Off Script: I Spit on Your Grave (1978)

Film: I Spit on Your Grave (1978)
Format: Starz Encore on rockin’ flatscreen.

When I was a kid, I Spit on Your Grave (also known as Day of the Woman) was one of those movies you heard about because your older brother had seen it. Kind of like Faces of Death in that respect. That’s really what I knew about this going in. It was something my brother Tom had seen at some sort of midnight movie somewhere and talked about with his friends. I picked up what I knew about it through osmosis more than anything else.

So what did I know? I Spit on Your Grave is about a woman who is gang raped and, once she recovers, who takes bloody, nasty revenge on her rapists. And guess what? That’s pretty much the whole movie. The first half leads up to the rape and contains the disturbingly long rape sequence. The second half is the revenge of our heroine, who exacts it with an increasing brutality as the film winds to a sudden and abrupt conclusion.