Given the schlock of some recent horror/zombie films, once hearing of the plot for Deadgirl, or seeing the trailer, you'd be forgiven for writing this one off. But it's not the repulsive mess that you'd expect it to be.
The plot is rather simple and perhaps typical of the genre - Rickie (Shiloh Fernandez) and JT (Noah Segan), bored of another day at school, decide to skip class and explore an abandoned mental hospital. Wherein they find a dead girl (Jenny Spain, in her first acting role), covered in a plastic sheet and seemingly chained to a table. For the next hour and twenty minutes we explore the relationship between Rickie and JT as their morals lead them down different paths. Fernandez and Segan are perfectly capable in their roles, with Segan excelling as his character becomes ever-increasingly erratic. Jenny Spain, without a single line of dialogue manages to invoke so much purely through a combination of whimpers, growls and longing looks into the lens of the camera.
It's not the acting or the plot that lets the film down, nor is it the camerawork on show - by the second act, Deadgirl's editing becomes just as gratingly offensive as the premise itself could be seen as. The same transitional overlays are used so much that scenes start to blur into one another completely, leaving you with a feeling that you're watching nothing more than a bizarre filmic experiment. You might be offended by the zombie coitus if you could tell that thats what it actually is - the problem being that another actor's half-transparent face is resting over the top of the picture.
And it's a shame, because this is a film that, while not quite turning the genre on its head, it does offer something greatly different. Horror blends with coming of age and while the central premise was always going to be the 'dead' girl chained to a table, we spend a lot of time watching the rapidly decaying relationship between the two lead characters as they struggle with the morality of the situation.
It's low-budget and it does come equipped with its sleaziness - the camera persists to linger on the naked body of our titular character for far too long in places - but decent performances and a slightly more intelligent take on the subject matter than you'd expect, set this apart from the ever-growing batch of half-assed horror movies that have come off the conveyor belt in recent years.
3