Deadgirl: proving that laws against necrophilia are a good thing

'Deadgirl' has been described as a coming of age story about two high school buddies. Perhaps that's true if you happen to be the Leonard Lake and Charles Ng type, or have a fondness for necrophilia. Written by Trent Haaga and directed by Marcel Sarmiento and Gadi Harel, 'Deadgirl' sets out to prove that the scariest thing any woman, living or dead, will ever encounter is a group of insecure, sexually frustrated, morally bankrupt, degenerate boys.

 

Noah Segan and Shiloh Fernandez play J.T. and Rickie, two bored high school losers. They skip school one day to go hang around an abandoned asylum, drink some warm beer and break stuff. Exploring the basement tunnels, they stumble upon a dead girl (Jenny Spain) strapped to a gurney and covered in plastic. Closer inspection reveals that she's not exactly dead. She's not exactly alive, either, and J.T. quickly decides that her less than average human status makes her the perfect play toy. Rickie wants no part of any of it. For the majority of the film he's the closest the viewer gets to a likable character, or at least a male character that's not completely repugnant. 

 

J.T. and Rickie swear to keep the dead girl a secret, but soon enough J.T. has let their mutual friend Wheeler in on the depraved action. Wheeler, played by Eric Podnar, is far more enthusiastic about their find than is Rickie. It's not long before he's charging other high school losers ten bucks a pop for a trip to the basement. Meanwhile, Rickie is busy obsessing about the pretty, and most importantly, living JoAnn (played by Candice Accola). Her jock boyfriend Johnny finds out about Rickie's crush and he and a friend beat up Rickie and Wheeler in the school parking lot. Things go from bad to worse when Wheeler opens up to the jocks about their secret, and the jocks force them into proving it.

 

The jocks appear appalled by the bound girl at first, but then are goaded into having a go at her. Johnny (Andrew DiPalma) is reluctant, but then does it anyway in order to prove he's a 'real man'. In the process, the dead girl bites him. Johnny catches a zombie std, and winds up with the worst case of irritable bowel syndrome in the history of film. Realizing that a bite from the dead girl is contagious, J.T. decides to find a new girl and get the zombie to bite her so that he'll have a fresh slave, thus adding kidnapping and murder-by-zombie to his long list of crimes.  He and Wheeler go hunting for a hot new girl and find JoAnn, which sets the stage for a climactic, though less than satisfying, ending.

 

'Deadgirl' isn't exactly a horror movie, and it's certainly no coming of age story. It barely qualifies as a zombie movie because the title character so rarely moves, let alone tries to attack anyone. This is basically just one long rape fantasy put to film, and one can only hope that this work is purely fictional and not intended to be the writer's commentary on what it's like to be a young guy in high school. Either way, the film is slow, humorless, and depicts men as disgusting, utterly reprehensible creatures. The real monsters in the film are the guys, not the dead girl.

 

There is a lot of degrading sex with a corpse in the film, and some of it actually tops 'Otto, or Up With Dead People' and 'Dead Alive/Braindead' in terms of being just plain gross and wrong. The dead girl, played by Jenny Spain in her first movie role, is totally nude through the entire film and apparently so hot to the degenerate boys in the film that even when she starts rotting and oozing green pus they still want to rape her. Repeatedly. Unlike 'Otto' and 'Dead Alive', there's nothing consensual about the zombie sex here, nor does it succeed at being funny, though the directors certainly try to inject some humor into the story. It never gets beyond rape, pure and simple. To the guys in the film, she's just a nameless piece of meat their for their enjoyment. 

 

J.T. and Wheeler do finally get what's coming to them, but it's a completely unsatisfactory fate, with J.T. begging Rickie not to tell his grandmother what happened. The film doesn't deliver any kind of cautionary tale or morality lesson, nor does it ever explain why the guys in the movie turn into such depraved scumbag rapists. The fact that the one seemingly decent character, Rickie, turns around and makes JoAnn his own personal 'dead girl' takes any point the film may have had and promptly flushes it down the toilet.

 

This is where 'Deadgirl' truly fails. Most zombie movies use the flesh eating monsters to reflect the horrible, inhuman things that mankind does to one another. Here, the zombie is a more human and sympathetic character than any living person in the film. The violence in the movie serves no real purpose, nothing is learned, no light is shed onto the dark subject matter or even on the motivations of the characters involved. It just depicts guys at their most utterly crude and despicable and women as passive victims. The film itself is disturbing and hard to watch, especially as a female viewer. If that's what the writer and directors were going for, then great, they win big here. The subject matter is controversial and that will make this a well rented title, but for my money I'd rather watch something 'cheery' and 'upbeat' like 'Hostel' or Takashi Miike's 'Imprint'.