Dead Girl

Marcel Sarmiento and Gadi Harel brought Trent Haaga's script to the big screen with mixed results.  Their film treads a fine line and there's a certain moment when you know that you either get it or you don't.  As they say in the commentary, it's at this point that there were either walk outs or laughs from the audience.  The subject matter is dark, twisted and horrific.  

When cutting school one day, high schoolers Rickie and JT go to a local abandoned hospital and have fun drinking, kicking furniture around, breaking windows and spray painting graffiti.  When a rather savage looking dog shows up whilst they're investigating the lower floors, they are chased into an air duct which leads to a corridor at the end of which is a door almost sealed shut.  JT pulls the furniture out of the way and prises it open and shouts for Rickie to come and have a look at what he's found.  Rickie just wants to get out of there before they get into trouble but his fascination gets the better of him and once he's seen what JT has found, they know that something strange is going on.   

Chained to a bed and covered in a plastic sheet lies a woman, seemingly dead.  Whilst they wonder why she'd be there and what happened to her, the sheet is pulled into her face and they realise she is breathing.  Here the morality of the two is obvious: Rickie wants to call the cops whilst JT thinks they have their very own sex slave.  With JT being the stronger of the two, he gets his way and, once he's told stoner friend Wheeler, the genie is well and truly out of the bottle.  

This could be a simple sick film of three school friends having their way but, as JT realises the woman can't be killed and is basically a zombie, there is a much darker element with horrific undertones as zombie rules come into play.   The box proudly boasts that this is "from the producer of Hellraiser and Heathers" (the man in question is Christopher Webster who was executive producer on all three films) and it does have that high school coming-of-age feel but with material that would grace a Chuck Palahniuk novel. 

Noah Segan has great fun with the completely amoral JT who figures that, because he found the dead girl, she is his to do with as he pleases, whilst Shiloh Fernandez' Rickie is a much more complex character, drawn into JT's world and wants to get out to try his luck with JoAnn, who he's loved since he was 9 years old.  He would provide the moral compass but he is compromised so you don't know where you stand and really have no character with whom to properly empathise - if Rickie had called the cops, it would be him but 17 year olds are more selfish than that, so he doesn't.   

Dead Girl contains some outright horror and some intimate scenes with an undead woman that just tread on the right side of good taste as they are not explicit but the general feel of discomfort and dread pervades the film with plenty of shock moments and scenes where you want to laugh but wonder if you should.  This is good fun whilst not being the most polished or well acted film around.  Michael Bowen is the biggest name on the cast list and he is only in two scenes which probably total less than five minutes.   

This isn't as much fun as it could be, nor is it as scary as a horror film should be but somehow works and is a good ride from the discovery to the final scene.The Disc
Extra Features
When the audio commentary started I expected the worst when all the speakers introduced themselves as, apart from the two directors, there is Trent Hagga, Harris Charalambous (the DP), editor Philip Blackford, composer Joseph Bauer, Noah Segan and Shiloh Fernandez!  Fortunately they don't compete for air time but talk about the production, locations, rehearsing, members of the cast and other generalities whilst each chips in with contributions about their own speciality.   It's a good listen, much better than I thought it would be and contains plenty of information about how the film was made.   

The making of is a pointless piece as they don't cover anything regarding how the film was made and the feature just consists of interviews in the short running time.  Much more interesting is the makeup and effects gallery with a decent number of photos from behind the scenes, creating the dead girl effects (even down to her merkin!).  

The Picture
Watching this I was slightly disappointed by the amount of grain and low contrast but Harris Charalambous says in the commentary that this was done on purpose as he wanted a washed out grungy look and was able to use the Viper digital camera to create this effect.  Looking back, it wouldn't have had the same effect if it looked crisp and clear with great black levels so it looks like the cinematographer knew what he was doing.  

The special makeup effects and prosthetics are excellent transforming the attractive Jenny Spain into an animalistic undead creature with horrible nails and teeth, gradually getting more and more beaten as the film progresses. 

 

The Sound
The DD 5.1 soundtrack creates some excellent tension using the surrounds to good effect and the jumps are well orchestrated but the dialogue is muddy and occasionally indistinct - there were several occasions where I couldn't make out what someone was saying.  Normally this is much better in the stereo option but sadly this wasn't the case.  There are no subtitles to help out so it's either a case of turning the sound right up or straining your ears for every syllable.  The decision not to do much ADR was a bad one.  

Final Thoughts
This is a hard film to describe without giving too much away and ruining it for audiences, so it makes it doubly hard when coming to recommending it or otherwise.  I suppose if you're open to something twisted and a little sick with lots of dark humour then you might like it!  That's as specific as I can be. Dead Girl (proper title "Deadgirl" but oddly released with the title as two words in the UK) is a fascinating character study, looking at the darker recesses of the human psyche whilst remaining a gross-out horror with some genuinely unsettling scenes.  The one weakness is the lack of development of JoAnn as a character which slightly spoils the ending's impact and it's also one of those where you don't believe any of the actors are 17 as they all look in their mid-20s - this is almost a given with films set in high school; just one example is Olivia Newton-John who was nearly 30 when she made Grease!