I Spit On Your Grave: Deja Vu (2019)

The beginning of my defense for why I subjected myself to this irredeemable piece of shit is…I routinely experience difficulty finding movies worth my time. Most movies aren’t good or bad. Most movies are generic energy vampires featuring an aimless plot that leaves you hollowed out while craving a death you weren’t fantasizing about 135 minutes prior. That tradition of sterilized entertainment inevitably sends poor saps like myself onto Tubi, thinking morbid things like “maybe I Spit On Your Grave: Deja Vu is worth my time.”

I was also led to this atrocious content because I watched the original I Spit On Your Grave this year and it was a unique experience. I was infatuated with I Spit On Your Grave’s hillbilly horror trope revolving around a woman who ventures in the countryside and encounters a vile side of humanity she had somehow never encountered in 1970s NYC. Nowadays that’d be like a Florida resident leaving their home state and suddenly discovering elderly Boomers with a fierce loyalty to Donald Trump. That amusing fantasy combined with the film’s unapologetic, cheap, crass stupidity surprisingly put the original I Spit On Your Grave far above the many gray blobs you’ll easily find masquerading as a movie.

This is a sidenote, but I’ll stress that I’m speaking about the original I Spit On Your Grave because at the time I write this, Wal-Mart has repackaged the 2010 remake with a new Valentine’s Day themed slipcover. In that movie a woman is gangraped, lives in the woods while planning her revenge and eventually gets one of her rapists tied to a tree while vultures feast on his eyes. Did it feel like Cupid’s arrow punctured your ass while I laid out that romantic prose?

The fascinating and jolting experience I had while watching I Spit On Your Grave made me incorrectly feel there was a reason to watch I Spit On Your Grave: Deja Vu, something quickly scrapped together once somebody heard about another 1978 horror film getting a sequel/reboot hybrid the previous year. Say what you want about the original I Spit On Your Grave, compared to Deja Vu it now resembles a beautiful dream Orson Welles experienced that made him weep once he realized a mere mortal lacked the ability to commit such a moving vision to film. Multiple times this sad excuse for a movie features clips from I Spit On Your Grave and it’s comparable to watching scenes from Vertigo in a Lifetime thriller so incompetent that even Eric Roberts turned it down.

I Spit On Your Grave: Deja Vu is not a movie. It’s more comparable to a YouTube video made by aspiring filmmakers in middle school who idolize Zack Snyder and attempted to make an intentionally bad tribute to Rob Zombie’s profanity packed horror films. It’s assumed Deja Vu was someone’s attempt at a campy horror film, but everything’s so incoherent and cheap that even while watching the most absurd displays, you still have have doubts about anybody involved possessing the awareness required for intentional camp. The complete disconnect Deja Vu has with reality is a step below Tommy Wiseau believing he was the second coming of Elia Kazan and Tennessee Williams while making The Room.

It’s unclear what I Spit On Your Grave: Deja Vu has to say about the current state of film because it’s so irrelevant. Since it’s a sequel to a notable exploitation classic that single-handedly kept New York City’s grindhouse theaters alive for years, perhaps it does say something sad about movies today. It’s startling how beautiful I Spit On Your Grave now appears when compared to Deja Vu. The same director’s involved, and yet the cheap, crass, stupid exploitation flick from 1978 now resembles a Douglas Sirk film whenever scenes are featured throughout Deja’s Vu digitally shot futility. I wanna watch movies that don’t suck my soul dry with their monotonous, unfulfilling and meaningless exhibitions. Apparently this is a request more unrealistic than demanding that Elizabeth Hurley and Tera Patrick fly to where I live and fuck my brains out.