Furîzu mî

Rape revenge flick is just so quirky I don't even know what I thought of it.

Half way through this I found myself wondering what genre it was. Was it a horror? No, because it wasn't gruesome or scary enough. Was it a drama? No, because there was nowhere near enough depth to the story. Was it a thriller? No, because there was hardly any sense of thrills or tension on display.

This stumbling block is always going to be a huge problem. If you cannot classify a story under a specific category, or indeed multiple ones, then it becomes very hard to understand what kind of mindset to watch it in. If it's a thriller then it gets your pulse racing and you instantly 'activate' the mental recesses to put you into that frame of mind so you'll get the most out of it. Likewise horror, and one prepares oneself to be scared or disgusted or whatever. It's like real life - you're not going to elicit any inappropriate emotion for a given situation. You want to panic when you're being chased by a lion, not when you're settling down for a relaxing evening with your wife/husband.

With this, I was simply baffled as to how to feel.

Chihiro is a young lady who appears to have it all; a good job, an impending marriage to a man she's deeply in love with, and a solid social circle of friends. Indeed, she's in absolute bliss.

However, when a man she seems to recognise shows up at her apartment block, she runs from him in a state of panic, and a flashback of a scene from a home movie where the man's eyes dominate the picture appears. Evidently, she knows this man, and is terrified of him. Running back to her apartment she tries to get away from him, but he sticks to her like glue and takes over her home.

Essentially, it's safe to say that he (Kojima) is someone from Chohiro's past who she hoped never to see again.

That would be a synopsis and sets the stall for the movie. Well, so you would think. The problem I have with this review is the movie has very little content. Basically rapist #1 shows up, gets killed by the vilified woman, then his buddy shows up and the same happens, then the last one. And to store the bodies of these perps? Chohiro buys industrial freezers.

And that's it.

Obviously, there's an ending here, but you can see it coming a mile off and the events leading up to it are also as inevitable.

The major flaw with this movie is there are simply no layers to it. It's uninteresting because it never makes anything happen.

There's just so little plot that it makes rating it impossible, plus the added fact that it even adopts comedy at one point shows how completely directionless it actually is.

It's shallow, vacuous, and devoid of meat. However, it *is* different, and is extremely quirky as a result, which I must give it credit for.

However, add some overwrought rape scenes to the mix and you finish this movie entirely confused as to what you made of it.

I think more could have been done with the idea, and plenty more to make it plausible. Which is another flaw; to say you have to suspend your disbelief is an understatement. It's just absolutely incredible how daft much of this is. So many things happen which seem to abandon logic entirely, and they don't even succeed in entertaining given how utterly daft they are. You find yourself asking just why she is acting the way she is, why she is doing what she is doing.

Is it entertaining? Dunno. I suppose it killed (pardon the pun) a couple of hours but really, it was just so narrow.

Strange.

While similar in plot to a revenge movie, this is actually a survival movie. I liked it for its intensity: it doesn't take long to get going, and keeps nonstop tension for the next hour or so. Although it reaches its emotional climax a full half-hour before the end, there's enough tension built up by then to carry it through. It concerns a young lady who's confronted by a gang of men who had raped her five years before. The second meeting is no accident, they've sought after her to victimize her some more. Rape is not a crime of sexual gratification, it's a crime of humiliating domination over another person. That said, Chihiro is just the kind of timid soul who can easily be dominated: she doesn't have the courage to do the sensible thing, instead simply hoping the whole thing will go away. It doesn't, of course, and she's forced into action out of self-preservation. It often reminds me of Miike's earlier film, "Audition". That is said to have a strong message about the treatment of women in Japanese society, and I see this as another side of the same coin: a woman who has had a disabling stigma of shame placed on her, and has to struggle to overcome it. While the ensuing violence is certainly justified, it is not glorified. There is no real victory in this movie. While the things she is subjected to are revolting, the camera is thankfully restrained. Most of the violence against her is offscreen, and even the original attack is shown only in fragments, as a series of flashbacks. There is a lot of nudity here, but I don't see it as exploitational. First of all, it's very much a sex-themed movie, so nudity is pretty much a given. Most of it occurs in the shower: she spends an awful lot of time trying to wash herself clean. The movie does offer plenty of messages, but they're not uplifting or inspiring ones at all: more indictments of double standards in the treatment of women. I thought this was a terrific movie, and one that sticks with you, marred only by some truly awful English-language dubbing (at least, in the version I saw). A movie like this depends on a strong lead actress to carry it, and the voice actress in the U.S. version is just really not any good at all.

Some films are made that test society's underlying beliefs, and this is one of them. some would say that the women in such a circumstance should call the police (as i would advocate also in every case), but sometimes with some people, pride and society may lead to people hiding. This is the case with Chihiro, who on being gatecrashed by her attackers, is afraid to lose her life once again by revealing what happened to her.

It tests our attitude to the victims in such circumstances, and makes you think. You see the film from the victims point of view... and in that way, for those willing to see a film that tests their minds, then this is a film for you. Outstanding and frightening movie that deserves to be watched..

I have seen the cover art for this movie ages ago, and i wanted to watch this thing quite a while now finally had my chance.

Now this movie did came from the same director that did SWEET WHIP, and SWEET WHIP is an amazing movie, this was pretty good as well. That ending was ridiculously depressing it made me really really sad.

This movie is classified as a Splatter film, and no. The movie is very tame gore wise, when i think of a Splatter movie what comes up in my mind is Premutos, DeadAlive, Daddy's Little Girl, Eat, these are gore films to the top, that keep hammering you with gore. Here there barely was any gore. And no that's not a negative to the film i'm just saying there wasn't really any gore here.

Now, as the title suggets, this would be the Asian i spit on your grave in my opinion, just more depressing (the ending). The story is thin as it is, a woman is getting harrased by her past rapists and she gets her revenge. That's pretty much the whole movie, and it works. Just imagine I spit on your grave Asian style.

The acting seems okay, the effects are regular, the story is thin as it is, but it sort of works, the camera, lighting everything is fine. However, i got only one negative: And that's the movie gets extremely repetitive, Just like I spit on your grave, it's just our main anti-villain hero killing off her rapists, that's all. It gets kinda repetitive, but still a fun watch.

If you enjoyed I spit on your grave, Hobo with a shotgun, Ms 47, Machine Girl for example, go for it, you most likely will enjoy this thing. I think the movie was fine.

What "I Spit On Your Grave" should've been. Well, OK, the plot advancement might be a tad contrived, and the weird way a rape victim in this film is portrayed, at least, I hope women aren't actually so victimized by shame in Japan as to maintain a stoic silence that is so firmly entrenched the antagonists can actually blackmail the victim vying against her fear that others might know of her "shame" of being deflowered, abused, or molested. Her inaction for a large portion of the film is agonizing, but understandable in consideration of the themes of the film (action vs. victimization, social shame vs. personal safety, social roles and double standards for men vs. for women). It's an educational bit of work, nicely shot, and generally engaging. Loads better than I had expected it to be. On a neat side note, the star of this, Harumi Inoue, was having dinner at a Sushi joint on fourth, bracketed by a pair of very Yakuza boss looking dudes, tans and black turtlenecks and thick ropey gold chains and tiny glinting glasses, real imposing. My pal Shotaro recognized her. Kind of weird to see a woman out calmly eating sushi that I'd just seen scantly clad, drenched in blood with murder on her mind. Guess that's an illustration of filmic reality vs. actual reality for you.