I Spit On Your Grave (2010)

I Spit on Your Grave was a 2010 American rape and revenge horror film and a remake of the controversial 1978 cult film of the same name. It was directed by Steven R. Monroe and stared Sarah Butler, Chad Lindberg, Daniel Franzese, Rodney Eastman, Jeff Branson and Andrew Howard.

Plot
The film opened with a young novelist, Jennifer Hills (Sarah Butler) driving to a shop to pick up the keys to a cabin that she rented for a few months and to get directions. She was going to the cabin in the woods down south to write her second novel. On her way to the cabin, she got lost and pulled into a gas station where she encountered a group of grease heads. She accidentally spilled some fluid on the head of the group, Johnny (Jeff Branson) and hit the panic button on her car, scaring him and causing him to spill gasoline all over himself. The other guys made fun of him for getting scared. Jennifer drove off into the gravelly road to the cabin. A few days passed and something strange happened. One night, she began to hear noises every so often that made her uneasy. Her first visitor was Matthew (Chad Lindberg) who was sent to the cabin to fix the broken toilet. His reward was a kiss from Jennifer and the shy Matthew ran out of the cabin. He later met up with the group and told them that "she likes me" and the guys began to talk about Jennifer whom they referred to as "the girl from the City" or "the girl".

Nightfall came and Jennifer began to hear noises around the house. She checked and found nothing. Her fears are realized when the gang from the gas station came to the cabin to get Matthew to lose his virginity. After they messed with her, making her perform fellatio on bottles and a gun, she was able to escape the cabin and ran off into the woods. She bumped into Storch (Andrew Howard), the sheriff and Earl (Tracey Walter), the person from whom she rented the cabin. Storch brought Jennifer back to the cabin acting like he was going to help her. He found wine and a marijuana joint and began to interrogate her. After an improper pat down, the boys came through the door and she realized that they are in cahoots. They held her down so Matthew could rape her. After he was done, she just got up and walked out butt naked outside the cabin and into the woods. She was confronted by the gang again. Andy held her head underwater and Storch anally raped her and they each had a turn raping her. Stanley was recording the entire event on his video camera the whole time. After all five men are done with her, she got up again and walked out of the woods and onto a bridge. Just when Storch was going to shoot her, Jennifer jumped into the river. The gang searched for her body, but had no luck finding her and began to get rid of any evidence left behind.

A month passed before Jennifer returned. She survived in the woods for a month eating as she explained later, bugs and other things and was staying in a run-down house in the woods. She started playing games with the group who all thought that Matthew lost it. To keep Earl quiet about Jennifer's visit, Storch killed him while hunting. Jennifer's first victim was Matthew, the slower of the bunch who had a crush on her and was the only one that felt remorse. Jennifer, however did not care and dragged him away with a noose around his neck. Her second and third victims are the group's two lackeys. Stanley (Daniel Franzese), the fat one stepped in a bear trap and Andy (Rodney Eastman) got knocked out with a baseball bat. Jennifer used fish hooks to keep Stanley's eyes open while she pulled out a fish and gutted it and spread the guts in his eyes and face. This was all recorded on his camera which was the same camera that he used to film her being raped. The fish guts attracted crows who began to peck on his face and eventually his eyeballs. Andy was tied up lying on a few boards over a bath tub being filled with water. Jennifer threw in some lye and removed one of the boards, forcing him to use his strength to stay out of the base. Eventually, his face hit the lye-filled bath tub. Each time that he pulled himself up, we saw his lye-burned face with his tongue dissolved. After being knocked out by a tire iron, Johnny was later strung up naked with a bridle in his mouth. Jennifer began to pull out his teeth one by one with pliers, then took out his own pistol and forced him to perform fellatio on it which was the same as he did to her and then she pulled out hedge clippers and cut off his penis with it and she stuck it in his mouth, leaving him to bleed to death.

After Jennifer was done with Johnny, she went to visit the sheriff's family. Pretending to be his daughter's school teacher, she talked to him on the phone. Storch raced home to find out that Jennifer was no longer there. He found out that she took his daughter to the playground. Storch raced there to find no one, except Jennifer in the back seat of his car. After the sheriff woke up from the blow from the baton, Jennifer began to rape Storch anally with a shotgun. She also attached a string to the trigger and the other end was tied around Matthew's wrist. She walked out of the house with Storch begging for mercy and cursing her out at the same time. Then, Matthew woke up and in a failed attempt by Storch to calm Matthew down, Matthew moved, firing the shotgun, killing both Storch and Matthew. Jennifer was then seen sitting in a tree with a smile on her face.

