I Spit on Your Grave 2 - Review

From its initial announcement I was vocally unenthusiastic of I Spit on Your Grave 2. I Spit on Your Grave was a film that I felt didn't require a remake let alone a sequel to the remake. After watching the movie I can say with confidence that I was correct in my initial reaction. This movie is trash. Not trashy like John Waters because that would be a good thing. It's just trash. Garbage.

The plot follows a young woman named Katie who moves to New York City from the mid-west with big dreams of becoming a model. Of course she struggles right out of the gate and is told that she has a lot of potential but her portfolio needs work. Out of desperation she contacts a photographer who offers free professional photos to models. The trade-off being that they are able to use the photos in their personal portfolio and make money off of them. She heads on over to this guys studio and there are three thick accented Bulgarian brothers who are all kinds of shady. She opts out of the photo shoot once things get weird but unfortunately she has garnered the attention of Georgy who apparently has a penchant for serial rape. Predictably he stalks her, eventually breaks into her home, murders her friend and brutally assaults her. Georgy calls his brother who decides they have to clean up the mess. This entails drugging Katie, shipping her to Bulgaria, finding a John who will pay a wad of cash to do what he wants to her, murdering her and disposing of her body. That's in a nutshell but there is a ton of sexual violence that happens in that span of time from an additional rape to cow prodding. It's brutal, graphic and difficult to watch. As we expect she survives and exacts revenge upon her abusers.

This sequel comes from director Steven Monroe who also directed the original remake. While I am not a raving fan of the remake there were some aspects of it that work. For one, the female lead in the film is put in a position where her abusers see her as a threat. She's a writer. She's smart, educated, classy, successful and attractive. They aren't. The original remake isn't a cautionary tale as much as an exploitation exploration of male and female roles and male inferiority complexes. They want to strip her of the power they perceive her as having over them. It doesn't always handle the material well but there is something there. With the sequel that's all gone. These men are not threatened by her. They are attracted to her. They see her solely as an object to be used. There is no need for them to strip her of anything because they don't see her as possessing anything.

There is also the issue of treating this as a cautionary tale. As a viewer we are being led down a path of judgement upon Katie. Here is a rundown of what goes through my mind as a viewer; "Well, she should have known better. Nothing is free in this world and they are foreign after all. Hasn't she seen Taken? You can't trust those wily Bulgarians!". Putting the blame onto her is not the way to handle material like this. It puts the viewer in a bad position and it's lazy writing.

The female lead in the film is Katie and she's played by Jemma Dallender. Her performance throughout is pretty uneven. For the first two-thirds she is very convincing and then she goes off the rails a bit in the final act. for the first two thirds I believe her performance is somewhere between acting and real emotion. The abuse and torture scenes seem to never end. She is raped several times and she is assaulted pretty violently with a cattle prod. I can only imagine how difficult it must be for an actress to spend days completely naked, covered in dirt and blood while the male characters act out unspeakable assaults on you. Degrading is the word that comes to mind. So when I see her screaming and crying that's probably more real than the audience may even realize. Once she moves into the revenge portion of the film her acting takes a nosedive. She is incredibly over the top and it frequently took me out of the movie. The director needed to reel her in and tone her down. This also strengthens my opinion that her performance earlier in the film is less of her acting because when she flexes her acting muscles they come up short. The males play typical evil woman-hating Bulgarians that speak in English for inexplicable reasons even when surrounded by other Bulgarians. God forbid they speak Bulgarian and you throw a subtitle up there.

There is one portion of the film that worked well for me and prevented a complete 0 score. After the men are done with Katie they dump her body in an underground series of tunnels leaving her for dead. She survives and overtime heals as she continues living underground eating rats and occasionally coming up to the surface for clothing and food. A priest befriends her and slowly attempts to gain her trust. A major complaint I had with Monroe's remake was that after Jennifer was dumped we spend a long amount of time with the men. It doesn't make sense since we don't like these guys and are more interested in seeing her survival and resilience. That's what's important to the story. Here Monroe goes the other way and stays with Katie only showing the guys in a few cut scenes. It's the best part of the film as she grows stronger and angrier planning her revenge and silently stalking her targets. The addition of the priest character, while cliche, at least manages to give us one Bulgarian who isn't an evil son of a bitch.

The final act focuses on Katie's revenge and there are some good brutal effects on display and some nasty kills but none of it feels as nasty as the first hour of the film. There is a pretty graphic scene that takes the saying "she's got your balls in a vice" to a whole new level as well as a toilet scene that's pretty disgusting. Most of the kills relate in some way to the form of abuse she received but none of it can compare to when she was on the receiving end. Those scenes were difficult to watch while many of these play in typical fashion. I assume that all relates back to the performances. These guys didn't spend hours naked with someone simulating rape on them.

I Spit on Your Grave 2 is a big miss. It's really bad and has almost no redeeming qualities. The writing is one note and offers nothing new. It follows so many beats done before and is all surface with no subtext. It's brutality for the sake of brutality. The "be careful of foreigners" message is tired and cliche. Hostel did it. Taken did it. This just manages to add a lot more graphic sexual assault into the mix. This can only be recommended to pure completists. If you've seen every rape revenge exploitation movie and therefore need to see this one then go ahead. Otherwise, you can do better, skip it.

Score: 1/5