Deadgirl

2008. Unrated director's cut.

Finally, here's a film that asks the all-important question: what would really happen if a couple of horny teenage losers found a naked female zombie?

The losers in question are playing hooky, drinking beer, and exploring the basement of an abandoned mental health facility, when they find a door that has been boarded up for years, the lock and hinges rusted shut. After considerable effort, they swing the door open and find a sexy naked woman chained to a hospital table. They assume that she's dead, until she starts to stir and make noises. Then they assume she's alive, until they start to think it through. How could a woman stay alive for a period that must have been many years, judging from the condition of the door? She is obviously neither dead nor alive, but undead.

The loser characters come in two varieties: sensitive and not. Mr Insensitive decides that he has found the ideal way to lose his virginity. Mr Sensitive thinks that idea is deplorable and leaves, although he has no intention of alerting any authorities because the other guy is his best friend.

And then things get complicated. The two guys can't seem to keep a secret, so other people start finding out about their discovery, and "deadgirl" starts to act as a tool for the losers to gain power or revenge. And Mr Insensitive just can't stop having sex with the zombie girl and starts living in the insane asylum. As you might imagine, that has to have some impact on his mental and physical health.

If I proceed any farther, I will spoil all the dark and nasty plot twists, but if you just have to know how it turns out, IMDb has a synopsis which spoils everything by summarizing the entire film almost scene-by-scene.

The film operates on two levels at once. On the one hand, it is an intense, creepy, atmospheric and half-deranged horror film which maintains an unrelenting sense of tension and leaves the viewer feeling that he himself is doing something wrong and might get caught. On the other hand, horror movies can also present unsparing looks at the dark side of human nature, in the tradition of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, and this film does just that. It is obvious from the beginning of the film that the humans are the real monsters in this human-zombie encounter, but the film goes beyond that cliché and ultimately reaches past its one-dimensional portrayals of vicious jocks and bitter losers, because the real emotional core of the film is in the attitude of the sensitive guy, the character we can relate to, the decent guy. When he descends to the same level as the other guys, and does so in completely credible ways, the film rises from mere exploitation to genuine drama.

This is an excellent genre film, arguably a masterpiece in its own demented way. I admired the absorptive emotional power of the film and the director's ability to maintain dramatic tension throughout, but I can't really say I "enjoyed" Deadgirl, and I'll never watch it again. Be forewarned that you won't enjoy watching it either, unless you're into some dark and twisted shit, and have a deeply cynical view of human nature.

Not that there's anything wrong with that.

According to Movie-Censorship.com, there is almost no difference between the unrated director's cut and the R-rated version. Details here. If that is accurate, then the R must be about as hard an R as one can imagine. Jenny Spain spends most of the film stark naked and getting fucked by teenage boys in various places, including all the usual orifices plus some bullet wounds.

NUDITY:

Here are 720p film clips which show about half of the nudity, maybe a bit more than half. The other half is just more of the same, indistinguishable from the scenes I included.

Here are a couple of interesting stills from the DVD special features: