“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 Spit On Your Grave (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 Spit On Your Grave stands as a staple of exploitation cinema, courting considerable controversy in its representation of rape and revenge. With a remake of I Spit On Your Grave already in production, following on from a recent wave of 1970s-era horror remakes (Friday the 13th (2009) and The Last House On The Left (2009) for example), the original I Spit On Your Grave deserves reappraisal as a piece of cinema (or a piece of trash). I Spit On Your Grave 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."