Horror remakes: I Spit on Your Grave

A few minutes into watching I Spit on Your Grave, the third horror remake I've watched as part of this year's themed October viewing, I thought to myself "Shit, is this even a horror movie?"

Oh sure, there's no doubt that what's happening in this movie is horrifying. But a terrorist attack is also horrifying. And most movies about terrorist attacks are not considered horror movies.

I wouldn't have had any doubt at all -- if it looks like a horror movie, walks like a horror movie and talks like a horror movie, it's a horror movie -- except that I remembered seeing something on its Wikipedia page, or actually the Wikipedia page of the original, that made me think twice. The entry starts out "I Spit on Your Grave (originally titled Day of the Woman) is a rape and revenge film written by Meir Zarchi." No mention of it being a horror movie at all.

Of course, the words "rape and revenge" are hyperlinked. And if you click in there, you get the following:

"Rape and revenge, or rape-revenge, is a horror film subgenre characterized by an individual enacting revenge for rape or other sexual acts committed against them or others." 

Whew. In the clear.

Certainly, I always thought of the original as a horror movie, but not all rape and revenge movies are, in fact, horror movies as I would define them. Do you consider Gaspar Noe's Irreversible a horror movie? No more than you consider every other of Noe's films horror movies, though an argument can be made that every movie he's ever made has actually functioned as a horror movie on some level.

I think the thing you have to recognize is that while many if not most horror movies are out to scare you, some are just out to disturb you. And I guess you can be scared -- about the world, about human nature -- by the things that disturb you. 

And wouldn't you know it, I actually watched it on Halloween of 2009, further establishing its bonafides for this themed viewing month. 

The thing that was most famous about the original I Spit on Your Grave, which drew me to watch it back in 2009, was what a lurid form of exploitation it was considered to be at the time of its release. How I knew about it was that I believe it was one of Roger Ebert's zero star reviews, along with Caligula and Mother's Day (1980) (which is on Kanopy right now so I should watch it). Here is a choice excerpt of what Ebert said about it:

This movie is an expression of the most diseased and perverted darker human natures. Because it is made artlessly, it flaunts its motives: There is no reason to see this movie except to be entertained by the sight of sadism and suffering.

Of course, when I saw it in 2009 I gave it three stars. It had to have some merit, right? Or else they wouldn't have remade the movie, and then made two more sequels to the remake?

I won't be watching those, but I did watch the original 2010 remake directed by Steven R. Munroe. 

I couldn't quite get to three stars on this one, but I do think it has some merit. 

It's been 16 years since I saw the original, but I have to think this was slightly less graphic than the original. It's also slightly more conventional in some of the revenge stuff. 

If you don't know the story, it's a fairly simple one of a writer (Sarah Butler) who goes to a remote cabin to work, but not without having to stop in at the gas station to fill up, where she has a brief interaction with some of the locals. They don't forget her and they work themselves up to going to attack her, where things get worse and worse, including them forcing a mentally challenged man to lose his virginity by raping her. Each ultimately has their turn with her, after which she escapes into the woods, where they catch her again and have their way with her some more.

Yes, vile stuff, Roger, I agree. But not vile stuff with no purpose at all.

True to the second half of the "rape and revenge" subgenre, she makes them all pay in horrible ways. Which, I think, is the justification for subjecting her to such atrocities before that. Not everyone buys that justification, but it works for me well enough because it concludes in a morally upright way. (Ebert would actually wrestle with these same issues in his complicated review of the aforementioned Irreversible.) 

