After watching this film and reflecting on it, I feel robbed. I feel like there should have been several hundred different things I should have felt that I did not. Similarly to my experience watching Feed, I felt like the subject matter of I Spit on Your Grave was treated with indifference.
Jennifer is spending the summer in the country writing her first novel. She has rented a house by a lake. She stops at a gas station and the attendant is quite friendly. There are a couple of locals entertaining themselves over in the grass. When she arrives at the house she has some groceries delivered, and the delivery man is also very nice, and might be a little slow. What I assume is a result of a combination of boredom, sweltering heat and backwoods inbreeding, this group of men violently beat and rape Jennifer at 3 different locations and leave her for dead. This is something that they will soon regret in a terribly boring, anti-climactic fashion.
Technically, this really isn't horror by normal standards. I mean, the events are horrible, which is why I categorize it as such, but there isn't a whole lot of blood, that much violence (outside of the rape) and there is no tension whatsoever. It's funny, though. There was no music in the film, except when actual music was playing on a stereo or something like that. I found this to be an interesting choice, because it would make any scares or tense moments organic, without music to tell you when to be frightened or when to jump. But those things never happened. It was like a lazy walk through a few weeks of events and then a quick slip out the back unnoticed. The film even ended without warning, with Jennifer boating off in to the credits.
My main problem with this film is, I felt indifference toward every single character. Now, please do not misunderstand me, the crimes committed against this woman were heinous and vile and I hated the offenders while in the act. But there was really no characterization, and half the time I doubted that these guys really would have done these things, especially as the film went on. They kept making horrible decisions, like getting in the car with her after finding out that she was still alive. One of them takes a bath with her. I saw them think, they can rationalize things. How could they make these decisions?
So, Jennifer takes her revenge on each one of them, one by one. Each kill was preceded with such obvious ruse or what seemed like endless delay, they were completely void of any terror or surprise. They were no different than any other scene in the film, really. Also, due to the lack of any real character development, I almost just didn't give a shit if they lived or died. It was like watching robots do horrible things to each other and then trying to imagine what it would be like if the robots were humans.
I hope that the recent remake of this film does a much better job of what the original should have done. It should have scarred me, honestly. I should have been very upset, and then shouting with glee every time Jennifer killed someone. Instead, I was left relatively the same as I was before watching it.
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