Movies: Deadgirl

This was the SIFF movie I was looking forward to the most. I had heard it was deeply disturbing, pushed the envelope, and all that happy stuff. I walked out not only disappointed but kinda pissed, because it could have been so much better.

It’s a fantastic idea. Two unpopular teenage boys find a woman in the basement of an old mental hospital. She’s beautiful, but her skin is cold. She moves, but she has no heartbeat. She’s a living dead girl. So what do the boys do? One of them decides to rape her. Disgusted, the other boy leaves.

Turns out that not only is she a living dead girl, but she can’t be killed. You can strangle her, bash her in the head, even shoot her, and she won’t die. She will show the damage, however, and she won’t heal.

The story is mostly about the two boys, how they react to the dead girl, who causes both of them to reveal his inner nature.

Sounds good, right? Well, it would have been, if it weren’t for some serious corn pollution in the script. The screenwriter has evidently forgotten all about what it’s like to be a teenager, and what high school life is about. The movie opens with two bullies playing catch with a fat kid’s glasses. Yeah, we’ve never seen THAT before. One of the two protagonist boys has a huge crush on the beautiful girl who dates the football star. Wow! How original! And then there’s the dialog. Evidently the writer figured if he had the words "fuck," "man," and "bro" coming out of his actors every 5-10 seconds, they would sound like authentic teenagers. What they sounded like was actors, choking and gagging on stilted lines. Now, I probably couldn’t write an accurate 2009 teenage conversation either. It’s been a long time since I was in high school. But if I was planning to attempt it, I might, y’know, go to a teenage hangout every day for a couple of weeks and LISTEN. Find out how this particular teenage subculture talks, rather than just pulling it out of my ass.

There was some awkward direction, which sometimes caused unintended laughter. There were also some very poor casting choices.The "football star" guy looked about 30 years old, and couldn’t act his way out of a wet paper bag. The "beautiful girl" was too old for the part as well, not to mention flat and uninspired.

And did I mention the weird pacing? Okay, this was a festival cut, not a final cut. But the movie was far too slow and repetitive in places. It needed at least a half-hour cut from it. Then there were the weird, out-of-atmosphere isolated events. There’s a genuinely funny scene where a cranky chick beats the crap out of her would-be attackers. It’s a well-directed scene and funny as hell. But it’s the ONLY funny scene in the film. Deliberately funny, anyway.

The two guys who played the leads were pretty good, as was their geeky pothead friend. But the finest acting came from the deadgirl herself. She had no lines, but she conveyed a bone-deep sense of menace and just otherness. She rocked.

The make-up in the film was fabulous. The deadgirl gets steadily deader and more gruesome as the movie goes along. Her skin grows more mottled, her lips more drawn back. CREEPY. The gore effects were also quite good.

I ended up giving the movie a festival rating of 3 out of 5. There was enough interesting content that I didn’t walk out, and even some genuinely fine moments. But it just missed.

The filmmakers were present at the showing I saw. They were going to do a Q and A after the film. I stuck around, wondering what these guys would have to say for themselves. They were incoherent, arrogant, and unresponsive to questions. They flatly refused to answer two different questions, one about the symbolism of a flower growing in a basement, the other about a vicious black dog that appears in the film. Their rationalization for this was they didn’t want to spoil it for everyone who was planning to buy the DVD when it released. Right. That would be exactly one guy, who goobed all over the film until I wanted to hit him with a bat. I’m still wondering if he was a plant.

There was some seriously nasty stuff in this movie, but it refused to really come close to the edge. One of the snotty little directors said they were careful to make the sexuality in the film not erotic in any way. They didn’t want it turning people on, it was all supposed to be horrible. Well, it wasn’t that horrible, just boring. And what if they HAD made it erotic? Wouldn’t it make most people intensely uncomfortable to find sex with an animated corpse stimulating? So wouldn’t that be a plus, for filmmakers who wanted to push the outer edges of good taste?

I have the words "How far can too far go?" tattooed on my arm. It’s a personal creed. And I tell you what, this movie didn’t go nearly far enough. It thought it was edgy, but in the end, it pulled most of its punches.

I did like the ending, even though I saw it coming from 300 miles away.

Note to potential distributors of Deadgirl: Do not let filmmakers speak. They have a more limited vocabulary than the kids in the film, and all THEY ever say is fuck, man, and bro.

Sadly, even if it’s recut for DVD, this will never be a truly good movie. The bad dialog and spots of bad direction are too glaring. It could be a decent film, if somebody’s very careful wtih the scissors.

Am I recommending that you see this movie? I can’t decide. If you’re an adventurous consumer of horror, go for it. There are some jewels in there among the lumps of coal. Non-horror fans probably want to avoid it. The relationship between the two boys and the coming-of-age aspects of the film aren’t fully developed enough to make for a solid storyline..

Okay, I’ve blabbed about this movie enough. Now for the moral of the movie:

NEVER, EVER, EVER FUCK A ZOMBIE.

The end.