There are a couple reasons why this remake didn't work for me quite as well -- if that's the right way to put it -- as the original:

1) There's something about the movements of the lead character, as she exacts her revenge, that gives her something in common with a serial killer in a slasher film. While I feel like Zarchi's film constrained itself more by a nominal sense of realism, the character Jennifer here starts operating in ways that defy natural description and verge on the supernatural. For one, she escapes their attempt to kill her by jumping into a river from a bridge and swimming off. Although the men look down from above, and it's not a very far distance down to the water, she never pokes her head back up for air, leading them to reluctantly conclude that she must have drowned, because otherwise they would have seen her emerge. Of course, she didn't drown, but we don't see any part of her journal to safety, so there's no plausible explanation for how she pulled it off. Neither is there a plausible explanation for the complicated kills she sets up for the rapists, which give her something in common with John "Jigsaw" Kramer. She dispatches each of the men in a way that mirrors the specific indignity they visited upon her, involving a gun in various orifices, a video camera, what have you. To set some of these up, though, she'd have to become something of an expert trap setter in the few weeks she took to rest and recover, and you just don't believe it. Like a serial killer, she shows up when she wants to, and disappears when she wants to, and then reemerges somewhere else really far away. I don't recall how the original handled this, but I like to think that, as a normal person, she was subject to imperfections in her vengeance tour that put her in danger, even as she exacted her sweet, sweet revenge.

2) Just because you can "like" one movie like this, doesn't mean that Roger Ebert is not essentially right on some level. The original I Spit on Your Grave is not a "good" or well made movie by most standards, but there's no doubt that it occupies a unique place in the history of exploitation cinema. It earns its reputation for poor taste and brazenness honestly, by being something of a watershed moment in the depiction of brutality and rape on screen. You can argue until you're blue in the face about whether this is a "good" thing to put into the world, but some people -- myself usually included -- think that one of the ideal roles of cinema is to shock us. An original I Spit on Your Grave can do this in a way that a remake cannot, and therefore, the original gets latitude that the remake does not. I'm mindful, also, that there are really awful versions of this sort of movie out there. One of my bottom five movies of all time is a terrible rape and revenge movie called Chaos, which is sort of a remake of Last House on the Left, which itself inspired I Spit on Your Grave. (And certainly got there ahead of Spit, I should add.) 

Still, I felt that this movie -- even if a lesser experience overall for me -- may have been made more sensitively and with more nuance. For one, this Jennifer does not have to engage in actual sexual acts in her attempt to seek revenge on the men, which I think does happen with the version of Jennifer Hills (same name) from the original. That alone makes it a little less unclean, a little less problematic.

But one thing I found interesting, and I can't recall if there's an equivalent in the original, is how this film shows the home life of the dirty cop who appears to be helping the escaped Jennifer, but instead is just delivering her back into the lion's den. This character, who I don't believe exists in the original, is the most foul of the five, but they give him a twist you might not have seen coming. They break away from Jennifer's story to show this man at home with his wife, who seems perfectly lovely, and an even lovelier young daughter. That this man would live this dual life -- being possibly even a good family man, and also anally raping women in the woods -- reminds us that evil lurks even within men who appear normal, as banal as Hannah Arendt once said.

Cat's Away: Because also new releases

This is the fourth night in Cat's Away, a cheekily named series of nightly viewings I'm doing while my wife is in America.

Now, on to the one trait this is shared by almost all films in almost all film festivals: actually being new.

Or, comparatively new, anyway.

I'm not flipping over my viewing calendar to focus on 2017 releases until next week; you may recall I divide my viewing year into new releases (August to January) and older releases (February to July), with plenty of overlap from the other in each. But I couldn't let the Friday night of my festival pass without a good 2017 popcorn movie.

I just didn't know how good.

Yes, I loved Kong: Skull Island.

After hearing good things about it, I was cautiously optimistic, which is why I downloaded a rental from iTunes last week and programmed it in this time slot. But emphasis on the word "cautiously." You can find someone to say something good about nearly every event movie of a given year, with the possible exception of Transformers, but I'd already been pretty disappointed in the likes of Alien: Covenant and John Wick: Chapter 2, among others. I didn't know if I had any reason to trust the good word of mouth on Kong more than any of these other movies.

But this movie had me from its opening seconds, its audacious style immediately grabbing me. It starts with a crackerjack prologue in which an American pilot crash lands in spectacularly absurdist fashion, his plane nose-diving into the desert sand as his parachute follows suit moments later, landing closer in the same frame. Jordan Vogt-Roberts -- remember this name, people -- immediately announces himself as a visual stylist with a whipsmart wit, and everything else just continues in the same vein. This film is replete with unconventional camera setups in small moments, finding that perfect balance between calling attention to themselves and blending seamlessly into the narrative.

