Jim Hemphill’s immaculately directed “Bad Reputation” is half “Carrie” and half “I Spit on Your Grave,” it’s a teen thriller that I can finally get behind, and one that never swims in the kiddy pool. This is a hardcore revenge film, and I enjoyed it from the very beginning. It’s also one of the few rape revenge flicks that have come around in years, with an utterly compelling series of events that leads to unthinkable carnage, after an utterly disturbing rape sequence renders a young insecure girl a merciless monster. Hemphill definitely has his ducks in a row with a film that really brings the best of the revenge genre to the screen, without ever watering the atmosphere down to appeal to a younger audience.
Tag Archives: Revenge
Dead Silence: Unrated (2007) (DVD)
Thanks to the advent of “The Twilight Zone,” R.L. Stine’s “Goosebumps,” and many other horrific entities, ventriloquist dummies have managed to become a pretty valid specter of fright all of my life. And thankfully, here comes James Wan to further perpetuate the fear of the ventriloquism in all its delights. “Dead Silence” is a film that wasn’t really an easy sell from the first minute. Surely, it starts off eerily enough, but it doesn’t really pick up until the second half. But what it accomplishes are genuine plot twists that only the boys from “Saw” can truly utilize, and man, are there ever plot twists abound, including one that’s a bit over the top, but truly creepy.
Hannibal Rising (2007)
This is us. This is us in America. We have to know about the monster, we have to demystify the boogeyman. We can’t be kept in the dark on some things. And of course, we have to know Hannibal is not a cold calculating killer, but a troubled child whose family was killed; so he decided to strike back at those who caused it. No, it’s actually the premise for this; I’m not confusing it for “Batman Begins.” And like the prequel to “Texas Chainsaw Massacre” we’re just supposed to believe Lecter became a cannibal one day.
Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance (Boksuneun naui geot) (2002)
Perhaps I wasn’t paying attention, or perhaps I was just falling asleep after the first hour of nothing, but I couldn’t understand about sixty percent of what occurred in “Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance.” Whether or not Park actually tells the story jumping from different time to time, I’ll never know, because characters I thought died pop up later, and events that suddenly never happened, leads to something unexpected. Park’s story is awfully disjointed to the point where I couldn’t even catch up.
Behind the Mask: The Rise of Leslie Vernon (2006)
He’s a skilled serial killer, a slasher along the lines of Jason, and, oh yeah, he’s a self-promoting sensationalist who wants to become a famous slasher of all things teen. Leslie Vernon lives in a world filled with monsters. He lives in a world where Jason, Freddy, and even Michael Myers wreak havoc on innocent victims and young teenagers. And what does Leslie Vernon want? He wants to be like them. And he’ll go through any lengths to live up to their legacies. And wouldn’t you know it? Director Scott Glosserman is about eighty percent of the way there.
Rosario Tijeras (2005)
Flora Martinez, aside from being absolutely beautiful and incredibly sexy, also provides a very good performance for “Rosario Tijeras” as the tragic and sometimes despicable Rosario who objectifies men the way she was objectified all of her life. She’s a being incapable of genuine love, and also seems incapable of finding true love. She’s someone who is used for her body, and carried around like a trophy, thus leads her own downfall in the face of her diminishing personal welfare. Her constant manipulation of her male counterparts is often achieved through her irresistible sex appeal, and this will often leave male audiences at a crossroads. The surefire draw should have been the lovely and vivacious Flora Martinez, who is an interesting choice for the lead of this snake of a woman. But then, at the end of it, I was pretty anxious to shut it off and move on.
I Spit on Your Grave (Day of the Woman) (1978)
Camille Keaton. What more is there to say about this woman? She’s so gorgeous, that I bet her feces smells like roses on freshly cut grass during the Spring. The statuesque and awfully beautiful Keaton is one of the highlights of the awfully gruesome “I Spit on Your Grave.” A film generally reviled, and yet so beloved among the great portion of movie lovers, this B revenge flick is a man hating saga before a slew of unofficial remakes stormed theaters in the 80’s. You have to appreciate a movie so reviled for doing what it set out to do, which is likely why many audiences are still offended by its cinematic offerings of a simplistic story of a woman being victimized and seeking vengeance, even to this day.
We sit there watching this woman be victimized almost endlessly, and after a while we want to seek pure revenge. That seems to be the general intent from director Zarchi. He draws out the pure horror for this character and brings the audience in at eye level. Hill is victimized and harassed, and chased, and raped, and raped, and raped some more. And it becomes utterly grueling to sit through. What did she do to deserve it? Nothing. She’s merely a victim of a series of senseless crimes, and she’s alone in this town. Why should you watch this? Curiosity, perhaps, experimentation, and experiencing what is, whether some like it or not, a cinematic zeitgeist of grind house filmmaking, and pure filmmaking in general. There’s simply nothing more to the plot than what can be described in two sentences.
An author vacationing at a local friend’s house to work on her book is attacked and raped by five men. Surviving, she appears two weeks later, and proceeds to kill them in a fit of bloody revenge. There’s simply nothing more to it. But what Marchi offers in this film is much more than dialogue or complexities can offer. It just visits a heinous and utterly senseless crime that seemed to almost be a sub-conscious word of warning to sexual freedom. This is a film that appeared subsequent to the feminist movement, and the free love era, and Hill seems to embody this attitude while being ravaged by the small town psychos who simply take that to their advantage.
Hill lies wide open, swims, and even lies on a boat in the river, and the group of men that watch and wait, make her pay for it. And many will say “She didn’t deserve this attack,” but Marchi seems to offer the notion that Hill may not have deserved it, but she sure was offering meat to the lions, whether she knew it or not. And she shows a woman’s wrath in ways that are still shocking. I mean, I guarantee you’ll re-consider getting into a hot bath with a woman after seeing what happens to the group leader Johnny. You really will. Women will cringe, men will cringe and instinctively cup their better half. Even decades later, the film still retains its shock factor and sheer gasp inducing imagery, and that’s an accomplishment. Keaton’s performance is rather fantastic and I stick to that notion.
Her rape is something that will be remembered for days on end, after viewing this. She screams, she suffers, and in one scene shambles home holding her arms up in sheer disgust at her violated, torn body. And once she seeks revenge, she hits the deep end and never comes back from it. “I Spit on You Grave” is not a film I’d normally enjoy: Man-hating cinema. But, it offers something that was genuine in its time, and it’s a classic that should be seen. In spite of the repetitiveness it gets caught in the halfway mark, “I Spit on Your Grave” is still an effective and shocking bit of revenge cinema with Camille Keaton burning herself into my brain as this gorgeous woman who becomes a stone cold punisher on the monsters who ravaged her.
In 1980 Roger Ebert described this as “A movie so sick, reprehensible and contemptible that I can hardly believe it’s playing in respectable theaters,” along with an obvious mortified declaration of: “There is no reason to see this movie except to be entertained by the sight of sadism and suffering.” It’s not surprising many folks consider this utter putrid, but “I Spit on Your Grave” should be looked on as a completely different sort of revenge film. It’s one that not only inspires such hatred from its heroine/victim Jennifer Hill, but it manages to inspire pure hatred from its audience. And it’s not surprising that many who defend it seem to suffer a harsh scrutiny, because I’ve found many seem to share Ebert’s thought process.
You can argue the film is sick, but you also have to admit it’s a very powerful rape and revenge thriller that set the standard and still compels, whether it’s through offending or mesmerizing its audience.