I Spit On Your Grave 2 (Movie Review)

I Spit On Your Grave 2 is not for the faint of heart since it manages to pack more gore, blood and guts in its 106 minutes runtime then any other horror film out there. If you think the Human Centipede was disturbing then you haven't seen I Spit On Your Grave 2 because it will change everything you thought you knew about the grotesque world of horror.



I Spit On Your Grave 2 introduces us to small time girl Katie (Jemma Dallender) who has moved to the Big Apple to get her start in modeling. It isn't long of waiting tables and countless rejections that she realizes it is a lot harder than it looks. A prospective agent tells her that that she needs a new portfolio, since country bumpkin wasn't cutting it, and it was probably going to cost her a couple of grand. Well, Katie lives in a fixer-upper apartment building with little money to her name, so of course, she jumps on an advertisement for free photoshoot.

She calls the number and what does she get? A creepy dude with a foreign accent says, "You call for photoshoot? Text photo," and hangs up on her. Serial killer rapist alert! Yeah, well naive Katie sends her photo right over and then gets an address in reply. I mean, everything here says stay the hell away, but Katie just thinks she just lucked up in getting $2,000 dollars worth of photos for free. Nothing is ever free and sometimes come with even higher price than you think.

Director Stephen Monroe doesn't take long to show the audience what mixing deranged characters with attractive young women who turn down their naked photoshoot offer can lead to. One of the men, Georgy (Yavor Baharov), uses the contact details from the signed release form to track down Katie and basically break in where he rapes and kidnaps her with the help of his partners in crime Ivan (Joe Absolom) and Nicolay (Aleksandar Aleksiev). She is drugged and taken to Bulgaria where she continues to get beaten, tortured and violently raped. As you would expect of a film of this nature, there is a lot of vulgarity, gore, nude scenes and crying. It is almost unbearable to watch as a woman, because you know there are real women out there that have went through that.

We soon find out that the family has a habit of this kind of behavior and seem to be involved in sex trafficking. Katie manages to escape the dingy basement out a small window and thinks she is free at last. However, it is not until this moment, she realizes that she is in another country and things get even more terrifying. She is ignored by passersby who don't speak her language and think she is just a crazy nut job. Eventually, she makes it to the police station where no one believes her story and leaves with a woman named Ana (Mary Stockley) who is a rape counselor. She supposingly runs a shelter and promises to take her to the U.S. Embassy after stopping to get her some clean clothes. Katie thinks the nightmare is almost to an end, before she steps down into a basement for new clothes, to only discover she is back where she started!

Well, after being raped, tortured and beaten one more time, the group decide it is time for her to go. They dig a whole in the basement, throw in her lifeless body in a trunk, and bury her alive. As Katie begs not to die, not much later, the floor breaks and she finds herself in the sewers beneath the city. The group go on about their business not knowing over the course of several days that Katie has been surviving in the sewers by eating crippled pigeons, wearing a homeless person's clothes and healing up for her revenge.

The rest of I Spit on Your Grave 2 involves Katie using her skills from growing up on a farm and her technical ability to rig up various torture devices. Her plan is to track down every person involved and torture them in the way that she was. While the film exhibits the same amount of inhumane and sadistic violence as the others in the series, the viewer just never really connects with Katie as a heroine or a victim. Ivan and the others are your stereotypical bad guys, and we end up with a movie that contains no real plot elements. The film is everything you expect of torture porn horror and in the end it fails at delivering any kind of real substance at all. However, I have to give props to the actors for their superb performances in pulling off the most grotesque film I have seen this year.

Score: 3.5 out 10


Movie Information
Release Date: September 24, 2013
Director: Steven R. Monroe
MPAA rating: R
Genres: Crime Fiction, Thriller, Horror
Cast: Jemma Dallender, Yavor Baharov, Joe Absolom, Aleksandar Aleksiev, and Mary Stockley