Rickie (Shiloh Fernandez) and J.T. (Noah Segan) are two high school teens in an unidentified town in America, living in poor-looking home situations with broken families and little opportunity. J.T. is cock-of-the-walk, overconfident, experimental in life, pushes boundaries and wants experiential fun. Rickie tries hard to be his moral compass, but J.T. is convincing and drags Rickie into all sorts of stuff, though we can see that Rickie is often not comfortable with it.
We join the story as we see that Rickie has eyes for his childhood sweetheart, Joann (Candice Accola), who is being kept out of reach by one of the macho school 'jocks', whom Joann clearly likes the thought of being with for social standing. We then spend some time with J.T. and Rickie as they skip their classes and head off for the day looking for adventure.
They end up breaking into an abandoned psychiatric hospital and have fun vandalising it, drinking and smoking. As they explore deeper into the basement, they find a naked, mute woman (Jenny Spain) chained to an autopsy table with plastic all over her. While Rickie wants to call the police, J.T. sees her move and realises that she's alive! After much poking and prodding and trying to work out what's what, Rickie gets cold feet and leaves the scene, heading for home. He almost calls the cops, but is interrupted and doesn't get around to it.
He returns to the scene, where J.T. has by now had his wicked way with her and, in the process, physically abused her in order to "control" her. So now we're into the theme of male domination and assumed physical rights. He also discovers that she can't die. At one point he actually shoots her with a gun, three times, and she survives. It's clear that the girl has been there for a long, long time, so something supernatural has clearly gone on - though the characters, trying to piece it together, suggest that she might have been a patient who medics were experimenting on.
Anyway, things go from bad to worse - sinister and dark to morbid, grisly and gory. Rickie tries to free her at one point, but when J.T. discovers this, he is enraged that his friend would spoil his "fun" and think differently from him about what he sees as a golden opportunity to keep her chained up as a captive sex slave, nicknaming her "Deadgirl". Having lost Rickie, J.T. decides to share the opportunity with another friend, so the secret starts to get out. Deadgirl takes opportunities where possible to bite anyone (or anything) in the vicinity, and once bitten, terrible things happen to them - some dying, and some living on as "undead" like her!
Usually I find this kind of horror funny, but this example doesn't evoke that at all. The themes are too nasty, and J.T. seems to turn very quickly into a sociopath - abusive, cruel and dehumanising a body that is clearly human and female. Rickie tries, as I said, to uphold any semblance of morality amongst all this chaos, but the film clearly implies that, apart from him, the school is full of like-minded males with little moral compass who are easily swayed towards gratification by someone who has gone loopy!
The film has never been banned, as such, but has been given '18' status in the UK and because of its themes of sexual assault, non-consensual graphic nudity and necrophilia (kind of), many mainstream digital platforms and physical retailers refused to carry or promote it.
Some acting notes of interest are that Jenny Spain, Deadgirl, had never acted in a film before and spent nearly the entire shoot nude, cold and covered in prosthetics! Shiloh Fernandez (Rickie) went on to star as David in Fede Álvarez's Evil Dead (2013). Candice Accola (Joann) shot Deadgirl just before landing her role as Caroline Forbes in The Vampire Diaries and Noah Segan (J.T.) went on to become a staple in Rian Johnson's films (Looper, Knives Out, Star Wars: The Last Jedi).
Anyway, the takeaway here amongst the mayhem is that usually in "zombie" films, the "creatures" - the undead - are mindless monsters, and humans are the survivors defending society. Here, the 'zombie' (though the filmmakers avoided using that term) is a victim and, actually, it's the living human teenagers who are the monsters. It's a challenging watch if you fancy it. It reminded me somewhat thematically of the film The Corpse of Anna Fritz (2015), which I reviewed previously. Deadgirl is actually quite hard to get hold of to watch in the UK just now, but it'll come around on streaming services.
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