Deadgirl
By Nick Manteris · 0 Comments · Leave a Comment
Finally, someone has created a film to answer the age-old question: would you still have sex that hot girl if she were a zombie? As it turns out… wait, what? That’s not an age-old question? …Seriously? …Are you sure? Well, if this movie wasn’t created in order to answer a meaningful and important question then it must be some sort of cruel joke.
First of all, we’re presented with high school kids that look like they dropped out of college years ago. (A trend in films that will probably never go away – much like phone numbers that start with “555” – even though there are age-correct actors and actresses that could easily fill parts like these.) The second issue is with the well thought-out and carefully constructed original characters…or, rather, the lack of them. Archetypes are one thing, but stereotypes are something altogether different. How many times have we seen the outcast (loser) guy that wants the pretty (unattainable) girl with the jock (asshole) boyfriend? For this story there is also a bad influence in the form of a fellow-outcast friend to convince our loser protagonist to skip school and drink beers in the abandoned asylum. Care to guess what they discover in the bowels of the creepy run-down building? That’s right, it’s the chained-up naked body of a girl that appears at first to be dead. (?) Except for the fact that she’s still sort of alive. So, (of course) one of the boys decides to have sex with her. That’s what you would do, right? …No? Well, they are high school kids – and sex is just about all they think about – so it’s probably natural or something that one of the first thoughts after a discovery like this is “sex slave.”
This film is disturbing on so many levels that’s it’s difficult to accurately recount. There’s the issue of rape… but is it rape if the victim is already dead? What if she’s undead? What if you tried to kill her and she still didn’t die? And does it count as necrophilia if the recipient is undead? Or is that anti-necrophilia? (Clearly the architects of this act should have also invented the word to go with it, but their lack of foresight allows for the invention of “zoenecrophilia.”) The fact that there is absolutely no indication of safe sex is even more disconcerting, but instead of becoming a plot point it just never gets mentioned – though they do talk about lube right before things (naturally) progress to wound penetration. (Yes, wound penetration. Don’t overthink it.) Later, the choices of some of the characters are further skewed in an unsettling direction, but the gas station scene that results from this new path eventually provides a tiny bit of humor in (what must be) an attempt to balance out the depravity. The humor is momentary, however, and the events once again sink into perversion before the brief horror of the conclusion.
- Score
- 4/10
In an interview, the writer, Trent Haaga, said, “So you have to go to the places that people that are spending ten million dollars will not go to. That’s how you get people to pay attention to what you’re doing.” Well, he should have plenty of attention now because he went to places where nobody has gone before. Gadi Harel, one of the directors, said, “What do we want people to get out of it? We want people to have an experience they’ve never had before.” Mission accomplished. (It might also be an experience that they never want again, but don’t worry about that right now.) The filmmakers also seem to want to turn “torture porn” into a “porn torture” of sorts and they’ve borrowed heavily from works like River’s Edge and Session 9 in order to create something that, admittedly, we haven’t seen before. (So that’s a positive thing, I guess.) As for any other positive things to say, the poster with the lips is pretty much f—ing brilliant and the alternate “You’ll never have anything better” tagline is great after you’ve seen the movie. This is not an enjoyable film – or a good one – but it definitely elicited a response… and that can’t be said about many movies these days.
