I Spit on Your Grave 3: Vengeance is Mine
I Spit on Your Grave 3 breaks the theme of the other movies. We don’t see a graphic rape scene like we do in the other movies. We do get to see somewhat graphic revenge on other rapists who got away with their crimes. You can tell it wasn’t directed by Steven R. Monroe. Obviously there’s no graphic rape scenes, but there is talk about it.
Photo Credit: Cinetel Films
Released: Nov 29, 2015
Runtime: 92 mins
Director: R.D. Braunstein
Writer: Daniel Gilboy
Actors: Sarah Butler, Jen Landon, Doug McKeon
PLOT
Jennifer, still haunted by her gang rape, goes to a rape support group at the suggestion of her therapist. She meets a like minded friend who believes in vengeance and revenge.
MY THOUGHTS
Justice isn't something you receive, it's something you dish out.--Jennifer
So the kills/deaths in I Spit on Your Grave 3 is a little bit difficult to count. Jennifer/Angela has a lot of hallucination type kills. She imagines a lot of the kills but they don’t actually happen. The best that I can count is 4 actual kills/deaths. Jennifer/Angela kills two guys, one is killed by the cops, and one guy kills himself. My personal favorite is when she rams the pipe (with a sledgehammer) up Ron’s ass. The man deserved so much more for what he did to his step daughter.
Not my favorite but makes me cringe for obvious reasons, is Nicholas’ death. She cuts off his penis in the middle of her going down on him. The one that makes me sad is Oscar’s suicide. Slicing up his arms and taking the blame for the deaths of the other men for Jennifer/Angela just made me feel sad. I liked the guy.
For this type of movie, the acting was decent. I was glad to see Sarah Butler reprise her role as Jennifer. Her character changes her name to Angela at the beginning. Jennifer is a much more hardened character than before. For me it was harder to feel good about rooting for her.
I was surprised to see Harley Jane Kozak (known for The House on Sorority Row and Arachnophobia) playing Jennifer’s therapist and seeing Michelle Hurd (known for Daredevil and Ash vs Evil Dead) as Detective Boyle who was on to Jennifer.
We start the movie with Jennifer, now going by Angela, with a crappy job and a small apartment. She has a therapist, and she starts going to a rape survivor group where she makes a friend who has similar violent, and distrustful of men views.
When her friend is killed by her abusive ex boyfriend, and gets away with it, Jennifer gets vengeful. She lures the guy into a compromising position (basically giving him oral sex) and then cuts off his penis, and bludgeons him to death.
She then goes after the rapists from her support group. The next one is Nicholas. He was raping his step daughter for many years and her mother didn’t believe her. This time she wanted to make sure he felt at least a little bit what the girl felt. So she rams a pipe up his ass with a sledgehammer.
The final rapist is Cole, who raped Oscar’s daughter which led to his daughters suicide. Unfortunately for Jennifer, Cole was a personal trainer and a big guy. She was about to get raped when the cops, who were following her, arrived and ended up shooting him to death.
This obviously gets the attention of the police and they suspect Jennifer. Luckily for her, one of the members of the group commits suicide and takes the blame for the killings. Even though they think it’s her she only gets arrested later for attacking a man, but not killing him. We find out that the therapist she has been seeing is actually a court appointed therapist while she is in jail for two years.
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I Spit on Your Grave 3 deals more with the revenge than rape in the Rape/Revenge sub genre. There’s only talk about the rapes from the various victims. More about Jennifer avenging or doling out justice when the courts fail. On the one hand I feel like it’s a good movie in how some people live after the rapes or horrifying incidents. (Obviously not the killings.) How they live in fear and feel like all men are assholes.
Which brings me to an issue I have with the movie. I don’t like how they portray all of the men, minus Oscar, as assholes who just want to rape or have sex with the women. Then again, it may just be from the perspective of Jennifer that all men are like that. I don’t know. But it did lessen my view of Jennifer.
Overall, I feel like there’s something lacking in this movie versus the movies up to this point in the franchise. As much as rape is a horrific aspect of the other movies, it gives us more reason to root for our main characters. In this movie, it’s secondary characters that these bad things happen to at another time, so we don’t get as much of the emotional aspect of it. I feel this is the reason I didn’t like this movie as much. Despite having Sarah Butler (who I like) in it and I did like the blood/gore and special effects, I didn’t like this movie and will not watch it again.
Have you seen the other I Spit on Your Grave movies? Check out my other reviews here: I Spit on Your Grave Franchise.
And now for your Forever Final Girl Exclusive…Did you know?:
First installment of the loosely connected series not to use a similar story formula.
The sign outside the therapist's office at the end of the film has been split to say "The Rapists".
Let’s get into the rankings:
Kills/Blood/Gore: 4/5
Sex/Nudity: 1/5
Scare factor: 2.5/5 Just for the aspect of rape throughout the movie, and for men the cut off of the penis.
Enjoyment factor: 1/5
My Rank: 2.1/5
IMDB: 5.1/10
Rotten Tomatoes: critics: –/10 audience: 2.7/10
Letterboxd: 2.3/5