Warning: spoilers ahead.

Well, you can’t win ’em all. Deadgirl (tiff), our first foray into the 2008 Midnight Madness programme, wasn’t very good. The plot: two teenagers find a dead girl in an abandoned mental hospital. Well, almost dead. More of a zombie. They then proceed to…abuse her. A lot. Over many days. What sounded in the synopsis like a tense struggle between urges to do the right and wrong things quickly turned into gang rape with some cheap (but effective) scares thrown in. Nellie almost left. We both just kept throwing each other incredulous looks.

True, these films are meant to be shocking and violent and scary and, in my cases, awful. The film wasn’t badly executed…it just wasn’t a good film. I know it’s hard to compare MM films to the mainstream ones we see, and it has to be evaluated in part on how well it keeps the tension built and the adrenaline up, but that was all it did. I could never recommend this film to anyone…even if they were horror genre fans, I don’t think it was a great example of how to do it.

Q&As weren’t terribly insightful either.

C-

[tags]tiff, tiff08, deadgirl[/tags]