Deadgirl (2008)
(In French, On Cable TV, June 2021) The zombie subgenre has grown so degenerate, repetitive and overdone as to feel boring. But once in a while, a film comes along to unnerve audiences and whatever its problems are, you can’t deny that Deadgirl is an uncomfortable experience. It starts as two teenagers discover a zombie girl chained in the basement of a nearby abandoned asylum. Since this isn’t a PG family comedy, one of the two teens’ first thought is to use her as a sex slave. Our protagonist isn’t sold on the idea, but his friend definitely is, and the situation gets more complex as more people are brought into the secret. It gets gorier, raunchier and more disturbing by the moment — the film’s R rating is justified by “strong aberrant sexuality” and the MPAA is not kidding about this one. Directors Marcel Sarmiento and Gadi Harel aren’t interested in comfort or decency. As a result, I have a hard time imagining anyone calling this fun or even a good film — but in a saturated subgenre with fewer and fewer original ideas (as evidenced by its juxtaposition to subgenre films during a zombie horror marathon), Deadgirl stands out as a particularly provocative zombie horror film and one that viewers will have a hard time forgetting, like trauma.