Name: I Spit on Your Grave
Genre: Video nasty, Rape-revenge
Released: 1978
Duration: 101 min

I Spit on Your Grave

⊘ Banned in UK, Ireland, Norway, Iceland, West Germany, Australia

A prosecuted DPP video nasty, banned outright in Ireland, Norway, Iceland and West Germany, and pulled from Australian sale from 1997 to 2004.

The most argued-about film on this site. Read the glossary entry before deciding.

The most argued-about film in the whole category. A writer is gang-raped in the country and returns, methodically, to kill the men responsible, and the assault occupies a punishing stretch of the runtime. Roger Ebert called it a vile bag of garbage; later feminist critics, including Carol Clover, argued its refusal to make the assault watchable is what separates it from the films it gets grouped with.

Both readings come from the same footage, which is the whole difficulty. It is bleak, clinical and extremely hard to sit through, and it has no interest in being enjoyed.

Read the arguments before you decide. Then decide carefully.

Trailer

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Written about

Exploitation film examples, cycle by cycle
Exploitation film examples grouped cycle by cycle, from Freaks in 1932 to the video nasties, with the real dates, cut durations and censorship rulings.
Banned, cut and confiscated
A Fulci print flown out of the country, an Australian rating that just means no, and a German court that filed The Evil Dead under criminal violence. Three states, three machines for making a film disappear.
The video nasty panic
A drill on a video sleeve, a prosecutors' hit list of seventy-two films, and a censorship law that was void for twenty-five years on a filing error.

Filed alongside