Paul Hyett
The Seasoning House

Before Tarantino, before Kill Bill, before the whole world discovered what on earth "Lady Snowblood" was, we children who enjoy the screen turning red had a single guardian deity in the face of the dilemma of "what the hell is a Rape & Revenge?" and the answer was: "I Spit On Your Grave" in Italian: "Non Violentate Jennifer"-I SWEAR-.

Those were different times: we were emerging from the beat generation, hippies, psychedelic trips in the desert; and we were about to enter that period which years later was nicknamed by someone (certainly by me, but I must have stolen it from about 100 other people) "the plastic years." After a wild indulgence in culture and free love, the world was determined to take a break and switch from creative drugs to passive drugs, from counterculture to television, and from free love between people who know and care about each other to the HIV of dark rooms. In short, the upcoming period wasn't exactly the best, and cinema, eyeing potential easy profits, was already fishing out old ideas from others and repackaging them in a more commercial way.

To cut a long story short so I don't get lost and start saying too much nonsense: "I Spit On Your Grave" is not the first Rape & Revenge in history: "They Call Her One Eye" is 5 years younger, it comes from Sweden and has at least one scene that even today makes you say "My God, yuck." Even from a salacious point of view, it's not like "I Spit..." had much to tell "They Call Her...": in "I Spit On Your Grave" you often and willingly saw the great ass and lovely little titties of Camille Keaton, but the film made in Sweden (we have not only IKEA) shamelessly showed close-ups of coitus and if I remember correctly even an ejaculation... In short, this is all to say that, like it or not, day by day cinema is becoming cleaner and more amiable. After all, we live in a pretty reactionary era, you can't complain too much.

Two years ago, as a demonstration of what I just concluded, came out the remake of "I Spit On..." which by itself was a bad idea from the start: basically "I Spit..." is a film that when it came out in '78 had an already obsolete plot, and especially it’s hard to shock someone in 2010 by talking about rapes. If we then add that the only two valid scenes from the original film were forgotten in the remake, we can conclude that I Spit On Your Grave made in 2010 was off to a bad start and kept its word better than a boy scout. Nothing shocking.
We said earlier that times were different, today for R&R we consider all those films in which mistreated women get back at those guilty of injustices they suffered. You will never believe it, but somewhere, hidden in a corner of the internet, I found a site where the author, hopefully with a bit of shame, included Dogville in the R&R stream... Wow!
So stop, it’s a genre that no longer exists, the infamous R&R and it's not a genre that no longer exists because nobody cares anymore: it’s no longer a genre because to manage to say something different from what’s been said (which... what the fuck should an R&R say: you rape me, I kill you.) so far, you have to do something that has nothing to do with it and disguise it as R&R with the clever move of: "I'm the director, if I tell you it’s an R&R you trust me, because indeed I am the director and you are not a damn thing"

This was the case until the Fright Fest of this year. Because a guy, Paul Hyett, came to the super festival in London, and decided to convince us all that it’s still possible nowadays to make a film of the aforementioned genre without ending up in shambles and without the only four idiots leaving the theater happily being under seventeen. Oh, Hyett set his mind to it strong, uh. He got so obsessed with this thing that first he sweated a lot to convince himself that he could actually do it, then in an hour and a half he convinced everyone who saw his film. And let's take a moment of attention please because Hyett doesn’t manage to disturb the viewer with excessive doses of ultraviolence or with scenes of sex beyond any limit, no, mr Hyett, God knows how, makes your soul ask your eyes to look elsewhere with blows of directorial choices. Make no mistake, we’re friends and therefore let’s be clear, there is plenty of blood in the film, even misogynistic sex, but these are not the most significant and direct moments of the film (something that can’t be said neither of the two "I Spit..." nor of "They call her..." nor of "dog... but screw Dogville Lord God!")

Let's proceed in order. The protagonist of this "The Seasoning House" lives in the Balkans. There is war, soldiers arrive, they take her sister away, kill her mother and bring her to a shack in the woods where other girls like her are fed to paying soldiers. She will fare better than the others: she’s ugly (not true, but not a damn, but the authors want us to think she’s ugly, which cost me quite some effort, maybe it costs you less) and also deaf-mute, so: "No sex! She’s the maid!" She thus ends up being the servant of the infamous "Seasoning House" until the day she says (silently) "Oh, I’m fed up, now let’s take out a pair of scissors and start spreading these guys on the walls." End. Or rather, it doesn’t end like that, at the end of the film you’ll know if she manages to get revenge for... Oh my God, for them killing her mother, kidnapping her sister, raping and killing a friend of hers, that they held her hostage in a shack, slapped her around, slit girls' throats in front of her eyes, and I think that's enough; it should be sufficient.
No: they don't rape her, but this is very much an R&R: there’s the sex that sparks the blood, there’s the revenge of an apparently defenseless woman (disabled to top it off), there’s the male who feels strong and gets screwed...

I'm not a fan of the genre, I'm not a fan either of films that treat a woman poorly for over an hour, and I realize that reading these lines you may think it’s one of those films that harms society, that ultimately the revenge is nothing compared to the moments where the protagonist is treated badly and that therefore in the end it’s the film of a misogynist who hides his feelings by trying to make you believe he’s on women's side while instead the subconscious and subliminal message that passes on is diametrically opposed. I know some, most of you, have thought about this. No, it’s not like that; this is not a misogynistic film like Dogville, and at the same time it’s not a crash-bang film like "They Call Her..." and it’s not even a crap but still makes you want to talk about it because it’s full of interesting ideas like a castration or a guy dissolved in acid. No, it’s a film that tackles a very tough genre (not that it’s difficult to make an R&R, it’s difficult to make a decent one) coming out with its bones all intact and winning by technical knockout before the last round.

It's the silences that disturb, it’s the suspension of space-time in which the deaf-mute heroine moves that leaves the film in an absolutely suspended emotional state. At the proper distances, let’s avoid saying or implying things that neither stand in heaven nor on earth; taking the proper distance from this statement: it’s a film that explores those insubstantial places that made "Drive" the best romantic film of my life. In "Drive" the emptiness was romantic, here the emptiness is empty. But absolutely empty: no hope, no joy, no possibilities. And at the same time: no pain, no anger, no nothing. Just emptiness, melancholically and desperately empty. Well, "Drive" was romantic, this is apathetic despair. But in "Drive" the emptiness served to get you into the mood of a series of characters, not in the head of a single character, here things go differently: when you’re in the void, you’re in the head of the deaf-mute, and in short making me empathize with a deaf-mute who has to care for girls ready for rape is not the easiest thing to do on a Saturday afternoon, yet Hyett manages brilliantly, he gets where the genre had never gone before, and when you throw the popcorn you’re not throwing them because the film comes up with some disgustingly graphic trick, you throw them because you are genuinely rooting for the poor girl (and there is a big difference between making you root for the fate of a character rather than making you root for seeing her naked in the next scene). Then make no mistake, I’m not saying "drive" and this film weigh on the global landscape of cinema history in recent years in the same way. I repeat: let’s avoid misunderstandings.

Enough, I think I said too much: kisses, hugs, best wishes for a great return from holidays, mark Hyett (who from not being a director has done a lot of stuff, imdb is there ready to tell you everything) catch this movie, avoid showing it to your girlfriend or your kids, etc.
In short, the usual advice.

May the English cinema have you in glory, convert fans of Coming Soon, you still have time.