retarded. The movie is nothing more or less than a series of attacks on the girl and then her attacks on the men, interrupted only by an unbelievably grotesque and inappropriate scene in which she enters a church and asks forgiveness for the murders she plans to commit." Ebert also included it on his "most hated" list and considered it to be the worst movie ever made. Both Ebert and fellow critic Gene Siskel lambasted the film on their television program Sneak Previews. In a later episode, Siskel and Ebert chose the film as the worst film of 1980, with Ebert famously saying "the people who made this film should really be ashamed of themselves, and so should the people who booked it and the people who went to see it — it's really an inhuman, sick film". Siskel would join Ebert in calling the film one of the worst ever made. Critic Luke Y. Thompson of The New Times stated that "defenders of the film have argued that it is actually pro-woman, due to the fact that the female lead wins in the end, which is sort of like saying that cockfights are pro-rooster because there is always one left standing". Film critic Mark Kermode has opined that it is "deeply, deeply problematic at the very best of times" and is not as interesting as earlier exploitation films such as The Last House on the Left. Critic David Keyes named it the worst film of the 1980s. This led to the film's removal from a major theatre. A contributor to Encyclopedia of Horror notes that the film attracted much debate for and against, frequently involving people who clearly had not actually seen the film. "The men are so grossly unattractive and the rapes so harrowing, long-drawn-out and starkly presented it is hard to imagine most male spectators identifying with the perpetrators, especially as the film's narrative structure and mise-en-scene force the spectator to view the action from Keaton's point of view. Further, there is no suggestion that she 'asked for it' or enjoyed it, except, of course, in the rapists' own perceptions, from which the film is careful to distance itself." The author continues that the scenes of revenge were "grotesquely misread by some critics", as Jennifer only "pretends to have enjoyed the rape so as to lure the men to their destruction", and that in these scenes the