List of Deaths
List of deaths in the film, I Spit On Your Grave (2010)

Cast

 * Sarah Butler as Jennifer Hills
 * Chad Lindberg as Matthew
 * Daniel Franzese as Stanley
 * Rodney Eastman as Andy
 * Jeff Branson as John "Johnny" Miller
 * Andrew Howard as Sheriff Storch
 * Tracey Walter as Earl
 * Mollie Milligan as Mrs. Storch
 * Saxon Sharbino as Chastity Storch
 * Amber Dawn Landrum as Girl at Gas Station

Production
Principal photography began on November 2, 2009, under Steven R. Monroe's direction. It was distributed by CineTel, and produced by the company's president and CEO Paul Hertzberg. Lisa Hansen, Jeff Klein, Alan Ostroff, Gary Needle, and Meir Zarchi (director of the original) served as executive producers. Location filming took place in Louisiana. The film was written by Stuart Morse, based on Zarchi's screenplay.

Release
CineTel Films had a planned 2010 worldwide theatrical release. The film was part of the Texas Frightmare Weekend on 1 May 2010 in the Sheraton Grand Hotel in Irving, Texas and part of the Film4 Frightfest on 29 August 2010. The Canadian unrated premiere was part of the Fantasia Festival on 28 July 2010, with the complete cast and Meir Zarchi the director of the original. An unrated version was released in limited release on October 8, 2010 in the United States.

Home media
The film is distributed in the United States, Canada, Australia and the UK by Anchor Bay Entertainment. The DVD and Blu-ray were released in the United States on February 8, 2011. The DVD includes an audio commentary by director Steven R. Monroe and producer Lisa Hansen, 11 deleted scenes, and teasers and trailers.

The DVD was banned in New Zealand just before its April release.

Critical reception
Critical reaction to the film has been generally negative, with a 34% rating on Rotten Tomatoes. On Metacritic the film was assigned a rating of 27% based on reviews from 14 critics, indicating "generally unfavorable reviews". Roger Ebert gave the film a zero-star rating (the same one he'd given the original) and described it as the "despicable remake of the despicable 1978 film". He claimed that it added "a phony sense of moral equivalency", stating "If I rape you, I have committed a crime. If you kill me, you have committed another one. The ideal outcome would be two people unharmed in the first place." While he allowed that the movie was made "professionally," as opposed to the original version that was devoid of any kind of skills or artistry, he considered this largely in the service of the truly offensive material, the rape scenes, later summarizing "this [version] is more offensive, because it lingers lovingly and at greater length on realistic verbal, psychological and physical violence against the woman, and then reduces her 'revenge' to cartoonish horror-flick impossibilities."

Mick LaSalle of the San Francisco Chronicle wrote, "In addition to all the obvious things that are disgusting about this movie, I Spit on Your Grave is trying to get us to hate each other. Hate it instead. It makes more sense and the hatred is much more deserved. "Critic Andrew O'Hehir also denounced the notion that the film has a message, writing that it "just piles imaginary atrocities on top of real ones, and then halfheartedly claims that it means something. Well, it doesn't."

Some support for the film in mainstream press came from The New York Times, which wrote, "Female-empowerment fantasy or just plain prurience, 'Grave' is extremely efficient grindhouse." V.A. Musetto, from the New York Post, also offered some support for the film, stating, "If you can handle it, see it." Like the original, the film did find limited cult support. Fangoria magazine wrote that I Spit on Your Grave "...is just as raw and upsetting in its on screen brutality as the original. Perhaps more so, since the acting is significantly better this time around".

Sequels
A sequel, I Spit on Your Grave 2, directed by Steven R. Monroe, was produced and was given a limited theatrical release on September 20, 2013. The film's plot concerns a young aspiring model named Katie (Jemma Dallender) who accepts an offer to have photos taken for her modeling portfolio. Unfortunately for Katie, little does she know the event turns into a nightmare of torture, rape, and kidnapping. The story has a rape-revenge plot similar to the first film. In March 2015 Anchor Bay Entertainment announced with I Spit on Your Grave III: Vengeance is Mine, the 3rd installment of the franchise. Sarah Butler returned to her role as Jennifer Hills and R.D. Braunstein is set as the director of the film.