Deadgirl
Dir: Marcel Sarmiento and Gadi Harel
Rating: 1.0/5.0
Dark Sky
101 Minutes
Directors Marcel Sarmiento and Gadi Harel may have intended Deadgirl to be something like a terrifying amalgamation of Stand By Me and Weekend at Bernie's, but their loosely plotted film that claims to be "a no-holds-barred look at the horror of growing up" is anything but grown up. After Rickie (Shiloh Fernandez) and JT (Noah Segan), two high school fuck-ups, come across a mysterious body in an abandoned mental hospital, they become bitterly divided over how to deal with it. The plot is amateur at best but in horror films, this isn't always a fatal flaw; given a strong basic premise, or surprisingly developed characters, or even the right effects, horror films often overcome their flimsy plots. But this is by no means the case with Deadgirl, which has not only its plot to overcome but uneven acting and pacing, brutally misogynist overtones and uninspired cinematography as well.
The performance of Segan in particular stands out as a major misstep; he lazily alternates throughout the film between a laughably poor approximation of a Southern accent and what appears to be his attempt to channel Gary Oldman's white boy pimp from True Romance. Every line Segan has seems fake and dead on arrival, his character appearing less as an amoral lost boy and instead more a sub-B-film hick villain. It becomes difficult to even judge the strength of the other actors because Segan is such a void of energy and nuance. Based on optimism and Segan's performance as Dode in the masterful Brick, it's tempting to lay the blame on the direction and script. It certainly doesn't help that screenwriter Trent Haaga, probably best known for his work on one of the many Toxic Avenger sequels, has no understanding of dialogue, his characters constantly reiterating each other's names as if the audience couldn't figure out who's speaking to whom and their language apparently lifted wholesale from a sitcom that was behind on slang a decade ago.
Detecting where exactly the film went off the rails, then, is an impossible task. An awkward cast and a bad script are by no means uncommon traits in horror films, but there simply isn't anything the movie does right. Gore lovers will find little to like in the effects, which are mostly unoriginal and restrained, moments that should be gruesome and shocking instead winding up just sadly lifeless. The drab, stereotypical sets similarly fail to create any kind of environmental terror and the camera work seems to have come straight out of a Production 101 manual. It would seem that the only thing the film actually succeeds at is being incredibly degrading and offensive towards women, since its central conceit is about what happens when two not all there teenage boys find a nude woman lying on a table in a derelict asylum; you can fill in the blanks, I'm sure.
But what isn't expected is the film's utter lack of morality or redemption, the progression of the story never once leading to any sort of message. Worse, the "hero" of the film only stands out as a result of his refusal to really do much of anything, making him more of a neutral party than a protagonist. In Deadgirl, Marcel Sarmiento and Gadi Harel have crafted what may just be the most hideous, unimaginative, shameful film of the decade, horror or otherwise.
by Morgan Davis