Verdict
Summary
It’s an age-old story, in a way, about boys and men and exercising dominance over girls and women, no matter the cost to their souls. It’s a pretty powerful little movie that still resonates, but I’d be very cautious about recommending it for obvious reasons. Proceed at your own risk.
Plot:
Two teenage boys find an undead woman chained in an abandoned mental asylum … and do what unsupervised, morally compromised boys would do, leading to severe consequences.
Review:
JT (Noah Segan) and Rickie (Shiloh Fernandez) are two aimless, unsupervised teenage boys without much of any parental structure at home. Their lives are headed nowhere, and they spend a lot of time doing stupid things, which one afternoon after school puts them in a sprawling abandoned mental asylum … where they explore. They find a secret room where they are stunned into silence when they find a nude woman (played by newcomer Jenny Spain) chained to a slab table and covered in a plastic sheet. She’s … alive, but not really. JT is immediately turned on and curious in an unhealthy way about the possibilities here, while Rickie is more morally grounded and refuses to touch or abuse the girl. The thought of releasing her or even communicating with this strange girl who doesn’t speak doesn’t even seem to cross their minds, but Rickie flees, while JT stays and does what a lot of boys his age who have no moral compass would do. Over the course of a few days, JT invites other boys to participate in the abuse and rape of the girl, who they soon surmise is dead or undead because no matter what they do to her, she won’t die. They pulverize her, they shoot her, they beat and abuse her to a pulp, but as long as she functions for their sick and depraved use as a receptacle for their gratification, she has a purpose. She doesn’t struggle, but it’s clear that if given the chance, she would bite and fight back. The whole thing sickens Rickie, but he’s too much of a coward to do much beyond half-heartedly trying to help the girl, which results in a near catastrophe for JT, who by a week or two has become a kingpin and pimp, lording over the dark space he now controls, and when word gets out about what’s going on at the asylum with some other boys at school, Rickie might finally get his chance to “man up” and fight back when he sees that JT and another boy need a living girl to get their rocks off rather than the dead one they’ve used and abused to the max …
Incredibly dark and disturbing, Deadgirl is quite unlike any other zombie movie out there, and I choose to accept it at face value rather than some kind of allegory for growing up, or sexual coming of age story. It’s a story about the line boys and men cross into depravity and how it distorts their reality and ruins lives. It could be a metaphor for how the progression of lust for pornography or more extreme forms of sex ends up destroying the ability to have real intimacy and love, but because the movie is so literal with its events and nonconsensual sex acts, I choose to view it as such. I remember being incredibly disturbed by it when I saw it at a film festival in late 2008 and never being able to shake it off my spirit, and watching it a second time for this review I was able to kind of identify a little bit with the character Fernandez plays, though he’s still morally compromised (especially by the end) because he still doesn’t understand what it means or how to engage with a female, resulting in a base need to simply possess a woman, taking what he thinks is his, without earning it. It’s an age-old story, in a way, about boys and men and exercising dominance over girls and women, no matter the cost to their souls. It’s a pretty powerful little movie that still resonates, but I’d be very cautious about recommending it for obvious reasons. Proceed at your own risk. From writer Trent Haaga and filmmakers Marcel Sarmiento and Gadi Harel.
Unearthed Films’ Blu-ray 15th anniversary edition of Deadgirl comes with several commentaries (one by Jenny Spain, which is interesting), a bunch of newly produced interviews, a making-of feature, and much more.
