DEADGIRL

“You never forget your first time.”

That is the tagline for what has to be one of the strangest, most disturbing and transgressive zombie films in the history of the canon.

JT and Rickie are a couple of aimless high school besties who have discovered, in the basement of an abandoned mental institution, a beautiful naked woman tied to a metal table, completely incapacitated. There is no one around. No one seems to know she’s there. And they don’t have a clue where she came from.

So what should they do? What would you do? If you were a desultory teenage boy with an underdeveloped frontal lobe and a penchant for sadism?

Written by Troma alum Trent Haaga, who would go onto direct “68 Kill” and directed by Marcel Sarmiento & Gadi Harel, neither of whom have done much else of note, Deadgirl asks just that question. It is an indictment suburban high school malaise and the terrible ennui it spawns.

And did I mention the woman is a zombie?

It is discovered early on that she cannot be killed, though the film never shows any interest in explaining how she came to exist in such a state or what she is doing tied up in the basement of an abandoned mental hospital in the first place. She exists more or less as a symbol for a moral quandary.

The performance by the actor playing JT is nothing short of hilarious, as he is not even trying to hide the fact that he is ripping off Christian Slater’s “Heathers” performance.

What’s striking is how little the film offers in terms of explanation or release. There’s no mythology to decode, no larger conspiracy to uncover, no cathartic justice. Just a tied up zombie woman for disturbed teenage boys to do with as they please. Even the zombie element feels almost incidental, stripped of genre comfort and reduced to function. This isn’t horror as spectacle, it’s horror as ethical thought experiment, and an intentionally unpleasant one. It is also not the kind of film where good prevails. Rather, moral collapse is the name of its game and by the end of the film Rickie has entirely surrendered to his own unrequited desires. He is just as deranged, just as self-serving, but maybe even worse, because the crime he commits is not random, but against somebody he claims to love.

I like fucked up films, especially the ones that are so lurid that any normal person would never watch it voluntarily, much less with relish. I couldn’t say why films like this appeal to me so much except that there is something about peering into the darkest depths of moral depravity that cast a new kind of sheen onto the world. Maybe it also has to do with the thundering approach of death. A way to desensitize myself in preparation for that coming oblivion. Whatever it is, I am magnetically drawn to films like this—the more extreme, the better—and often the challenge is in finding something new that is more extreme than the last.

This one is different, though. It is not extreme in any of the typical ways. There is no excessive gore (though there is some) and while the sexuality is about as aberrant as you can get, it doesn’t feel pornographic. Rather, the extremity here is really in the feeling-tone you’re left with. This is a fucking bleak movie, and the ending outdoes all the bleakness that came before it. It’s an unpolished, low budget indie shot around sun-bleached LA neighborhoods and industrial sites near the river and beneath bridges. It also defies every genre convention, especially when it comes to films about zombies. It embodies a vibe and tone that seethe with teenaged despondency, and serves as an effective gut-punch to the senses.