Dante’s Weekend Double: The “Wrath Of August” Comes To A Bitter End With ‘I Saw The Devil’ & ‘I Spit On Your Grave’
Four weeks (and eight films) have passed, but the thirst for blood is not sated, and it never will be. That is the harsh price paid for retribution.
These final two films show that we all have a bit of evil in our souls. That some darkness goes deeper for others, and all it takes is the right kind of monster (or monsters) to come along and awaken it. Vengeance is yours, folks!
I Saw The Devil (Peppermint & Company/SoftBank Ventures Korea/Finecut)
A layover from last week brings one more unforgiving cut of South Korean acrimony from 2010 It’s easily one of their best directed by Kim Jee-Woon (A Tale of Two Sisters) and starring Lee Byung-hun (A Bittersweet Life) and Choi Min-sik (Oldboy, Lady Vengeance).
I Saw The Devil is about an NIS secret agent named Kim Soo-Hyun (Lee), whose fiancé is murdered by serial killer, Jang Kyung-chul (Choi), a psychopath who kills, and dismembers women of all ages for pleasure. After the police find Jang Joo-yeon’s remains scattered along the local water canals, Soo-Hyun launches his own private investigation that quickly leads to his man, and that’s when the party begins.
He abducts Kyung-chul after kicking his ass and asphyxiating him with a plastic bag. Then he forces him to swallow a tracking device and sets him free. Catch, wound, and release are the name of the game that Soo-Hyun utilizes to torture his prey. The man becomes a monster on his quest for vengeance. That’s until the tables turn, and Kyung-chul shows him what a professional monster looks like.
To successfully defeat the devil, one must become an equal (if not greater) evil to do so. Kim Jee-Woon paints a bleak picture of the dark places a retributive mindset can take a person, of the darkness within everyone, and how far those depths can go when the worst happens. It’s a great cinematic depiction of what Nietzsche said about how whatever is done for love occurs beyond the confines of good and evil. This isn’t a feel-good film by any stretch of the imagination, but it’s still a damned good one.
I Saw The Devil over on Prime, but luckily there was no fiddle.
I Spit On Your Grave (The Jerry Gross Organization)
We have saved the absolute worst for last, and anyone who has seen this controversial shocker from 1978 is probably nodding their heads in agreement right now…or shaking it in disgust. The infamous, and most definitely not legendary Day of the Woman (aka I Spit On Your Grave) has spent almost half a century disturbing moviegoers brave enough to watch it while earning the pure vitriol of most film critics.
It was one of those selections from the old video store days that foolish adolescents would rent so they could prove to their friends how much of an edge lord they were (guilty!).
This is the messed-up tale of Jennifer Hills (played incredibly by Camille Keaton). She’s a writer from New York City who rents a cottage out in the upstate countryside to work on her first novel. It’s the ideal setting, and certainly a lot less pretentious than sitting at a Starbucks, but (digression aside) it quickly turns into a nightmare.
Jennifer arrives in the BuFu town and immediately attracts the attention of a scummy group of northern rednecks, and the village simpleton. Let’s just say that for a movie about a writer, this didn’t seem to have one working on it. What follows are some of the hardest sequences to watch in all of film history. These good ol’ boys abduct Jennifer, take turns sexually assaulting her, sodomizing her, and then leave her for dead.
This movie is 102 minutes long, and 30 are dedicated to showing that horrific ordeal. If anyone wants to sit this one out, I personally can’t blame them. For those still left, to Trauma Town we go. Jennifer survives the experience and then spends several days pulling herself together before seeking out her male suitors one by one and giving them the graphic endings they deserve. One that involves a bathtub, a knife, and quick ssssssslice!
The raw, unflinching ugliness of this movie has not aged, and neither has the terrible filmmaking behind it. There must not have been anything in the budget to hire an editor, and that’s assuming they could find someone to do it. I Spit On Your Grave is a hard watch, and an even harder re-watch, but it’s still one of the ultimate revenge movies – one that can be found on TUBI if you’re brave enough.
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