I SPIT ON YOUR GRAVE: DEJA VU
(2019)
A lot of water has passed under the bridge since the original I Spit On Your Grave was released. Forty-one years of it all told. In that time, the "video nasties" scare came and went (although it still returns briefly in different forms every now and again whenever the media discover the latest random psycho/gun nut has a couple of horror films in his movie collection), and the series was rebooted in 2010 with a remake, and two sequels which followed shortly after. Better produced and twice as brutal as the original, these three adventures in torture porn should have been more than enough grave spitting for one lifetime.
Unfortunately, Meir Zarchi - the director of the original movie - thought differently, and at the tender age of eighty, somehow came to the conclusion that four decades later, the world needed a proper sequel and took his place behind the camera once again. Obviously not wanting to upset the misguided octogenarian, nobody appeared to speak up against him, and I Spit On Your Grave: Deja Vu is the disastrous result.
Firstly, let's start with the fact that the film is TWO AND A HALF HOURS LONG. Seriously, wtf? If this was a big budget Hollywood blockbuster full of explosions and barely understandable time travel then okay, that would be fine. But it isn't. It's an extremely low budget bit of schlocky rape/revenge nonsense that becomes a pain in the arse to watch after just thirty excruciating minutes.
Those of you who remember the nineties might remember a comedian called Jim Tavaré. You know, the tall posh guy with the double bass who was only ever funny for about five or ten minutes? Yeah well, for reasons best known to his agent, he actually stars in this godawful mess. Playing a redneck baddie while sporting a half-arsed Lemmy moustache, a pair of dungarees, and a ridiculous stutter, for most of his time on screen, Tavaré comes across like a hillbilly Basil Fawlty with a speech impediment, and his character - like most things in the film - makes little to no sense at all. First he's a bad guy. Then he's a good guy. Then he's a bad guy again. Oh, just kill the bald dickhead already, will you.
The story - what there is of it - has the rape victim from the original (Zarchi's real life wife, Camille Keaton) coming to a small town to promote her book and meet up with her supermodel daughter. Kidnapped by the families of the men she killed in the original, Keaton is raped, murdered and beheaded, while her daughter is merely kidnapped and raped. Good times.
Escaping the rapists, the daughter discovers the body of her mother, goes bonkers and basically re-enacts the original film, sometimes exactly and even word for word. For ninety more minutes, the air is filled with the sound of rednecks with Tourette's Syndrome relentlessly shouting "FUCK!", "CUNT!", "FUCK!", "SHIT!" at anything that moves, only stopping occasionally to die in a variety of unlikely, CGI assisted ways.
While the original is bathed in notoriety, the closest this badly edited knock-off ever comes is the violent rape scene which features a fifty year old woman with bad teeth and saggy tits trying her hand at assertive lesbianism. And nobody needs to see that. Scenes drag on endlessly full of inane dialogue and bad acting, I lost count of how many times people literally spit on graves, and the tagged on final half an hour (which somehow manages to be simultaneously ridiculously stupid and mind-numbingly boring) is so utterly fucking woeful that it doesn't even bear thinking about.
An eighty year old director films his seventy year old wife being violently raped and murdered. Yeah, that's fun.
1/10
