I Spit On Your Grave is neither as bad as many classic reviews would have you believe, nor anywhere near as important as its director thinks it is. The film is not, in the end, ruthlessly and pitilessly misogynistic, nor is it as brutally graphic as legend has long held -- but perhaps that is indicative of gradual desensitization after a long, violent 30 years at the movies.

All the controversial hubbub surrounding the film's incessant depiction of rape and torture is almost immediately squelched by the film itself -- it is almost too clumsy to be truly evil. Rape in any context is heinous and repulsive, but the scenes in I Spit on Your Grave are so pedestrian they're almost silly; the rapists jump around howling like banshees, and during the violent act make no movements that seem even remotely sexual. The simulated contact is faker than in late-night soft-core Cinemax. Slightly harsher is the violence, but it's rather neutered (no pun intended) in its presentation, though that may again be one desensitized man's opinion. Truly disconcerting are the more believable, realistic moments when the rapists stop hollering like lunatics and begin shouting sexist epithets and inflicting non-sexual physical harm, but the film's purpose is to spend more time inflicting pain on the rapists than watching them inflict pain on their victim.

The story is as simple as a straight line. A woman leaves her apartment in the city for a solitary vacation in a country cabin. She stops for gas and meets three men who make idle chit-chat. She sunbathes in a hammock and skinny-dips in the river. Soon the men from the gas station are stalking her in a speedboat, and they bring their mentally-challenged buddy along to trap the woman, beat her, and rape her. Then again, and finally a third time. When they finally finish (I guess the third time's a charm), she takes two weeks to recover before turning the tables on her rapists and killing them off one by one. Sandwiched in between the violence and torture is one ridiculous scene in which the woman walks into a church, looks up at the Jesus statue, and asks forgiveness for the crimes she is about to commit. I guess that's supposed to give us sympathy for the heroine, but I would've liked it better if she'd planned her revenge in cold blood. And truth be told, "in cold blood" is precisely how she does it anyway; the church scene is simply an unnecessary and pretentious bridge from violence-against-woman to violence-by-woman.

I Spit on Your Grave is staged and photographed at the level of a '70s-era instructional video, and for a while that seems like what it is... you know, until all the raping and killing start to happen. The audio is also horrifically recorded, but none of the characters say anything worth listening to, so that isn't a big problem. For director Meir Zarchi's work, this much can be said: His visual sense is more astute than a young Wes Craven's in the similarly-themed Last House on the Left. The content, too, exists above the fray of simple exploitation. Yes, there is no intricate plot or multi-dimensional characters, but in an odd way, that's the point. The men treat the woman coldly, with no regard other than as a plaything. Her retaliation is served in exactly the same manner. And because she not only preys on the men physically, but mentally as well, using superior intelligence to lure them into her trap and exact brutal revenge, she wins.

The film's lack of any nuanced structure or emotional subtext makes it seem cold and calculating, when in fact it is a female empowerment fantasy, one of the first films to ever attempt such a construction. In that vein, this very dated, very silly motion picture is actually kind of important. Originally titled Day of the Woman, this is a movie that shows a bruised and battered woman rising above her status as a victim and taking matters into her own hands.

The special edition DVD cheapens the film's potential power, however, by daring viewers to "decide for yourself!" and by wearing the film's notoriously awful reviews as badges of honor. Zarchi has a commentary track in which he eloquently labors over his masterpiece in wooden readings of pre-written material, which ultimately lessens the film's impact. In the end, I Spit On Your Grave is more an over-hyped legend than a powerful motion picture -- it is less something to experience than something to talk about.

Far more noteworthy is Elite's DVD release of the film. As bad as the movie is, the commentary track by the legendary Joe Bob Briggs absolutely demands a listen. In fact you can skip the regular audio altogether (remastering this in Dolby Digital and DTS seems like a waste anyway) and listen to Joe Bob's hilarious running gag. Zarchi has a commentary of his own as well, but Briggs' is the one to check out.