I think I might get breathless, or my fingers might get tired, if I tried to tell you everything I liked in this movie, but let's just touch on a number of them here. Tread carefully, as there may be some spoilers.

1) The Vietnam War era setting really worked for me. It's become an increasingly common strategy to set big budget brand movies in other historical eras -- Wonder Woman, the recent X-Men movies -- but I don't think I had yet seen one that was so influenced by the familiar beats of a Vietnam War movie. In fact, this felt kind of like a mashup of a Vietnam War movie and a summer blockbuster, and I'm always a fan of a good mashup if done right.

2) What a wise decision to make this movie rated R. Not only did it allow some truly unbridled carnage -- I'm thinking of a couple people being torn limb from limb, and a soldier getting lanced by a spider leg down his throat -- but it also allowed John C. Reilly to say a thing like "It sounds like a bird, but it's a fucking ant." Interestingly, we never did actually see that ant, but that's okay, because this movie showed us so much else that we didn't need it. It was stronger for leaving some things up to our imagination.

3) But when it did offer us a big set piece, it didn't scrimp on it. Kong vs. the helicopters is one for the ages, but that's not what I'll focus on here. Instead, that scene where the soldiers have to take down the 60-foot? 80-foot? spider is one such an example. They had to work really damn hard to level the thing, not to mention to avoid getting stepped on by it -- which, it should be said, may not have been a thing the spider was even trying to do. I get the sense it was just strolling along and happened to squash some soldiers, just as we might unknowingly crush a bug. I loved moments like when the spider's stomach is perforated and it unleashes a torrent of guts on the soldier below, which reminded me of my beloved Starship Troopers.

4) And speaking of throwaway set pieces, what about when Kong fights the octopus and then eats it, its appendages still writhing as he shoves them down this throat? I messaged my friend at that time: "This movie is the best."

5) The cast was something I uniformly liked as well. I'd heard there were just entirely too many characters, and sure, not all of them got a proper character arc. But there was enough development dolled out to each that I was grateful for the large size of the cast, rather than resentful of it. In fact, the large size of the cast reminded me of a type of entertainment that was common to the era in which this film is set: the all-star cast disaster movie. With the number of famous faces here being whittled down by attrition, the movie put me in mind of movies like The Towering Inferno and The Poseidon Adventure. Which is most assuredly a good thing.

6) If I weren't covering this movie as a Cat's Away post, I might have devoted a solo post to the topic of Brie Larson's recent trend of appearing as either the only or one of the only women in a movie filled with men with guns. I would have called that post "Brie Larson, Sausagefest Queen." Larson is literally the only woman in Ben Wheatley's Free Fire from earlier this year, and here she's one of just two women, though the second is so underdeveloped that she might as well be the only one. Interestingly, both films are also set in the 1970s, when that gender dynamic would have just been a reality.

7) It always impresses me when films walk the line between comedic and tragic, and this one does it terrifically. Some of this movie is insanely funny, though you also really feel the moments of loss. Anything John C. Reilly says is a riot, but Shea Whigham is actually quite funny as well, among others. In fact, Whigham may embody this delicate tonal balance more than anyone else, because SPOILER ALERT AGAIN his death is actually one of those solemn moments. It's also a moment that undercuts our expectations. He's ready to sacrifice himself by by letting a giant creepy crawlie eat him and then pulling the pins on a couple grenade to blow the thing up. But in another one of those moments like the spider randomly squashing the soldiers below, the creepy crawlie does not choose to eat him, but rather flicks him into the side of a distant rock face with his tail, where the grenades detonate harmlessly. The moment struck me as a comment on the senselessness of loss in war, as even when this guy is trying to be a hero he is robbed of that chance by random occurrence.

