Editor's Note: This was originally published for FANGORIA on September 21, 2009, and we're proud to share it as part of The Gingold Files.
Having divided viewers and sparked a lot of chatter on the film-festival circuit and at midnight shows over the past year, Deadgirl has now arrived on unrated DVD from Dark Sky with a reversible cover reflecting the way the movie subverts expectations of the undead and bad-girl subgenres. Initially packaged on the outside is a traditional zombie image; on the inside is more provocative art.
The movie (reviewed at length here) is both a gory ghoul opus in which the living corpse receives more violence than it inflicts, and a femme-fatale film of sorts in which the title character is confined to a state of inactivity for much of the running time. Specifically, the catatonic DeadGirl (Jenny Spain) is discovered bound to a table in the basement of an abandoned hospital by Rickie (Shiloh Fernandez) and J.T. (Noah Segan), teenaged pals united by their high-school-outsider status. While Rickie thinks they should do something to help her, J.T. sees in the naked, restrained and barely communicative figure an object he can dominate, the way life and other people have been subjugating him. As he turns her into a sex slave, the friendship between J.T. and Rickie becomes severely strained, and things only get messier when J.T. starts introducing others to his new “girlfriend.”
There’s more thematic meat chewed on here than human flesh, though Deadgirl is still chock full of grisly moments to make you squirm. Some viewers might be made equally uncomfortable with the film’s unflinching dissection of the male ego and libido, while still others will simply find the onscreen abuse of the DeadGirl too nasty and unpleasant to watch. Regardless of where you sit, there’s no denying that screenwriter Trent Haaga and directors Marcel Sarmiento and Gadi Harel have ventured into more ambitious territory than most youth-oriented fright cinema, which tends to take more simplistic views on relationships between boys and girls and sex and violence.
Deadgirl’s increasingly despairing view of its world is reflected in the 2.35:1 transfer, which is pretty sharp outside, softer and grainier within the title character’s lair and bears muted colors throughout, with undemonstrative but clear enough Dolby Digital 5.1 sound. An audio commentary stitches together two recording sessions: one with the directors, cinematographer Harris Charalambous, editor Philip Blackford and composer Joseph Bauer, the other with Haaga and the male leads. The result is that there’s never a dull or quiet moment, though there are places where it seems the speaker has been abruptly cut off. The discussion ranges from general to scene-specific, and runs the gamut from technical specifics (shots that are digital composites and handheld moments that were steadied in post) to good, in-depth stuff about the characters and the debate over the film’s perceived misogyny, plus more about the score than one usually hears on such tracks. There are fun asides, too, as when Haaga notes that the two protagonists are better-looking than he intended, and the revelation that the hands groping the Deadgirl in close-ups are often Sarmiento’s (suggesting her angles were shot separately from her co-stars’).
A few deleted scenes are addressed along the way that don’t turn up on the disc, but those that do are more interesting than the norm; one amusing setpiece would have left a plot thread involving a DeadBoy hanging had it been included in the movie. “Exquisite Corpse: The Making of Deadgirl” doesn’t add much to what we learn from the commentary, and teases with too-brief on-set video snippets that could and should have been expanded for a better examination of what was no doubt an unusual filmmaking experience. Finally, makeup FX artist Jim Ojala provides a great collection of prosthetics-in-progress photos and funny, detailed notes explaining them. A few of these get up close and personal with the nether regions of both the DeadGirl and one of her male victims, offering—like the movie itself—perhaps more than some viewers of both genders will want to look at.
