When you’re presented with the opportunity to see a film deemed “too unbearable to release,” you have to check it out, don’t you? That’s how I wound up with a copy of the 2008 horror movie Deadgirl, in my mailbox. I’ve seen my share of slasher movies and torture porn films like Saw and Hostel, so I felt like I was prepared for anything. Deadgirl definitely has its disturbing moments. But I was pleasantly surprised to find out that it’s just as much a story about friendship, young love and loneliness as it a movie about sex with a zombie.

Rickie (Shiloh Fernandez) and JT (Noah Segan) are best friends, a couple of high school outcasts who cut class one afternoon to go pound beers and vandalize the boarded up remains of an abandoned mental hospital. As they explore the halls of the empty hospital, they venture down into the dank basement and make a gruesome discovery: a naked woman chained to a table with a plastic bag over her head. Who is she? Where did she come from? And what happened to her? These questions are never answered, creating a creeping case of ambiguity that lurks in thee dark shadows of the movie.

One of the guys pokes the “dead” girl and she opens her eyes. Holy shit! She’s alive! Rickie immediately wants to go tell the police, but the sicker, hornier JT has other plans for the chained up woman. Now before you start thinking that the film is going to get exploitative, I hate to disappoint. Although there are some glimpses of nudity and a couple of well done blood-splattering scenes, everything disturbing about Dead Girl is what’s implied. The fact that we know that JT is going to screw the chained up woman made me squirm enough that I didn’t have to see it. It’s what happens next that really makes the movie twisted. (more…)