8) The visuals look great in this film, no better example than in Kong himself. I remember being impressed with the way Kong looked in Peter Jackson's film, and I'm sure he still does look good. But 12 years later, this Kong looks magnificent. More than anything I was impressed with how he seems to occupy clear three dimensional space and carries with him a specific weight and tangibility. That's been a big problem with digital creations in general, but it is no problem here.

9) How is it possible that this director only made one other film that has gotten any attention, and it's the 2013 coming of age comedy The Kings of Summer, which I have not even seen? This is like Colin Trevorrow going from Safety Not Guaranteed to Jurassic World, but even more so, as this film is far more visually assured than Jurassic World, and I'm a Jurassic World fan. In fact, this film operates like a Jurassic Park movie in a number of senses -- the encounter with the giant water buffalo is like the first discovery of the brontosauruses -- only it does it in a way that does not overtly reference dinosaurs. Unlike, unfortunately, Jackson's King Kong, which has that very problematic middle section.

10) They are making more of these movies, which excites me. Please please please let Vogt-Roberts direct.

If this were a weeknight I might be done. But it being a Friday night, I watched a second movie, which was this:

Oof, I bet you didn't expect this to be intruding on your Kong: Skull Island post! Sorry, what a punch in the nuts.

Spoilers to follow.

If you don't know Irreversible, it's the movie that contains a ten-minute scene of Monica Bellucci being brutally raped, and a guy getting his head bashed in with a fire extinguisher, the result of about ten separate bludgeons. For many, it is a consummate one-timer.

But this was my second time seeing it. Gaspar Noe's films have a way of burrowing into your brain, and Irreversible joins Enter the Void as films of his I've seen twice and cannot shake. Third, fourth and fifth viewings may eventually be forthcoming for both.

As I have already written a lot today I am not going to give a full "review" of Irreversible, though if you follow the tag for Irreversible you'll find I've referenced it twice on this blog previously. However, I will tell you that it's so much more than a movie reverse-engineered around a ten-minute rape scene, and I'll also say that having watched it twice now does not make me a bad person. You know how they say that many supposedly anti-war films end up glamorizing war? That's not the case with this rape scene, which is one of the most disturbing things I've ever seen in a film but is not even remotely titillating in the way war can titillate you, even when the filmmakers are not intending that. The scene is agonizing and sickening and upsetting, and it absolutely serves a function in making us think about brutality and its consequences -- which the entire film contemplates quite effectively, even more so for being told in reverse chronological order. That decision, executed so smartly, is reason enough for many cinephiles to watch the film, and then you've also got the audacious cinematography (most of the film is composed of long takes and there are many instances of vertiginous, swirling cameras) and the haunting score (a queasy dirge that sounds like a hazardous materials siren that's running out of batteries). Well look, here I've gone and tried to jam everything I like about this film into one paragraph after all.

But the most profound moment of this film requires its own paragraph. Irreversible finishes in an incredibly warm place, with Bellucci and her boyfriend (Vincent Cassell) lovingly intertwined in bed hours before her brutal rape. As Roger Ebert pointed out, the arc of the narrative is toward greater morality, forcing you to confront most of the awfulness in the first half. The very last scene is of Bellucci lying on the grass, reading a book, as kids dance around a sprinkler and Beethoven plays on the soundtrack. We pull in on the sprinkler and it becomes nearly indistinguishable behind a strobe light that fills the screen for the last 20 seconds of the movie, both a punishing and enthralling visual exercise, as the distant sprinkler looks kind of like a view of the cosmos.

And once the strobe light ends, the movie ends, with only these last words on the screen:

"Time destroys all things."

And in the spirit of Gaspar Noe, I will also end without a further word.

Unsafe

I've been dreading watching Gaspar Noe's Enter the Void again. Dreading it.

Maybe not as much as I've been dreading watching Gaspar Noe's Irreversible again, but dreading it nonetheless.

Ordinarily, if you were dreading watching a movie a second time, the solution would be simple. You just wouldn't watch it a second time.

But that's what makes Noe's movies so unusual. You don't really want to watch them again because of the ways they've unsettled you, but you are also magnetically drawn to them. They're like a drug you know you shouldn't take because it gives you a terrible trip, but there's also something unforgettable about that terrible trip. Something transcendent, even.

