Monday, November 18, 2013

Film Review: I Spit on Your Grave 2

Copyright: Anchor Bay Films
In one scene Katie (played by Jemma Dallender), now well on her warpath of revenge, begins to torture one of her former captors in a Bulgarian toilet. She ducks his head in the disgusting, overflowing toilet bowl while he cries for help and mercy. In that toilet there are two stalls, and Katie in one point moves him to the next one. In one stall the bowl is full of yellow liquid that is probably urine. The other one is full of brownish goo, most likely feces.In a very neat fashion, the visitors of that broken and godforsaken toilet decided to fill one toilet bowl with one kind of bodily fluids, while the other one gets the second kind.

I this scene lies, for me, the gist of the film. It’s exploitative and cradles to a section of the audience that obviously gets something emotionally from scenes of torture and, more prominently, rape. But it’s also lazy and rudely ignores common sense and logic, just like its cousins from the regular porn industry. Because this film does the same thing as porn does. It delivers one kind of thing (rape and later on, mutilation) in as much detail as, I’m guessing, Dallenders' agents allowed. If that one thing is disregarded I Spit on Your Grave 2 is a substandard torture flick.

It has no redeeming details, except a few beautiful night shots of the Bulgarian city Katie is held in. Apart from that, the movie takes care of every violent scene and disregards everything else. Its plot is thin, and acting is mediocre at best.

Katie is an aspiring model who ends up in a basement in Bulgaria, imprisoned by a family gang of ruthless psychopaths. Fifty minutes and two escapes later, she begins her revenge spree. In the end the film leaves us with nothing – it accomplished its mission in the few ultra violent focus points. After it has ended it’s simply no more, and that’s why it’s a bad artwork whose authors didn’t have anything to say, but they still said it aloud.

The film had a limited theatrical release, but I’m sure that it will generate a handsome income through DVD sales and on-demand viewing. After all, porn is good business. This kind of exotic porn that deals with violence both physical and sexual is probably even move lucrative.