"She's our monster....."

 Since I can't drag my ass out to Santa Cruz to see Paranormal Activity (I want to see this flick so bad I am having serious film-goer envy,) and I don't want to waste a post on Jennifer's Body (not as bad as I had heard, not as good as I had hoped.  I liked the stuff with the emo devil worshipping band, but that's about it.  If they had made the film about the posers in the band- now that would have been good.  Little side note: It is MUCH creepier to see a film like Jennifer's Body at the 12:20 Tuesday matinee by yourself when the only other people in the theatre of 3 middle aged creepy guys all sitting my themselves, than it is to see Halloween 2 all by yourself, no one else in the theatre.  I had to move twice to get maximum distance between myself and creepy guys.  And then I thought- What the hell am I doing with my life?,) that leaves me with writing about Deadgirl, an AWESOME new-wave Zombie flick.

Great poster right?!  Deadgirl was directed by Marcel Sarmiento and Gadi Harel and written by Trent Haaga (Citizen Toxie: The Toxic Avenger IV.)  Don't let the Troma connection fool you: this is dead serious film (pun intended) and it is really, really good.  After being disappointed by Grace (a film I wanted to love) I approached Deadgirl with caution: it was, after all, getting the same kind of praise that Grace did (revolutionary, scary as hell, new voice in horror, you know the drill.)  The minute I saw the actual Deadgirl I knew that this WAS going to be a different, scary story. 


Two high school stoner-loser types cut class one day and go to the abandoned mental hospital to get drunk and throw shit around (as you do.)  In the basement of the hospital they discover, in a closed up room, a naked girl strapped to a table, seemingly dead.  They soon discover that she is NOT dead, and in fact, she can't be killed.  The boy with a shred of decency left in him (played by Shiloh Fernandez, who looks like a certain well known indie actor turned burned out white rapper) wants to go to the police.  His buddy, JT (played by Noah Segan,who looks like Andy Samberg) wants to "keep her."  Keep her they do, and JT at least does with her what you would expect.  The film really goes there in terms of grossness. The flick is like Stand by Me but taken to the next level: example- if the body in Stand by Me was that of a young girl and the boys were not stuck in a Rob Reiner film.  The good kid, Rickie, tries to do what he can to "save" the girl, but to no avail. What you think might become a battle between morality and evil progresses into something very different throughout the course of the film.  As the tensions between the boys rise, and each descends into his own little hell, the silent Deadgirl looks on, a witness and victim of their degradation.  The actress who plays her, Jenny Spain, is completely terrifying.  She can express with her eyes more than a lot of actresses can with a page of dialog- and, she is essentially a zombie. 

When the flick was finished (the ending, by the way, was perfect) I said "That was a fucking good movie."  My cat looked at me in disgust and left the room.  Since my husband does not care for horror, I make the cat watch all this shit with me.  His favorite film is Let the right one in, for obvious reasons.