Ironically, it was not quite getting this sensation from Noe's latest, last year's Love, that pushed Enter the Void up to the top of my rewatch list, that prompted me to cue it up on Netflix Thursday night.

Love was compelling on a basic level and it was easily recognizable as a Noe film. Its X-rated eroticism was actually pretty sexy, and it goes to the margins of being haunting. But it falls short of the mindfuck that is both Enter the Void and Irreversible, the other of which I will probably now be prompted to watch at some point in the coming months as well. And even ejaculating penises grow repetitive after a while.

I suppose one might argue that parts of Enter the Void grow repetitive, but that's part of their hypnotic charm. "Charm" would be the wrong word, though. Definitely the wrong word. "Spell" is better. "Fever dream" might be even better. "Nightmare" might ultimately be correct.

I won't tell you a whole lot about Enter the Void, mostly because I don't recommend it for just anybody, so selling any particular person on watching it is not my goal. Also, it's worth not knowing exactly what's going to happen to you when you start watching it.

But I'll tell you what happens RIGHT when you start watching it, when the mood is set via the complete credits of the movie assaulting you right off the bat. No, it's not the slow northward crawl you get with most credits. It's a strobing, stroke-inducing blast of information in different fonts of different sizes, different production company logos, different languages, and even probably some hieroglyphs. Then there's the intense, driving music that also pummels you. It's Noe's unique way of preparing you for the shocks to your senses that are about to follow.

Ironically, what then follows is completely different in tone and speed. The movie starts with slow, dreamy POV shots of an American drug dealer living in Tokyo, first as he gets high (and stares up into the swirly colors of the ceiling for about ten minutes), then as he goes to a bar to deliver some drugs to a partner.

And that's when things go really off the rails.

And don't even get me started on that car crash.

What both Enter the Void and Irreversible -- you know, the one with the brutal extended rape scene -- do so well is that they create a feeling that you are unsafe. They are suffused with ominous foreboding, the kind that manifests itself in the score and in all the visuals, the kind that seeps into your skin. Noe's is a dark, sad, violent world, where good people come to bad ends. It's also invigorating and bracing and impossible to forget.

Once I tackle my second viewing of Irreversible -- oh Lord, that rape scene -- I'll need to go back and watch Noe's first feature, I Stand Alone, his only feature I have yet to see. It came out in 1998 and, I understand, is just as hard to watch as his other films, with the possible exception of Love, which may dangle you over the edge a couple times but never drops you.

And for a new Noe film, it'll be quite the wait. Never have fewer than four years elapsed between his films, and it was seven years from Irreversible in 2002 to Enter the Void in 2009.

So will Noe again leave me feeling unsafe, in whatever film he makes in 2020 or 2021?

I'm already dreading it.

Eight movies I'd watch on Netflix if my wife didn't find out

Netflix is a great resource for cinephiles. I'm not telling you anything you don't already know.

It means you can sit down to watch nearly anything from nearly any genre at nearly any time, as long as you've paid your monthly dues and Netflix has it available for streaming.

Unless, of course, you share your Netflix queue with your spouse.

That limits the field somewhat.

I'm sure that this is only a neurotic like me talking, and that you are a lot more evolved than to get hung up on things like this, but every time I consider watching something on Netflix, I wonder what my wife will think of seeing it among our three most recently viewed titles. It's only the most recent three I have to worry about, since for some reason, our "See All Activity" link is broken. (It reads, simply, "You have not viewed any titles yet.")

Wonder what I'm talking about? Here are some examples:

1) Blue is the Warmest Color (2013, Abdellatif Kechiche) - "I hear this is filled with graphic lesbian sex. What was my husband up to when I was sleeping last night?"
Why this fear is irrational: It was an acclaimed arthouse film from 2013, so there's every reason a cinematic omnivore such as myself would want to watch it ... even if it did not contain graphic lesbian sex. Besides, its three-hour running time would prove my dedication.

