Deadgirl

There’s no denying that Deadgirl ultimately possesses the feel of a shot-on-a-shoestring STV horror effort, as the film’s low-rent production values are exacerbated by an increasingly outlandish storyline and characters that are far from authentic. The movie follows two scuzzy friends (Shiloh Fernandez’s Rickie and Noah Segan’s JT) as they stumble upon a bound and still-breathing woman deep within the bowels of an abandoned hospital, with the bulk of the proceedings revolving around their efforts to keep the title character’s existence under wraps for as long as possible. Admittedly, Deadgirl does hold some promise in its early scenes, as directors Marcel Sarmiento and Gadi Harel effectively set up the two central characters and their less-than-savory reputations both at home and at school. It’s only with the discovery of the dead girl that the film starts to go off the rails, as JT’s initial reaction is to eschew telling the cops in favor of holding onto her as, essentially, a living sex toy. It’s a baffling decision that ultimately colors everything that follows, as the movie becomes more and more far-fetched as it progresses – yet this is hardly as problematic as the almost painfully uneventful nature of Trent Haaga’s screenplay (ie once the movie reaches a certain point, nothing much of interest happens). The inclusion of an eye-rollingly silly subplot involving Rickie’s crush on an unattainable fellow student is as pointless as it sounds, and it’s ultimately hard to work up any real enthusiasm for a film that paints virtually all of its male characters as sleazy rapists with necrophilic tendencies.

*1/2 out of ****