I Will Dance on Your Grave, I Will Dance on Your Grave: Savage Vengeance, I Spit on Your Grave 2: Savage Vengeance — whatever you call this, it’s a kind of, sort of sequel to I Spit On Your Grave, to the point that Camille Keaton is in it, using the name Vickie Kehl. In fact, she even has the same name as the original, Jennifer.

How can every movie that followed the scummy first movie be so much worse?

Man, Camille Keaton has had it rough in the movies. She started as Solange in What Have You Done to Solange?, playing the doomed girl around whom the entire movie’s narrative revolves. She’s also in some further Italian weirdness like Tragic Ceremony, Sex of the Witch and Madeleine: Anatomy of a Nightmare before being decimated at length in Day of the Woman AKA  I Spit On Your Grave. I’ve spent so much time considering rape revenge (and revengeomatic) movies, that force us through so much pain in order to get to the catharsis; do we need so much pain to get to redemption? 

And yet here we are again, as this starts with Jennifer being assaulted by four men in a park, then is doxxed by a law professor, revealing to their class that she killed everyone who attacked her and got away with it. Angry, she goes on a vacation with her friend Sam (Linda Lyer), which ends up with — you guessed it — Sam being raped and killed before Jennifer is attacked and left for dead, stabbed in the chest. Well, you also can prognosticate that Jennifer returns, with a chainsaw and shotgun, and slices men’s heads in two and blasts another right in the dick. 

Shot in Tennessee for $6,000 by Donald Farmer, this had some insane behind the scenes happenings, according to critic Dan Tabor: “The strangest part in all of this is Camille Keaton under the name Vickie Kehl actually decided to go along with it and star in the film even though she was married to Meir Zarchi who directed the original I Spit on Your Grave. So she had to know this film was done without his permission. But after filming concluded on No Justice, she began shooting what amounted to a fan film, only to change her mind halfway through production. It’s rumored she called her husband, crying, and left the film about 75% finished, which is why this film barely clocks in at over an hour.”

When Keaton walked off, Farmer was left with a jigsaw puzzle where half the pieces were missing, leading to the disjointed, dream-like (or nightmare-like) pacing that defines the final cut. Meir threatened to sue, which is why there’s so much ADR that changes plot details. One assumes that Farmer was going to go all The Boogieman and use footage from the first movie to set things up. Now, he would have to remake that, and in the attack, no one takes off their pants. Farmer claimed the DP — he had a DP on this? — didn’t like the idea of making the sexual moments dirty. 

The bad guys, Dwayne and Tommy, are cartoonish versions of the squalid original bad guys. In fact, Tommy even keeps dead bodies in his house. This film is like a cover band version of a great band, and it just reminds you to enjoy the inspiration, not what Xeroxes what you already liked. The lack of grime makes the cartoonish villains feel less like threats and more like community theater actors who wandered onto the wrong set.

I asked, “Do we need so much pain to get to redemption?” The original I Spit on Your Grave argued that the audience must earn its comeuppance by enduring the assault in real time. Savage Vengeance fails because it treats the assault like a box to be checked; at least Meir’s movie has something resembling a soul. This is…man, what a weird film. I’m amazed that it exists.

You can watch this on YouTube.