for any price? Rape her. Having legal problems with an ex-girlfriend because she got a restraining order against you for that time you got drunk and raped her? Get drunk and rape her again. The local high school football team lost the big homecoming game and you lost your beer money betting on it? Rape a cheerleader from the opposing team. Horny, but there's nobody around to rape? Go out to the barn and rape any number of available livestock. See, the life of a redneck is a simple one. You work on a tractor or plow fields or let Jeff Foxworthy write humorous observations about your miserable life all day, then you go out, get drunk, rape something and go home to watch the tractor pulls.

Back to the movie (if you can call it that), whilst she's sunbathing the next day Jenn is accosted by the whoopin' and hollerin' quartet, dragged into a nearby patch of swamp and brutalized on and off for the next 20 minutes, complete with creepy harmonica interlude that brings along a Deliverance type of hillbilly auditory dread. This sinister undertone is only heightened when you realize the goof playing the instrument is decked out in highwater pants and his patented hillbilly rapin' suspenders, which are of course suspenders whose sole use is to hold up the highwaters between rapings… you'll notice the main topic of this review, and I apologize for harping on the subject, but I'm running on fumes here and I… oh fuck it, just keep ramblin' on.

Amidst the unpleasantries, things go from bad to nightmarish as one of the bucktoothed, unshaven cretins gives Jenny the "back of a Volkswagen™" treatment, screwing her in a very uncomfortable place, which would become a favorite of Hollywood's Ben Affleck many years later. 15 minutes into the proceedings, the seemingly unending parade of forced entry makes it's way into Jenny's house, where the living room plays privy to many a continued ugly scene. Caked in mud and bloody and bruised from what's already been done to her, Matthew gets some booze in his system and decides to take his sloppy seconds on Jenn, urged on by the inaudible Comanche war cries of his drunken audience. I have to fast forward through a lot of this stuff in this viewing, not because of the rape in itself (they are all actors after all) but just because these are some of the UGLIEST people I've ever seen baring their greasy flesh for a camera!… and I've seen more amateur '70s porn than I care to recount!

It's a writhing tangle of pale, hairy, dirty, greasy, scrawny bodies with gnarled and unkempt pubic hair. In the unholy name of Cthulhu, Camille Keaton looks like the backwoods cousin of Calista Flockheart she's so disgustingly boney and meatless! But, don't worry kids, I've got a 5 gallon drum of Dramamine™, a quart of Captain Morgan™ and one very deep barf bucket for these situations, and what doesn't kill me… well, nothing can kill me, I'm the God of Death, so… uhm… I guess that… I should shut up before my brain overheats and shuts down, resorting me to an unfunny pile of hair and brains with a sense of humor on par with "Baby Bob"… I may not be able to die, but I can be scared so badly an enema won't be necessary. Why am I continuing to go off on pointless diatribes that have nothing to do with this movie? I'm waiting for the fucking rape stuff to get over with and I can think of a lot of pointless things in a 25 minute time span!

After raping her, beating her, berating her and tearing up what exists of her novel, the pigfuckers leave Jenny a near comatose vegetable on the floor and leave Matthew with the task of killing her so she can't point out her assailants when the shock finally wears off… say 30 years… after she's long dead and buried 6 feet under. But, unable to kill, Matt goes soft for the second time that day (he couldn't get his rocks off, as all the pressure to perform got to him. But then we've all been there on our first time, right?... right?!) and simply wipes the knife's blade in the blood dribbling from Jenny's mouth, taking it back to his pals as proof of her "death" before the group leaves, content that their evil acts have been properly covered. As for Jenny, she eventually collects herself and drags herself upstairs to wash up, then snoozes in bed a few days to heal before sitting around to brood and put the pieces of her book back together and write a few more chapters… okay, is she trying to forget the tremendous savaging she got by immersing herself in her work, or is she collecting the events in type? Why the fuck is she not calling the cops or meeting a hit man in a darkly lit K-Mart™ parking lot in the middle of the night!?

