Leaning against the window, picking idly at the paint all flaking and peeling on the underside of the sill, Talbot clears the throat and recites: “This woman has just cut, chopped, broken and burned five men beyond recognition… but no jury in America would ever convict her.” He tilts the head back, purses the lips a time. “Knife in the hand,” says, “bare-backed and bloodied. Tattered garment pulled down o’er the right shoulder. Arse half out. Daylight through the trees up ahead, and yet the full of every night that ever was it is that she’s prowling...”
I nod, fishing from the corners of the pouch in the paw the last few tendrils of Golden Virginia tobacco. “Aye,” saying. “An image and a half, is what it is.”
“Is what it is, is right. And one that the picture itself could never hope to live up to, whatever the number of its merits. And a fair few, I suppose, is the number of them.”
Camile Keaton, granddaughter of Buster, is the woman, and Meir Zarchi’s infamous - and iconic - I Spit On Your Grave (aka Day of the Woman, I Hate Your Guts, or, simply, The Rape and Revenge of Jennifer Hill) the picture in question.
“For as grubby and sleazy and begrimed a thing as it was, there’s no doubting that a thing in possession of A Point it was, also.”
Four nights prior, Talbot and I are sat shivering afore a screen on the suitably dank ground floor of The Horse Hospital - “a three-tiered progressive arts venue in London providing an encompassing umbrella for the related media of film, fashion, music and art” - listening to Bizarre Magazine’s Billy Chainsaw, sleazepert of some renown and one-time P.A. of Siouxsie and the Banshees, introduce what will henceforth be known as ISOYG 2010, director Steven R. Monroe’s game attempt to wrench something halfways relevant to the Here and Now from out the guts of what Roger Ebert once famously described as “a movie so sick, reprehensible and contemptible that I can hardly believe it’s playing in respectable theatres.”
“You know what you’re getting with a film like this” says Chainsaw. “I don’t really need to say anything.”
That the crowd do indeed know what they’re getting, or at least what they hope they’re getting, is confirmed by the low murmur rising then from the cobbles, wafting about the Morbid Angel pendants and the Suspiria tattoos and the facial accoutrements of those present, ascending to the rafters as a great plume of excitable, anticipatory babble flush with misremembered atrocity. Giddy accounts of bits out Deodato’s House On The Edge Of The Park, or Vibenius’s Thriller: A Cruel Picture, or indeed Wes Craven’s Last House On The Left zigzag about the room, fragments of savage scenes now attributed to Zarchi’s “vile bag of garbage” (Ebert again), and with little in the way of rebuttal or riposte for that.
Article comments
1 - El Bicho
welcome back. I enjoyed the brief oasis from the "this is what happened/this is what I think" desert that covers the Internet
2 - Aaron McMullan
Thank you very much, Sir Bicho. Heh, I don't have the discipline for "this is what happened/this is what I think," is my problem.
3 - Mat Brewster
God almighty, Aaron, a better interpretation of this film will never be written I suspect. Dare I saw these words about the film are much, much better than the film itself.
Not that I've seen it mind you, nor ever will. One viewing of the original was enough, I think.
4 - Aaron McMullan
Sir Brewster, thank you no end, all the grateful in the world, am I, for them kind words of yours. I dare say, though, when it's been kickin around the psyche for a year or ten, someone will get around to saying a great deal more about this particular number.