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I Spit on Your Grave (1978)
(aka Day of the Woman)
In producer/director/writer Meir Zarchi's gruesomely-told
and widely vilified exploitation story, a notorious rape/vigilante
revenge splatter-horror ('nastie') film:
- the character of NYC socialite/writer Jennifer
Hills (Camille Keaton, grand-niece of the famous comedian Buster
Keaton) who rented a remote and woodsy summer riverside dwelling
in Connecticut, and was spied upon; when she first arrived
at the house, she went skinny-dippin
- she made the acquaintance of four
locals, including three aimless, misogynistic and sex-obsessed
guys she had first met at a gas station (Eron Tabor as gas station
manager Johnny, and his two unemployed friends Anthony Nichols
as Stanley, and Gunter Kleeman as harmonica-playing Andy), and
a fourth bespectacled, mentally-slow supermarket delivery man (Richard
Pace as Matthew Lucas) who brought Jennifer an order of groceries
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Johnny Stillman
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Matthew Lucas
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Andy Chirensky
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Stanley Woods
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- there were two entirely painful-to-watch rape sequences
that were graphic and lengthy (30 minutes in a 100 minute film!),
one in the muddy forest, and another in her house
- one day while she was sunning
herself in a canoe on the river, Stanley and Andy circled her in
their motorboat, and towed her canoe to shore where they harrassed
her and chased her through a muddy forest. They were met by the other
two men - the excuse to hassle her was to aid Matthew in losing his
virginity to her ("The broad's all yours. Come on....We got
her for you"). So they stripped her of
her bathing suit and offered her up, but when Matthew chickened
out ("I can't do it now, not now!"), Johnny raped her
in a meadow in degrading fashion. She vainly struggled against
them as she was held down and violated.
Repeated Rapes and Threatened Murder: In Muddy Forest
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She crawled away and ran off, only to be tracked
down again - and then brutally and anally raped by Andy while restrained
over a large boulder - and letting out a horrendous scream! Her experience
was particularly heinous, including both a vaginal and anal rape in
the outdoors.
Repeated Rapes and Threatened Murder: In House
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Matthew's Attempted Rape
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Bottle Rape by Stanley
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Matthew Faking Jennifer's Death
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- there was a second attempted
rape in her rental house before she could call the police; an
impotent, slightly-drunken Matthew complained to his buddies: "I
can't come, you're interrupting my concentration...I can't, not
with people watching me."
As Jennifer laid there helpless, Stanley told her: "Total submission.
That's what I like in a woman. Total submission," then briefly bottle-raped
her and thrust his crotch into her face, yelling: "Suck it, bitch!" as
he repeatedly slapped her and called her a whore.
- when ordered and coaxed
into stabbing Jennifer to death in the heart to eliminate their only
witness to the multiple crimes ("If
she's dead, she can't point her finger at us"), Matthew faked
the murder by spreading blood on the knife blade
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bruised and battered, the traumatized victim Jennifer knelt under
a cleansing shower; two weeks later after Jennifer
was spotted on the lawn by the river, Matthew was beaten up for lying
- planning revenge, the traumatized victim
paid a visit to a church to pray for forgiveness before her brutal
and bloody counter-assault she had planned, followed by the scenes
of her angry (yet often seductive) revenge against each of the four
attackers; two of the killings involved sexually seducing and distracting
the men beforehand, in order to lower their defenses
- (1) outside her home where she
had summoned Matthew to deliver groceries, she unbuttoned her see-through
nightgown as she promised him: "I could have given you a summer
to remember for the rest of your life." She kissed him, pulled
down his pants to his ankles, and gave herself to him, before slipping
a rope noose around his neck while he was climaxing and then hanging
him from a tree. She dumped his body into the lake.
- (2) she picked up Johnny at the gas station, held
him at gunpoint and forced him to strip, but then admitted that she
had inappropriately teased the group into raping her. She invited
him back to her house, promising: "Come
on, I'll give you a hot bath." Naked in the warm bathtub with
him, she manually stimulated him as he closed his eyes and relaxed
("You've got great hands - God bless your hands. Oh yeah, that's
fantastic"). She conducted a lethal bloodletting castration
- a literal bloodbath with a conveniently-placed carving knife (his
first reaction: "That's so sweet, it's painful"), causing
him to bleed to death in the locked bathroom ("What have you
done to me? Oh, God! Oh, s--t!...I can't stop the bleeding...It won't
stop bleeding!"). In the living room, she calmly sat stone-faced
in a rocker and listened to a Puccini opera on the phonograph as
he screamed in the background and died. She burned his clothes in
the fireplace, cleaned up the blood-splattered bathroom, and dumped
his body on the basement stairs.
- (3) after hijacking Stanley's motorboat
on the river, she pushed him into the water and terrorized him by
threatening to run him over; meanwhile on-shore, Andy (with an axe)
came to the rescue and charged into the water; his axe ended up on
the floor of the motorboat; Andy swam out into the water to rescue
the drowning Stanley, just as Jennifer swung Andy's axe into his
back
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Andy Axed in Back
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Stanley Disemboweled by Motorboat
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- (4) she pretended to help rescue
Stanley, but then disemboweled him with the outboard motor as he
clung onto the engine while climbing into the boat. She uttered the
same words he had spoken to her earlier: "Suck
it, bitch!" (the film's final line of dialogue).
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Jennifer: Skinny-Dipping
Cleansing Shower after Rapes
Visit to Church
Seduction of Matthew Before Hanging Him
Castration of Johnny
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