Day of the Woman (1978)

Originally exhibited under the title Day of the Woman and later renamed for the drive-in trade, this 1978 picture follows a Manhattan novelist who rents a Connecticut cottage, is gang raped by four local men, and then dispatches them one at a time with a knife, a noose, and an outboard motor. It is an exploitation object through and through, and it apologizes for nothing. Its pleasures, such as they are, reside in the mechanics of vengeance and not in any argument about the world.

The cast is uniformly white, race never arises as a subject, and the picture has no interest in who stands before the camera. There are no queer characters. There is no economic critique, no environmental concern, no affirmation of the body; the camera leers where it should not, which is the opposite of an affirming project. A mentally disabled man is written as a participant in the assault and is later hanged, a treatment that stigmatizes instead of dignifying. The story is contemporary and invented, so there is no history to revise, and the film never pauses to lecture. It is too busy being lurid.

The single area of genuine ambiguity is the film's relationship to its female lead. Jennifer wins, decisively and gruesomely, and later critics have read the whole affair as feminist wish-fulfillment. That reading is contested. On release it was picketed by feminists and banned in several countries for glorifying violence against women. The revenge is real; the agenda is not. We grant a modest, grudging allowance and nothing further. Roger Ebert gave it zero stars and called it a vile bag of garbage, and Gene Siskel agreed. It nonetheless found an audience on videocassette, where it outsold Fiddler on the Roof and The Godfather Part II on a single sales chart, a fact that tells us something about the republic. Britain branded it a video nasty and prosecuted it for years. The classification is straightforward: a revenge picture, an exploitation picture, and a headache for anyone who has ever had to rate one.