Deadgirl
Deadgirl (2008)
★ / ★★★★
High school students Rickie (Shiloh Fernandez) and JT (Noah Segan) decided to go to an abandoned mental hospital, drink a couple of beers, and throw some chairs around like most troubled teens do. But when they stumbled upon the lower levels of the building, they discovered a naked woman (Jenny Spain) covered in plastic and tied up in chains. They presumed her to be dead until she started moving. JT had a stupid idea: keep her there and use her as their sex slave. Rickie, the more sensitive of the two, softly disagreed. He would rather call the police. Later, JT, possessed by rage, accidentally snapped the girl’s neck. She didn’t die. He killed her two more times just to test his sick hypothesis. She was incapable of dying. The concept of “Deadgirl,” written by Trent Haaga, impressed me. There was something about hormonal teenagers dealing with a really complicated moral and ethical situation that fascinated me. However, the execution lacked focus and power. There were far too many scenes of Rickie pining over Joann (Candice Accola) from afar. It was creepy, not melancholy enough. They shared one kiss when they were twelve, presumably his first kiss, and he became desperately and hopelessly in love with her. Those scenes, designed to hammer in our heads the fact that he was a romantic, didn’t lead anywhere other than to buy time until the next cruel scene when the girl in chains was raped by JT and Wheeler (Eric Podnar), a fellow schoolmate and local druggie. His intense stares caught the attention of Joann’s boyfriend (Andrew DiPalma), a possible repressed homosexual, and took great pleasure, along with baseball star Dwyer (Nolan Gerard Funk) in beating Rickie to a pulp in the school parking lot. What bothered me most was no one asked the most obvious questions. Who left the girl in that basement and why? Was there some sicko who installed cameras around the room to watch what someone would do to the girl? How long had she been there? Did she have some kind of disease? The last question was especially important. The guys were more concerned about penetrating the same hole and sharing the same “pool” than the possible ramifications of their actions. Talk about thinking with their rods and not with their brains. Rickie, the one who we were supposed to root for, was too much of a wimp to stand up against his friends. I wished there was a character who had a stronger sense of self. I certainly wouldn’t have made the same choices Rickie did. The boys treated her like an object just because she wouldn’t die. They were blind to the fact that she was able to move, bleed, and react to the most rudimentary sensations. “Deadgirl,” directed by Marcel Sarmiento and Gadi Harel, had a daring subject matter but it failed in exploring the deeper questions about torture. What could have been great felt exploitative and cheap.
