"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 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 blasted the movie 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.