The controversial movie Roger Ebert detested: “A vile bag of garbage”
American film critic Roger Ebert had a lot of strong opinions. His unrelenting comments on everything from the latest arthouse picture to the newest blockbuster allowed him to become the most well-known movie reviewer in the country, never holding back what he actually thought. While he could, of course, be kind, his reviews of bad movies were always much more entertaining to read.
Ebert blended plenty of humour into his reviews, making them accessible for more casual movie-goers to understand what was worth seeing and what they should avoid. His reviews were so popular that Ebert even influenced the success of certain films, encouraging people not to waste their time on pieces of cinema he deemed a waste of celluloid.
One of these films was I Spit On Your Grave by Meir Zarchi. He opened up his review of the 1978 film by writing, “A vile bag of garbage named I Spit on Your Grave is playing in Chicago theaters this week.” He went on to call it “so sick, reprehensible and contemptible,” adding, “I can hardly believe it’s playing in respectable theatres, such as Plitt’s United Artists. But it is.” For Ebert, watching the rape-revenge movie was “one of the most depressing experiences of my life”.
I Spit on Your Grave didn’t make Ebert feel depressed in the same way that an Ingmar Bergman film might; rather, the critic was gobsmacked by the purely disturbing nature of the exploitative movie, which he viewed as nothing more than a bizarre attempt at making money. “This is a film without a shred of artistic distinction. It lacks even simple craftsmanship. There is no possible motive for exhibiting it,” he added. Ebert noticed that the audience was larger than normal in the theatre he viewed it at, which is perhaps a testament to the film’s male-gazey poster.
Shot from behind, we see the image of a scantily clad woman, later confirmed to be Demi Moore, even though she’s not in the film. Her clothes barely hang onto her body as she walks through some greenery with a blade in her hand. The tagline reads: “This woman has just cut, chopped, broken and burned five men beyond recognition…but no jury in America would ever convict her!” Clearly, audiences were enticed by this exploitative film, and while it didn’t end up doing particularly well at the box office overall, the VHS sales for it were very high.
Ebert was shocked by the audience, stating that they were “disturbing”.
He explained, “They talked out loud. And if they seriously believed the things they were saying, they were vicarious sex criminals.” He even noted that men would shout out phrases like “That was a good one!” and “That’ll show her!” after each rape. The movie features many intense scenes, such as gang rape sequences, which are purely sensationalistic. Combined with the poor quality of the film, I Spit On Your Grave is labelled as one of the worst movies ever, and Ebert couldn’t have agreed more.
“This movie is an expression of the most diseased and perverted darker human natures,” he surmised. “As a critic, I have never condemned the use of violence in films if I felt the filmmakers had an artistic reason for employing it. I Spit on Your Grave does not. It is a geek show.”
