Deadgirl (2008)

Thought a while before watching this film as I am not a great lover of gratuitous gore. The subject matter is of course shocking but it shines a light on a very real phenomenon i.e. peer pressure amongst young men.Whilst I don't believe for a moment that so many lads would suffer from the colossal lack of empathy shown in this film it does play into the 'I dare you' mentality culture shared by adolescent males all around the world.Putting any sentiment or morality aside it's actually a well made movie albeit clearly on a tight budget. It's very insular, by that I mean what is going on outside the group involved (police investigations re missing people etc) is not even mentioned and in this instance nor should it be.The film is like a tidal pool of 'what ifs' left behind after the ocean of the unthinkable has receded.

I gave this the second chance it didn't deserve, listened to the commentary track thinking even if they didn't successfully justify the misogyny, if they at least addressed it, mentioned it even, I could give them some leeway, because the film's technically well-made, well-shot, well-directed, well-edited, the sound design's good, the acting's usually fine. In an attempt to be fair to the filmmakers, I'll try to quote them accurately. This is what we get:"When we finished the movie we were wondering if people were gonna say the movie's misogynistic or not. If you didn't get it, it'd be an easy thing to throw out at us. But it's not.""I mean I wrote the thing, and you know, I love women and I respect them, and I feel that this was more of an indictment of like this stupid drokking pumped-up sex idiocy of kids than anything. I mean ultimately Ricky objectifies Joanne the same way as JT does to the dead girl and it all ties in together. But some people just think we're getting off on the rape aspect of it.""The point is you're not really getting off on torture, you're using her as a sex object."So that's all right then. In my experience, the phrase "I love women" when used defensively is revealing in its generalisation.Earlier they say, "The truth is that when you're young, I think a lot of people can relate to not really thinking of consequences...or what's right or wrong, you just sort of react." Okay right yeah, I'm sure we can all remember being teenagers and thinking some drokking embarrassing stuff, and if Deadgirl was made by 14-year-olds it'd be fairly impressive. You'd want to make sure they all got some counselling and maybe spoke to some girls now and then, but still, fairly impressive. But these smugfunts don't sound 14 unless all their voices already broke. Just pathetic emotionally-immature little men who hate women and feel like boasting to the whole world about it like we're going to be impressed. As it is no self-respecting woman would drokk any of them with a ten-foot cattle prod, even if they were dead. Basically if you're a 14-year-old Peter Sutcliffe you'll love this film, but instead of watching it you should probably kill yourself.Being generous, there are two main female characters in this. The first, the dead "girl", isn't really a character, but an object. The filmmakers explicitly describe her as an animal rather than a person. She has copious hair on her pubis - "she would not be getting waxed" - but no armpit hair. The second female character is bound, killed and raped for the crime of turning down sexual advances from a male character. Without any obvious irony, they state "This movie is about female empowerment," because after a woman is hit in the head with a crowbar, she doesn't die.Sake, I mean...unless you're a religious nutter you've surely experienced a degree of existential angst, and can see the value of something provocative, and I completely relate to that. But there's so little substance to the provocation here it's not worth it.

I'm a huge fan of both the zombie sub-genre, and ambitious indie films. I came across "Deadgirl" on a list of most underrated indie horror films. I settled in thinking that the premise had a lot of promise to actually generate some chills and nail biter moments and boy oh boy was I wrong. Deadgirl is a juvenile,unambitious, convoluted film that doesn't know what it wants to convey and has plot/event holes in it that you could drive a semi-truck through sideways.I allowed myself to follow the cliché main characters' angst-ridden journey to the abandoned mental asylum, all the way to the unsealing of the ominous door that contained the title character, The Dead Girl. What followed was a confused, lazy approach to story telling that left me asking more questions that it even attempted to answer. The cheesiness was overshadowed only by the depth of the misogynist,homo-erotic exhibitionist overtones.J.T and Wheeler seem not only OK with,but anxious to watch each other have sex with "Joann", and eager to bring Ricky into the fold(s)necrophilia, as a taboo subject matter, is nothing new to me as I saw Jorg Buttgereit's "Nekromantik" almost 2 decades ago, to much better effect. This story is so full of undefined,lazily written elements it became frustrating to watch. The school parking lot beat down and subsequent kidnapping of Ricky and Wheeler was both unbelievable and completely stupid. Follow that up by antagonist/jock/bad-boy Johnny's being goaded into oral sex with the carnivorous Joann and you have a clear picture of the childish,ridiculous devices used to tell this potentially interesting story. I won't even begin to question seemingly random,misused elements like: the ominous black dog that I had assumed had some supernatural link to Joann(boy was I wrong; why Wheeler's whining,screeching admission of having their own private sex-slave motivated Johnny to even bother to kidnap Wheeler and Ricky and investigate the asylum. There are so many completely unreal and stupid attempts at moving the story along, that this already lengthy review would be twice as long as it already is.I will concede that Joann's makeup special effects are masterfully done and chilling (see: Ricky's daydream.) If you are about 14 years old, completely bored, and have no sense of the art of story narrative, please watch this movie. Anyone else that watches this ridiculous B.S is pretty much wasting an hour and change that will leave you feeling dumber for the experience.

While some people accuse this movie of being a vile rape fantasy by the filmmakers, I think this totally misses the point: the protagonists are actually the villains of the movie. If anything, this movie takes a rather sympathetic view of radical feminism, which purports that society (in the form of a patriarchy) oppresses women, primarily through objectification and, ultimately, rape.Each of the male characters in this movie objectifies women in a different way. Our two protagonists have been crapped on for their entire lives. J.T., the more aggressive and dominant one, is desperate to find some way to turn the tables so that he can finally be the oppressor for a change. Richie, a wishy-washy "nice guy" type, spends his days nursing his stalker crush on the girlfriend of the local asshole jock, who, of course, treats his girlfriend like property.When these guys (and a couple others) discover a helpless, immortal woman (strongly implied to be a zombie) in an abandoned asylum, they realize that they can indulge every anti-social fantasy that they've ever had, no matter how violent or sexual. The movie deals with deeply misogynist subject matter, but the movie itself is not misogynist. Rather, it reverses the traditional roles in a horror movie. What would traditionally be the monster is instead victimized repeatedly by the "heroes". This leads to an admittedly somewhat clichéd theme: which is the true monster? Recommending this movie can be a bit tricky because of the controversial, disturbing subject matter, the lack of likable characters, and the deeply cynical take on society (and teenage boys in particular). If none of this bothers you, and you're familiar with the Troma-inspired approach to filmmaking (fast, cheap, and amateurish), then I'd suggest you give it a try. It's not for everyone, and there are perfectly legitimate reasons to dislike it, but I think many people are seriously misinterpreting the themes.