10 Films That Should Never Have Become Franchises
1. I Spit On Your Grave
If you haven’t seen I Spit On Your Grave, all you need to know is that it’s about a young woman’s revenge on the four men who raped her and left her for dead. One is hung from a tree, another has his penis cut off and bleeds to death, and so on.
The 1980 release of Meir Zarchi’s movie was protested by feminists, who felt the filmmaker had turned rape into entertainment. In his review, Roger Ebert called it “a movie so sick, reprehensible and contemptible that I can hardly believe it’s playing in respectable theaters.”
In 2010, the remake met with a muted response despite adhering closely to the original narrative. A sequel followed that told essentially the same story with a different character, then in I Spit On Your Grave: Vengeance Is Mine the original lead character returned to punish the city’s rapists.
Due out in 2018, I Spit on Your Grave: Déjà vu is a direct sequel to Zarchi’s film but isn’t there something distasteful about franchising rape and revenge? Doesn’t being told the same story five times just dull our sensations and trivialize the subject?