“They don’t call ’em exploitation movies for nothing!”: Joe Bob Briggs and the Critical Commentary on I Spit on Your Grave

Film critic Joe Bob Briggs opens his DVD audio commentary for the cult classic rape/revenge film, <i>I Spit On Your Grave </i>(1978), with a simple proposition, "What we're going to decide here is this the most disgusting movie ever made or is it the most feminist movie ever made (sic)?" Directed by Meir Zarchi, <i>I Spit On Your Grave</i> stands as a staple of exploitation cinema, courting considerable controversy in its representation of rape and revenge. With a remake of <i>I Spit On Your Grave</i> already in production, following on from a recent wave of 1970s-era horror remakes (<i>Friday the 13th </i>(2009) and <i>The Last House On The Left</i> (2009) for example), the original <i>I Spit On Your Grave</i> deserves reappraisal as a piece of cinema (or a piece of trash). <i>I Spit On Your Grave</i> was once despised as a "video nasty," which we can see in a print review Briggs wrote concerning its VHS release: "This flick is considered 'the most disgusting movie ever made' by Ebert the Wimp and Siskel the Simp, who went on TV for two, three years tellin [sic] everybody that it makes men want to rape women, which is why the theaters quit running it."