A few days later, Jenny's canoe finally floats back to shore behind her house, which is really odd, considering you'd think the current would've carried that thing 4 states away within that time, but I guess the physics of canoes and river currents aren't a big subject in this kind of movie. A full two weeks later, still nothing has happened yet between Jenny and her attackers. Is she just going to wait out the rest of the summer and head back to New York with a cargo hold full of excess emotional and mental baggage, or is something gonna happen here?! If that is the case, at least it'll probably all be documented in her book and she'll likely make a mint off of it. Shit, Lifetime, WE and Oxygen would get into a bidding war over who gets to make the movie first and who gets stuck with Eric Roberts starring. Would all that money make her forget about all her torment at the oversized and unwashed hands of those rednecks, or is this all more suffering for her art than anyone should be subjected to? Hmmm, a question that makes us all put ourselves in her shoes: would keeping quiet and making a mint off of your story of being gangraped by hillbillies be worth having to go through the actual experience? Then again, who's to say she can't make all that cash and get some violent shit revenge at the same time? I won't be saying it, that's for sure! She'd probably go all Last House On The Left on Lil' Anub if I did, and that's something I don't want to go through again… did I say "again"? Uhm, I meant "with Jim"… wait, no… I meant, errr, "a gin", like a cotton gin… going… through… well, that's enough about my sexual bloopers and practical jokes (my new show on the Hallmark Channel, cumming this fall!).

Meanwhile, the four rape apes start to get suspicious. It's been a fortnight and there's been no word of a body being found or reports of any rank odors stinkin' up the town, so it looks like our guys are left with no choice but to go back to the house and investigate. No surprise when the harmonica player and the deranged guy who looks like a bad John Saxon impersonator get around to it, they see who else but Jenny; relaxing out back by the shore, still hacking away at her book. Now it's time to get to the grave spitting! There is going to be grave spitting, right?

After kicking the shit out of Matt for lacking even the simple testicular fortitude to kill a defenseless and beaten woman, our antagonists soon learn it's not legal ramifications and lawyer fees they need to be losing sleep over, but the righteous vengeance of a Manhattan girl with God and a .38 on her side! And so, decked out in the height of '70s vigilante fashion, Jenny gets to work on her well-crafted and systematic revenge plot. Out muscled by each of her victims-to-be, the obvious choice would be her gun, right? The problem with such a device is that a gun is good for killing someone quickly and efficiently. Say you're running from a pimp to whom you owe lots of money. If you want to keep from getting your Johnson decapitated and added to his collection, you're gonna need something along the lines of a .44 to splatter his brains and gold teeth all over his pimp-mobile. But, if you're looking for revenge on someone (say you're the pimp now), you're not going to give them a fast and semi-painless death. No, you're going to pull out their fingernails with pliers, pluck their nose hairs with tweezers heated with a lighter, and stick large sewing needles into various spots of their body… and that's just the appetizer.

No, to open up a whole 7 course meal of whoop-ass on someone or someones who have done you wrong (say sodomized you or unfairly critiqued your novel, which is a work in progress and needs time for refinement like any project, damn it!), you gotta make it last and you gotta make it hurt. Jenny's from New York, I can't emphasize that enough, so you know she's got plenty of shit in her head down to the last painful details for each of these peckers. Speaking of peckers, Matthew, whom the Cheroke Indians refer to as, "He with the Limp Noodle", is the first to meet his fate, when he's sent to Jenny's house on a grocery run. Fearing retaliation, he slips a butcher knife down the front of his pants to prove how truly retarded he is. One slip or a fall on his bicycle and *BAM!*, Jenny doesn't even NEED to do anything to him! But, somehow he manages to make it all the way there without dismembering his favorite appendage, leaving Jenn to seduce the wonky little fuck, go so far as to let him get off a free quickie and then lynch him from a tree, pants around his ankles as she then tosses him and his bike into the river. The coroner's report? I suspect it would read something like, "… signs of swelling, heavy bruising and trauma around jugular and throat area. However, found in river with bicycle, so case will be labeled an accidental suicide".

The following day target #2 gets his chance, as Jenny heads for the gas station to confront the pump monkey. She picks him up in her car with promises of some dirty sex, only to hold him at gunpoint in a clearing in the forest and make him strip. Not as ignorant a scumbag as he seems, the guy somehow convinces Jenny that her raping was her own fault, using the old "’no’ means ‘yes’" and "you dress seductively in an effort to seduce men, then get off playing the victim when you practically make them rape you" bullshit. Now, knowing that she's a horrible person and deserves being held down, smacked around and violated, Jenn takes the shaved ape back to her place to bathe him and jerk him off… and after all these millennia of trying to be a nice guy, I find that being an asshole really DOES work on chicks. Things are of course amiss though, when Jennifer tells her falsely secure boyfriend about what she did to Matt, then proceeds to dissect the man's penis and lock him in the bathroom to bleed to death. Hmmm, maybe the whole "respecting of women" thing is a good idea to stick to after all, cuz like this guy, "I can't stand the bleeding!"

