Out of all of the movies that pop up on "most disturbing movies ever made" listicles, Deadgirl is by far one of the strangest. Not necessarily because of its premise -- two high schoolers find a mute naked woman chained to a bed in an abandoned hospital -- which is obviously horrific and sounds like just another "let's watch femoids suffer for entertainment" torture porn fest for incels to jack off to, but because it is somewhere in the previously nonexistent zone between "over-the-top Troma flicks" and "meaningful yet blunt allegories". It's both well-made -- it's slick, has that middle-of-the-road indie filmmaker look I despise so much, and some serviceable gore -- and not well-made at all -- it also features incomprehensibly shot "action sequences", terrible musical cues, and 20-35 year old "teenagers" spouting dialogue that I still can't tell is a parody of dialogue written by out-of-touch old people or just exactly that. And it is blunt. It won't hit you until the very end, but this film is so blunt it almost wraps around into being sort-of smart.
If the lines "you know that ain't a real human being man, right? it's all right" and "I wasn't raping her, you said she wanted it" haven't tipped you off by the end of the film, this is actually "about" the horrible ways women are objectified. And how easy it is for men to justify rape. And masculine peer pressure. It's so blatant, and I fucking love it. I'll take blunt-yet-purposeful fucked up horror over almost any other kind of movie. Don't get me wrong, though, Deadgirl has a bad problem and that is its complete inability to balance tone. The characters are written with such broad strokes that they appear to be tongue-in-cheek caricatures of high school stereotypes in movies, but the actors are so (intentionally?) wooden that I can't help myself from thinking this movie is dead serious (haha) for most of its runtime. I mean, a stoner guy yelling "we have a sex slave and we fuck her every night!" at a jock to try to one-up him is played completely straight.
But what separates Deadgirl from films that sledgehammer the viewer with oh-so-meaningful rape and torture is that it actually feels like it's trying. No matter how many times what I will simply refer to as the "pus scene" wiggles its way into my internal bank of intrusive thoughts, this film just doesn't feel like it's wholly resorting to "edgy" content to shock. Disturbing movies don't usually have this level of production, and most of them certainly aren't grasping into the void for some nuanced commentary. Underneath all the layers of is-it-or-isn't-it-serious goodness/badness that pervade this film, the end proves itself to be a genuinely clever throat-punch that rewrites everything that came before it. After all the jocks and the lazy stoners get rightly punished for their rape-y tendencies, we're left with the poor main character Ricky. He tried so hard to get his friends to stop raping, and all he has to show for his hard work is being the Final Boy, the only one not murdered somehow by a now free-roaming deadgirl.
Oh wait, there's a Final Girl too -- his crush, Joann, who in one of the movie's most clear-minded scenes tells him to "fucking grow up" and get over his lame infatuation with her. Except she's a deadgirl now. And Ricky lovingly attends to her body in the same hospital his friend beat the shit out of his deadgirl in, now turned into a sick candle-lit shrine. Ricky isn't like those other guys that will rape and beat up women at any chance they get! He's a nice guy. Who, if you can't tell, is secretly one and the same with the other guys in the movie. It's just that their dick-waving and blatant objectification is substituted with poor-me whining about unrequited love and that insidious objectification so common among men who are so absorbed in their own tfw-no-gf insanity that they can't actually see women as anything other than goddesses sent down from the earth to save them from their own personal hell of existence.
But is this just his nature as an angsty emo boy, or was it caused by taking in and being warped by all of the shitty ways he saw the deadgirl got treated? The movie doesn't quite go that far, but this scene exemplifies what is so good about Deadgirl -- it may be tonally broken and technically horrible but it is hard-hitting where it really, really counts. There are enough movies criticizing the pitfalls of stereotypical masculinity. Deadgirl hits nice guys right in the dick.
So while I can't say that Deadgirl is a good movie, it sure is a lot of fun. And honestly, writing about the merits of movies that aren't seen as "good" or even okay by most people is a lot more entertaining than writing about movies I passionately love or hate. Maybe part of liking transgressive cinema and searching so hard for really good fucked up movies means being intellectually held captive by dumb, blunt movies made by inept filmmakers. And if that's the case with me and Deadgirl, then I guess I'm doomed to a life of transgressive-cine-Stockholm-Syndrome. And is that really so much worse than people who are artistically held captive by every film they are "supposed to like"? I don't think so.