Deadgirl | Indie Horror/Thriller | rated R/Unrated (A,L,N,S,R,V,G) | 1:41 mins | This is a review of the unrated director’s cut
Two high school burnouts sneak into an old abandoned insane asylum to trash the place and find a naked woman chained up down there who first appears to be dead, then shows signs of barely clinging to life and then appears to be unable to die. No matter how hard you try. The two split on what to do with their discovery. Rickie the nice guy harboring a crush on the jock’s girlfriend JoAnn wants to free her, but J.T. thinks it is perfectly natural to keep the girl as their undead sex slave.
I thought I’d seen it all and the level of depravity Deadgirl dips it’s wick into still threw me for a loop. It is a freaky, utterly messed up, often terrible movie that’s sheer weirdness and moxy almost won me to it’s side before it was all over. Almost. My desire and delight to see something I haven’t seen before has to put up a fight with some awful filmmaking and obnoxious characters with often senseless motives.
The smartest thing the movie does is leaving the titular Deadgirl a complete mystery as well as leaving interpretations of her varying from character to character. Rickie thinks she’s alive, J.T. claims she’s dead and hot (I don’t see it, even if she wasn’t bound, bloodied and riddled with bullet holes), Wheeler thinks she’s a sex object and brags about all the action he’s getting. The movie isn’t expressly about zombie rape, but in the long and short that is what it is, however you want to define zombie.
It all starts out pretty poorly. Both lead actors are annoying enough to put a damper on the insane story, entering the assylum with the lofty goal of trashing it. They’re poorly acted, unlikeable and suffer the teen movie cliche of looking far older then their character age. When discovery of the dead girl immediately turns to talk of how great she would be it is all so bizarre it is a hard idea to get behind. Handled even worse is Rickie’s crush on JoAnn (shown in slow, odd fantasies centered on her looking into the camera) and silent fade transitions out of a high school student film.
But along the way the movie develops into something rather interesting. J.T. goes from unlikeable jerk to really entertaining villain. The Deadgirl has rattled loose something in J.T. that was once just a layer under the surface as teenage rebellion but now manifested in full blown insanity as he sits in the basement day after day overseeing the deadgirl and her visitors. Up there, he says, he and his friends are cannon fodder, but down there they have control. Rickie is a terrible hero, poorly acted by Shiloh Fernandez (TV’s Shiloh Fernandez). But J.T. is played with delicious campy villainy by Noah Segan (Brick) complete with well thought-out backward moralizing monologues. Segan is a lot of fun here and is the movie’s biggest selling point.
After a lot of garbage – probably a good hour – Deadgirl takes it’s already sick, wacky premise to the next level in a creative little turn of the plot that I liked and won’t give away. It’s writers explore their idea well. I also like that Rickie is basically fighting for a girl who has no interest in him. She wouldn’t give him the time of day and not even saving her life will change that. There’s something you don’t see every day. So the ideas are there, but they are slapped together in a hurried unclear jumble and buried under amature writing. Basically if you’re halfway through, you might as well finish because it gets better.
I couldn’t help but think that the intention was for Deadgirl to be a satire aimed at teenage boys so desperate for sex, or more accurately, control of a stiffling out-of-control life that they would do anyone or anything to get it. That’s really the only level the movie works on and even at that it is an only briefly realized idea. The movie is more concerned with shocking through necrophelia then exploring the satirical angle it brings up. It is grimy, obnoxious and ugly, not funny enough to work as a goulish black comedy or creepy/scary enough to work as a horror film.
I’m as big an advocate for an original, sick, twisted, taboo-breaking exploration of the depraved side of the human mind as there is. That’s what horror is for. Some will love it for just that. But zombie rape can only go so far. Deadgirl‘s cons far out weigh their pros. It’s hard to recommend the movie’s 3rd act bits of inspiration when everything proceeding it is such a slog to get through.