Variety reporter Michael Fleming, like many in his profession, likely doesn't really know much about show business history. His job is to document the latest news from Hollywood, and if while doing that he occasionally pretends familiarity with a film he's clearly never seen, well, who cares.
My gues is, the bland tone of Fleming's piece on the proposed remake of I Spit On Your Grave will become common whenever this monumentally bad idea ever sees release. Because the original was made in 1978, it will be assumed that the original is dated, and as Fleming notes, the Saw and Hostel films may have convinced contemporary audiences these films are the state-of-the-art in horror.
I'm sure any remake will be more flashily directed, maintain a more consistent tone, probably even feature cast members from whatever CW show the producers can afford. It will look a lot like the remakes of Texas Chain Saw Massacre and The Hills Have Eyes, and will be heavily promoted with pop-up ads at sites like Ain'tItCoolNews and Dark Horizons.
And it will be bland as oatmeal.
Meir Zarchi's original film is poorly made and utterly indefensible, but by God it works. Its story of a woman's revenge after a brutal rape sounds like a quasi-feminist Death Wish riff, but only in outline. Since the opening rape sequence goes on and on, as heroine Camille Keaton is repeatedly brutalized and violated by a quartet of backwoods creeps (one of them is developmentally disabled--for comedy relief purposes), and Keaton is nude for so much of this, one begins to suspect Zarchi intended this sequence for our enjoyment.
Which, let's face it, he did. Zarchi's film was clearly made to play in big city grindhouses (its distributor was the notoriously slimy Jerry Gross Organization), and he intended to give audiences what they wanted. He wasn't, shall we say, appealing to all that is fine and noble in mankind--he was pitching this to an audience full of sleazeballs, eager to cheer on every depravity, to enjoy watching the hot naked chick fondled by their on-screen surrogates, to vicariously live out their revenge on every woman who ever said no them.
I know this firsthand, because I saw I Spit On Your Grave in the depths of pre-Giuliani Times Square, where it still played as late as 1981, with an audience primed for it, loving it as the bitch got what was coming to her. They'd switch allegiances at the drop of a hat, because they also seemed to enjoy the later revenge scenes, but I'll never forget the guy behind me laughing during the rape scene, muttering, "I want a piece of that."
I'm not, Lord knows, defending any of this, but whatever else Zarchi's film was, it was more than just a movie. It was a kind of interactive event, the crude images on screen enhanced by the base audience response they were designed to elicit. That sort of thing is impossible now, because nobody goes to the movies in the same way. Grindhouses are a thing of the past, and whatever drive-ins still exist show only the usual Hollywood fare. When I saw I Spit On Your Grave in '81 it was part of a double bill with a Sonny Chiba kung-fu epic, and the two movies played in an endless loop, with no down time between them. Audience members came and went whenever they pleased, staying as long as they wanted, since the theaters would be open all night. No commercials, no trailers for bland new Hollywood product, just endless on-screen nastiness, playing to an audience full of society's dregs, gathered together because there was no place else to go.
