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Article Excerpt
Just as devotees of foreign 'art films' and Hollywood classics have long enjoyed deluxe DVD editions of their favorite films released by The Criterion Collection, fans of horror, sci-fi, exploitation, and cult films are now being catered to, Criterion-style, by Elite Entertainment's new series of "Millennium Edition" DVD releases of such genre classics as Night of the Living Dead (1968), George Romero's debut feature about a marauding army of flesh-eating zombies, Stuart Gordon's Re-Animator (1985), an H.P. Lovecraft-inspired tale of a mad scientist who brings the dead back to life, and Meir Zarchi's I Spit on Your Grave (1978), acclaimed or reviled, depending on your point of view, as the most powerful or repulsive rape revenge melodrama ever filmed.
While all three Millennium Edition releases boast state-of the-art visual and audio improvements, filmmaker commentary tracks and interviews, poster and photo galleries, deleted scenes, storyboards, and the like, the I Spit on Your Grave DVD, the newest in the series, is also enhanced with a commentary track by drive-in movie critic and cultfilm guru Joe Bob Briggs. Former host of The Movie Channel's Drive-In Theatre and TNT's Monster Vision, author of several books--including The Cosmic Wisdom of Joe Bob Briggs, A Guide to Western Civilization, or My Story, two anthologies of his film criticism, and, most recently, Profoundly Disturbed: The Shocking Movies That Changed History--and author of several UPI columns (Joe Bob's Drive-In, The Vegas Guy, and Joe Bob's America), Joe Bob has worked the exploitation film beat for over twenty years now and was the ideal choice as film critic to record a commentary track for I Spit on Your Grave.
In fact, Joe Bob has long been a champion of this much-maligned film, which he feels was "destroyed" by critics, in particular by Roger Ebert and Gene Siskel, who wrote extremely negative reviews in their respective Chicago newspapers and then targeted the film for further abuse in their popular "Sneak Previews" TV program. Ebert, for example, called the film "sick, reprehensible, and contemptible... an expression of the most diseased and perverted darker human natures," while Siskel suggested that I Spit on Your Grave might actually encourage men to commit rapes.
In his commentary track, Joe Bob makes a passionate defense of the film, and contends with the statements of Siskel and Ebert, as well as some feminist critics, on a virtual scene-by-scene basis. He makes a convincing case for their misreadings of the film and their utterly wrongheaded condemnations of it. Lauding the film's stark dramatic simplicity--little dialog, no music score, and an almost documentary-like visual style--Joe Bob argues that the film clearly privileges the female victim's point of view, that there is nothing remotely sexual or titillating about the film, which emphasizes the brutality of the rape scenes, and, at one point, exasperatedly asks, "If Susan Brownmiller, Andrea Dworkin and Gloria Steinem all tried to come up with their version of the nature of rape, wouldn't it look something like this?"
Joe Bob's commentary also provides lots of interesting background information on the filmmakers and performers (the lead actress, Camille Keaton, is the grandniece of Buster!) and discusses I Spit on Your Grave and the rape revenge melodrama in general within a broader social and cultural context. He compares it to a wide variety of other rape revenge films and at various points, belying the good ol' boy pose, makes references to Aristotle, Greek Tragedy, Puccini,...
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