by Allen Richards
Those gams. Boy, oh boy, those gams. That rump, too…
Summer 1985 and I’d just turned twelve but didn’t own a VCR yet. That didn’t stop me from swinging by the video store after my weekly excursion to the dollar movie at New Carrolton Mall — really a strip mall with one enclosed end that housed an AMC multiplex, Sears, a comic shop where I spent the rest of my allowance, and that video store. That video store was always the last stop before the two-mile walk back home. I can’t remember the name, and the mall was razed years ago to make way for urban sprawl, but there was nowhere else where my prepubescent friends and I could get a look at some tit. Sure, the Dawn of the Dead box had some boobage, and the slack-ass working the register didn’t seem to give two spits if we ducked into the Adult aisle for a minute or two, catching our first glimpses of Betamax beaver, but there was just something about that I Spit on Your Grave box art that I couldn’t help but keep coming back to. Oh, yeah, it was those gams. That rump, too.
It would be years before I’d finally get around to watching the actual movie. Two-and-a-half years later my family finally got their first VCR, and sometime around then I’d gotten into reading Fangoria and Gorezone. While my horny little ass should have been all over that rental, I’d built it up to be some sort of exploitation holy grail that I’d have to work my way up to. There were a few movies like that, ones I was too afraid to rent after reading the hype in Fango — The Evil Dead, Faces of Death, Make Them Die Slowly, and Burial Ground come immediately to mind. By the time I was able to muster the sack to pluck down for I Spit in the spring of 1991, I’d been rendered catatonic by Evil Dead the year prior, and spent a night trying to keep down a wave of up-chuck after one of my sister’s freshman, teenybopper gal-pals brought over Burial Ground (for the record, the gore effects didn’t get to me, at least not that much, but that weird hausfrau chowing down with her mouth open still makes me want to wretch twenty years later).
In those days I rented some real garbage. “Safe” horror title — ones that didn’t carry those “Banned In X Number of Countries” warnings. While I don’t remember that exact warning on the I Spit box, I’d finally gotten to the point where everything outside of those gams wasn’t lost on me. Words like “raped,” “burned,” and “mutilated” were my warnings. So was Roger Ebert’s review in his 1990 Movie Guide. What he depicted was something so vile that I was assured to again be rendered a little screaming bitch, just like I was during Evil Dead. Simply put, I just never had the stones to pluck down.
The only reason I Spit even made it into my house at all was that school let out early one day. That close to graduation, half days were common, and I remember thinking that if I were ever going to watch this fucker, it had to be then. That day — “just do it and get it over with.” While it was sunny out — to avoid another midnight Evil Dead meltdown. Before my mother came home from work — the promise of full 1970s bush was something you never wanted to let your mother catch you indulging.
Strangely, while I remember events leading up to the movie as if they happened yesterday, the movie itself is little more than a blur. Hell, I remember more of what I thought about the movie as it unfolded than I do the movie itself. Sure, images come to mind, but they’re more like random flashes. Camille Keaton holding that ax above her head as that raging speedboat roared the ultimate “I am Woman” message with so much finality that Gloria Steinem could have given up her crusade and just plastered a frame grab on billboards across the country and men the world over would have been rendered instantly impotent.
The campout. God, that campout. Every bit as poorly written and embarrassing to watch as Ebert said. But, as fate would have it, that “do you think girls poo?” discussion echoed exactly what one of my redneck friends stated to me only weeks prior. Apparently, pretty girls dropping deuces is about as hard to fathom as, say, why anyone would stick their dick in a blender. Is there some sort of extra taboo associated with a dirty human function if the participant is lust worthy? Was it just some sophomoric idiot’s attempt at lame potty humor? I still don’t know, nor do I care, but just the same, I’ll never forget that campfire discussion, or my redneck friend wondering the same thing in earnest, or thinking “Holy Jesus, Ebert was right!” While on the subject of potty humor, there’s the film’s sole bathroom scene and another disconnected image burned right into my brain where Camille emasculated one of her attackers (and every audience member harboring lascivious thoughts) while he took a bath. The punishment certainly fit the crime, but to a teenager who hadn’t actually put his to proper use yet, this seemed by far the most heinous act of the entire film.
Then there’s Camille Keaton herself. She did indeed look gorgeous, especially naked, and that’s really all I remember about the thirty minutes of rape. Rape, as a concept and not just a cinematic convention, was completely alien to me then and I’m not sure exactly how that early exposure might have affected me over the years but somewhere along the way, either as it unfolded before me then or in the twenty years since, I’ve pretty much forgotten/repressed the bulk of the film’s rape. Just a single image of Camille is all I can muster, but that might have more to do with that exact image being posted all over the fanboy driven Internet than it does my recall ability. Watching the I Spit remake recently, I was able to connect certain scenes to moments in the original, but drew a complete blank during the scenes of rape. Was it too traumatic for me then? Was the embarrassing possibility of being titillated during the exposure too humiliating to remember? I’m tempted to say “no” on both simply because of my reaction during the closing credits, when I thought, “Really? That was it? What was all the fuss about?” In hindsight, that might be my most disturbing memory of the film and the reason I’ve never been tempted to watch it since. Then again, just today I picked up the DVD case at Best Buy and gave the once over, once again, to those gams. That rump, too.