brief runs each time, and Zarchi barely made back the money he had spent on advertising. In 1980, it was picked up for distribution by the Jerry Gross Organization. A condition of this re-release was that the distributors could change the title to anything they wished. It was at this time the film was retitled I Spit on Your Grave. The movie did not have a theatrical release in the United Kingdom and was solely released on home video in that country. Commercial performance The film did poorly at the box office but managed to have some success in videocassette sales. I Spit on Your Grave reached number 24 on Billboard 1981 list of best-selling titles. The film stayed in the Billboard Video Cassette Top Forty for 14 consecutive weeks and won the number one best-selling video cassette award above more popular movies like Fiddler on the Roof, The Godfather Part II and Grease. By 1982, I Spit on Your Grave had been released on video six times in the United States due to high demand. In a 1984 interview with Fangoria, Zarchi said, "I found out that of the millions of video machines in England, there's maybe one single house that has not seen I Spit on Your Grave." He claimed that by that point 20 million people worldwide had seen I Spit on Your Grave. Critical reception I Spit on Your Grave received universally negative reviews from critics. Film critic Roger Ebert referred to it as "a vile bag of garbage...without a shred of artistic distinction", adding that "Attending it was one of the most depressing experiences of my life." He mentioned in his review that a female member of the audience (one of many people who randomly talked aloud) had "feminist solidarity for the movie's heroine". He wrote, "I wanted to ask if she'd been appalled by the movie's hour of rape scenes." Ebert was also one of many to cite the movie's poor production quality as a weakness in addition to the scenes he found offensive, stating "The story of I Spit on Your Grave is told with moronic simplicity. These horrible events are shown with an absolute minimum of dialogue, which is so poorly recorded that it often cannot be heard. There is no attempt to develop the personalities of the characters - they are, simply, a girl and four men, one of them mentally