When Matt and their leader don't show up, harmonica guy and the pseudo-Saxon put 1 and 1 together to get 7. Their abominable math skills aside, they decide that it's time to get Miss Hill while they can still outnumber her. She proves rather prominent in the field of motorboat dueling though, as she overturns the duo and sends them into the river. The music man ends with a nice sized axe planted in his spine and Clone Saxon falls as just another victim of outboard motor rage. Here's a tip for future boat outings kiddies: if you get knocked out of your dingy and have to grab onto the side of a boat to keep from drowning, try not to make it the motor side… Everything is wrapped up in a disturbing package, as the end credits role from a first person shot from Jennifer's boat, no music but the engine running as she leaves this evil place of suspenders and harmonicas.

Keaton had little work following this role. It's gotta be hard to get work after everyone's only picture of you in their head is of that afro bush, those lanky limbs and you cutting off some guy's dick with a steak knife, especially in the male dominated world of moviemaking. For example, of the few other roles listed for the lady in her IMDB filmography, one of them is on a flick called Raw Force, credited as "Girl on toilet"… sure, that could be defined as illustrious… provided Webster's Dictionary has revised "illustrious" to mean "pathetic, worthless and better off having never happened in the first place". As for director Meir Zarchi, his follow up flick, Don't Mess With My Sister is something I've yet to see, but reviews I've read have been 98.6% negative, due mostly to peoples' expectations of something worthy of the shock and "hey dumbass, look at this!" way I Spit takes hold of your hand and shoves it into a food processor. With that failure came some event that kept Zarchi from filmmaking ever since. Whether he couldn't take all the negativity for one of his creations or it’s just that no one would hire him anymore, either way he just hasn't worked since. Maybe he had to leave behind his old life to join the CIA. Maybe he turned into a bearded, bug eating hermit in a cave in the Appalachian Mountains. Maybe he realized it was his life long dream to join a Polka band and spend the rest of his life playing German hip hop at Oktoberfest celebrations the world over.

Whatever the case, at least he'll always have I Spit On Your Grave which, though to some is a thing they'd rather have nowhere within 50 miles of their resume, will always hold a place for Meir in the annals of shock film. Yes, though movies from the age of Jimmy Carter's tyrannical reign become more and more obscure with the passing years (thanks to the appearance of hundreds of quickie cheap-o pics every cycle of the seasons), I Spit On Your Grave continues to last as a disturbing portrayal of revenge and no-holds-barred brutal reality. Though I make light on how ugly and dirty these people are, they're realistic… at least more realistic than the silicone plastic mannequin people that have claimed the Hollywood hills as their own. Come on, like some bimbo with big rubber tits and a size -2 waistline is real? Or rapists with six pack abs and iron pecs are any more real? These people don't rape each other; these people get laid at the drop of a hat… or a $100 bill. No, the unwashed, ignorant, self-absorbed rednecks are real. You won't find Camille Keaton on the cover of a magazine or with her ass in the air for Playboy, because she's real, not the product of some Dr. Frankenstein's scalpel in an effort to make herself the "perfect" fulfillment to "every" man's fantasy. This reality of the casting, along with the graphic rape scenes and the all around muddy and greasy appearance of '70s movies in general makes this a flick that you can't forget, even if you try. It's sick… and it's mentally scarring… and it's effective, which is something that few movies are these days, or movies in general since the dawn of moving photography.

The lack of music actually helps too at times, giving us nothing to distract from the real horrors being shoved into our eye sockets, giving us no escape into our happy place. But, the acting sucked, the direction had nothing to distinguish it from any other point-and-click 90 minute feature you'll find in the dank and dusty crevices of your local dirt level rental store and the last 10 minutes or so felt rushed to bring it all in under a 100 minute limit. Let’s say I could’ve used fewer scenes of graphic rape and our heroine hanging around doing nothing and more brutal revenge stuff. All in all, despite being a memorable flick, that doesn't mean it's a good flick, so I'll stick with the rating... I'm also a little miffed about there being no spitting on graves... why not just stick with the original title of Day Of The Woman? It makes a lot more sense...

H.O.P.E.L.E.S.S. Rating:
- Uggh, this shit is way too inappropriate for viewing with friends or anyone else for that matter. Unless you're dating someone who gets off on this type of thing (and there are a LOT of fucked-in-the-head type people who this actually applies to), this is something to be viewed alone if at all.

If You Liked This Flick, Check Out: I Spit On Your Corpse, I Piss On Your Grave or Naked Vengeance

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