I Spit On Your Grave

After the unlikely and mild success of 2009's The Last House on the Left remake, it was only a matter of time before I Spit on Your Grave (the ill-famed sexploitation film from the Grindhouse era) would receive a big budget remake. Said remake manages to recreate the same characters and horrifying scenarios while also paying homage to certain key points in the original film in a disturbing manner. Unlike the original, Jennifer Hills (Sarah Butler) is a fighter who doesn't use her sexuality as a weapon after she's brutally raped and violated by a group of rednecks (who all look like they hail from Los Angeles, by the way), but rather sets up Saw-inspired traps to gain vengeance upon her attackers. Unlike Meir Zarchi's uncanny ability to focus the lens on every crinkle of pubic hair, Steven R. Monroe's direction is focused primarily on the dominance of the act rather than showing overly explicit nudity. By putting far more attention into the mental degradation of Jennifer's character, preferable over the physical degradation, Monroe also proves that one doesn't need to film 25 minutes of interrupted rape to elicit feelings of fear and dread from their audience. Like Quentin Tarantino's Inglourious Basterds, I Spit on Your Grave is gore-drenched daydream because even though we would like to believe that a woman could knock out her assailants with a dainty blow to the head with a baseball bat and torture them relentlessly, the scenario is as likely as Eli Roth pumping Hitler full of lead. Although devoid of thematic resonance like its predecessor, 2010's I Spit on Your Grave is a film that doesn't pretend to be something it's not, which can't be said about the original. The DVD features include a 15-minute behind-the-scenes featurette, trailers for both the original and remake, and a slew of unmemorable deleted scenes.