'Grave' unleashes rabid revenge fantasy

I cannot defend Steven Monroe's remake of the 1978 exploitation horror benchmark “I Spit on Your Grave as a great work of art, or barely a work of art at all. But at least his version of the nasty rape-and-revenge opus is better crafted than its crass and artlessly rendered original.

The simple plot involves a young novelist named Jennifer (a very brave Sarah Butler) who heads off to an isolated cabin to write. Local yokels spy on her, break into the cabin, then take turns raping her.

They intend to kill her, too. But she hobbles, naked and writhing in pain, on to a bridge, and falls into the water below. Her body is never discovered.

Later, Jennifer returns as an avenging warrior, no longer the innocent writer, but a malevolent spirit bent upon a rampage of raw revenge.

This woman doesn't turn the other cheek, she burns it with lye.

Meir Zarchi's original film with terrible sound quality and dullingly long, stationary camera shots lingered on the violent, sexual abuse of Jennifer, then whisked us through her retribution, the most graphic being her emasculation of an attacker with a kitchen knife while enjoying a bubble bath.

The remake reverses this by condensing the sexual attacks into a tighter, more powerful sequence while going the full monty on Jennifer's surprisingly fantastic, diabolically contrived acts of fiendish revenge that owe a great debt to Jigsaw from the popular “Saw horror films.

Significantly, Monroe creates more sympathy for Jennifer by having his lens take her point of view during the rapes, a rejection of the 1980s horror film formula that forced viewers to identify with assailants by viewing experiences through attackers' eyes.

We have zero background information on any of the characters. We never come to know them or particularly care about them, not even Jennifer. She exists only to be victimized. The attackers exist only to be victimized back.

Monroe cut two things he didn't like from the original “I Spit. One is Jennifer's church visit where she asks forgiveness for the evil she is about to commit. The other is Jennifer's use of sex to seduce her attackers before she kills them.

Somehow, this actually makes “I Spit a degree or two less offensive.

This movie, for better or not, taps into something primal in audiences who shocked me both when I saw the remake last month and in 1980 when the movie first came to the area. During the revenge sequences, I saw ordinary nice people turn into bloodthirsty crowds cheering on Jennifer to torment and kill.

For a long time, I was appalled by the ease with which the first “I Spit could reduce regular folks into a messy pool of Schadenfreude.

Since then, I decided that the film is a classic example of Aristotle's theory of catharsis, that a work of drama can be used to address, then drain away, some fairly nasty feelings we hide from the world in everyday life.

So, for 108 minutes, Monroe's “I Spit releases whatever dark, restrained emotions are lurking deep within our psyches, so we can put on our civil game faces to return to the world outside the theater.

OK, it may be cathartic.

That still doesn't make it a worthy motion picture.

“I Spit on Your Grave

“I Spit on Your Grave"

Rating: ★ ½

Starring: Sarah Butler, Chad Lindberg, Jeff Branson, Tracey Walter

Directed by: Steven Monroe

Other: An Anchor Bay Films release. At the 600 North Michigan Avenue Cinemas in Chicago. Not rated by the MPAA.

Language, nudity, graphic sexual violence.

108 minutes.