2) Marriage Italian Style (1964, Vittorio de Sica) - "Why is my husband wondering how marriage is done differently with Italians? Is he not happy with our marriage? Does he want an Italian wife?"
Why this fear is irrational: De Sica is a brilliant director (see The Bicycle Thief), and consuming more foreign cinema is always one of my goals.

3) UnHung Hero (2013, Brian Spitz) - "Does my husband worry that he has a small penis?"
Why this fear is irrational: We love documentaries, and ones with a comedic bent and an original approach often jump to the top of our list. And besides ... um, I don't. I have a friend who has that problem.

4) My Week With Marilyn (2011, Simon Curtis) - "Does my husband have a crush on Michelle Williams?"
Why this fear is irrational: My wife doesn't know I have a crush on Michelle Williams.

5) Zombie Ass: Toilet of the Dead (2012, Noboru Iguchi) - "What kind of fetishist mood was my husband in last night that he was watching a movie involving zombies, shit and Japanese girls in skimpy school uniforms?"
Why this fear is irrational: It's just a zombie movie, albeit an oddball and probably terrible one.

6) Show Me Love (1998, Lukas Moodysson) - "Is this the lesbian movie my husband watched when he decided Blue is the Warmest Color was too long?"
Why this fear is irrational: She probably wouldn't have even heard of the movie or bothered to look up what it was about, and the title is pretty vague. Plus, we loved Moodysson's film Together.

7) Irreversible (2002, Gaspar Noe) - "Why did my husband want to watch a movie featuring a nine-minute rape scene a second time?"
Why this fear is irrational: Okay, it's not so irrational. (The movie is brilliant and haunting, though.)

8) The Piano Teacher (2001, Michael Haneke) - "Why did my husband want to watch this movie that I warned him was brutal?"
Why this fear is irrational: I don't even know what's brutal about it, though I believe it's something sexual. And besides, she's actually seen it.

So now that I've proved that all (okay, most) of these fears are irrational, I oughtta go get watching, right?

Not so fast. I mean, I'm still the same neurotic I was at the beginning of this post.

It's not so much the idea that I might ever want to watch these movies that bothers me ... it's giving my wife that moment where she says "Why did he choose to watch this movie last night?" In other words, what mood was he in that made him think this was the right movie to scratch that itch?

That thinking too is highly irrational ... in the sense that it can be applied to any time we watch a movie for any reason. Every viewing we've ever had, you might say, has been preceded by a particular mood that created the necessary conditions to kick off the viewing. If you're ever going to watch Irreversible, you have to at some point decide that tonight's the night.

But it isn't so surprising to me that I should want to keep some of these things hidden. Irreversible is, in many ways, a dark and twisted film, one that plumbs the very depths of darkness and brutality. It also contains some moments that are just plain beautiful. The overall cinematic experience is unforgettable, and something I seek to repeat. But I also don't want to be accountable for why I wanted to watch it again. I don't want anyone to think that I'm a disturbed individual who gets some sort of sick pleasure from watching Monica Bellucci get raped for nine minutes. Although that's the most famous thing about the movie, it's hardly the most interesting. I sort of want to watch this movie again just for that incredible final shot and the strobe light effect that closes the movie. Oh, and for that part where the guy's head gets smashed in with a fire extinguisher, which was simply horrifying.

So yeah, I won't be watching Irreversible again until the circumstances are just right ... when I can hide the evidence of having done so.

The others? Well, you could argue that simply adding them to our queue in the first place was the moment when my wife's eyebrows might have raised. You could argue that watching the title is just the logic eventual completion of a transaction that may have begun years ago.

The most irrational thing about this whole post? My wife isn't like that. She doesn't think things to death. She doesn't wonder about my secret motivations. She just isn't wired that way. If she saw that Irreversible was one of the three most recent views on our accout, her eyes and brain would make a momentary acknowledgement of the simple fact of it, without applying any additional analysis. Then she'd just move on.

In fact, you might say, the only reason she'd have occasion to think about any of this would be if she were to read this post.

Neurotics ... you just can't save us from ourselves.