DEAD GIRLS (1990)

Trailer (can’t locate one, so here’s the entire film):

*Spoilers Throughout*

What’s It About: A girl metal/punk/shit band goes to a remote lakeside cottage to unwind and help out the lead singer’s sister who tried to kill herself after listening to the band’s lyrics. So, you know, she goes on vacation with the band… to get away from their influence… but it doesn’t matter since a killer in a skull mask shows up.

Here are some of my observations as I watched the film:

• Dead Girls (1990), not to be confused with Dead Girls (2014), Dead Girl (1996), Deadgirl (2008), The Dead Girl (2006), Girls Gone Dead (2012), The Living Dead Girl (1982), Revenge of the Living Dead Girls (1987), My Life as a Dead Girl (2015), Gone Girl (2014, although at least I sat through all of Dead Girls), and Me and Earl and the Dying Girl (2015).
• “Life is a dog. A total bummer.” You know, if you want to sell records, maybe you shouldn’t nudge your fanbase into killing themselves. Your fucking hit song is called “You’ve Gotta Kill Yourself.” That’s just bad marketing. Or maybe it’s great marketing, because the band wouldn’t be popular otherwise.
• So, Brooke, the nimrod sister of the lead singer of Dead Girls, tries to commit suicide due to her sister’s devil music. You know what? Good call.
• The Dead Girls have an “intense” photo shoot and talk about all the crazy shit they do onstage (one girl dies EVERY NIGHT, another eviscerates herself, and another strangles herself with the American flag, and the brother and lead guitarist are brother and sister, but they’re also lovers), but we never get to see any of it so who cares. It may have been slightly cool and made sense if they had died in those ways throughout the movie, but they do not.
• The whole band goes to Brooke’s house and get a tongue-lashing from Gina’s Bible-thumping parents. The mother is far and away the best actress in this, but I don’t think her fire and brimstone sermon is acting. I think the filmmakers legitimately pissed off a local shrew and filmed her reaction.
• Of course, a fan sends the girls a skull mask and it’s flaunted around like some special object, and it’s the same mask the killer uses later (it’s picked up last by Gina’s boyfriend, Mike, so, not too hard to piece that one-piece puzzle together).
• The dubbed-over Asian manager takes a ranged nail gun shot to the forehead from our masked killer. I’m almost positive that doesn’t really work. 
• So the Dead Girls are on their way to a cabin (of course) to help Brooke recover? It makes no sense, but they have to go to a cabin to get murdered somehow. It’s the exact same premise as the Evil Dead remake, but more watchable. 
• Skull Mask is going to make everyone read Dead Girls lyrics before he kills them in ways mentioned in the lyrics. Interesting premise, fucknut execution. 
• When I want to relax by a stagnant lake and lay a towel in the dirt I also like to wear most of my clothes. 
• Elmo the Slow Caretaker saves one of the bandmembers from the horror of poison oak. 
• Gina has bad vibes about the murders as they happen, but is powerless to stop it, so that’s helpful.
• The name of the girl who was just killed was Stryker… Stryker… Stryker… STRYKER! …Susie Stryker?
• Susie’s body is gone and the town sheriff doesn’t believe their wild tales about her death, thinking they’re just seeking publicity… somehow. That would be the worst idea ever for a publicity stunt. And a movie. 
• Holy shit. The sheriff, who is a gentleman of African-American heritage, told the girls he doesn’t care for their suicide-causing devil music, and tells them he doesn’t want their kind in his town, so one of the girls (Ingrid Incest) says, “Gee, sounds like what those crackers down in Alabama used to say about YOUR people when they were burning crosses on your lawns in the ’60s.” WOW. That’s the most horrifyingly racist thing I’ve ever heard in a Z-grade horror film. Blackenstein didn’t even go there. Sounds like the director has issues. 
• This may be the longest movie ever made. As I write this note, this is my sixth time trying to get through it. I just can’t do it. 
• Ingrid Incest is the biggest fucking c-word whose image has ever been captured on film. If you said that the cancer unit of a children’s hospital burned down with all the patients inside she’d have a snide bitchy comment about it. 
  

  Inbred Girls

• It seriously sounds like someone is blowing a slide whistle for a spooky wind effect. 
• This movie should be in its climax and wrapping up in about 10 minutes, but there are 40 mother fucking minutes left! How is that possible? I’m convinced that this has the longest running time of any horror movie made in the ’80s and ’90s. And it’s even more astonishing since it’s zero budget. Maybe (hopefully) it’s a YouTube glitch and there’s 30 minutes of black screen at the end of the video. 
• “There are three avenues of entry in the barn.” HIYOOOOOO!!
• It’s a dead girl’s party, who could ask for more?
• This is more dragged out than RuPaul. 
• This movie would have been great if it starred Aerosmith. Although you could say that about any of the movies we’re watching this month. But I can’t think of a funnier real band for a horror movie like this than Aerosmith. Just hearing Steven Tyler scream when the killer stabbed him would be hysterical. 
  
• So the incestuous brother turns out to be the killer, but Gina shoots him, then it turns out that the incestuous sister was in cahoots, but then she’s killed by Skull Mask, who’s not her brother, for he has been killed, and then Elmo the Slow Red Herring Caretaker acts like the killer, which makes no sense and is bullshit, then it turns out Gina’s boyfriend Mike from the beginning, who came out of nowhere, is the killer. Following?
• So wait, who killed who? There were just like four twists in a row and taken together they make zero sense. 
• I guess Mike has a split personality? I’d like to split all VHS tapes of this movie in half with my sharpened scrotum. 
• Hahaha! Mike stepped on one of the shitty booby traps Amy the Army girl set before and blows himself up. What a dumbshit. 
• This movie has more false endings than Return of the King, but with incestual overtones instead of homosexual overtones.
• Then the psychologist bitch who’s taking care of Gina’s sister finds her tied up in the barn and decides to learn her there for the sake of her sister’s well being? You know what? I concur. 
• Although she does inform Gina that she’ll succumb to “exposure” in 48 hours, even though she’s inside. 
• Haha! And that’s the end. Fantastic. 

Scare Volume: The killer wears a mask with a SKULL on it! Spooooooky stuff! If you’re 4.

Where’s He-Man when you need him?

Gore Volume: Not a whole lot, except for one scene with an axe kill. I think they only had 3 fl. oz. of fake blood in their budget, so they had to use it sparingly.

Nudity Volume: NONE! And the word “Girls” is right there in the movie’s title! Not even a graphic sex scene between the brother and sister! Although at one point, Susie takes her top off to sunbathe by the stagnant lake, but you only see from behind, then she gets spooked by some ducks, and puts her top back on.

Best Kill: When Mike kills Elmo by blasting him in the head with a small-to-medium-sized stick over and over.

Best Scene: I’d have to say the ending, where Gina is left for dead in the barn of horrors, is very funny, but that’s probably unintentional.

Shed Girls

Worst Scene: Any scene where the brother and sister express their mutual desire to rub their sex organs together.

How ’bout the Tunes: For a movie about a fucking band, they play one (1) song, the aforementioned “You’ve Got to Kill Yourself.” IMDb lists one other song on the soundtrack called “Angel of Death,” but I honestly didn’t hear it in the movie. Since the only clip of this turd available is the whole movie, I’ll timecode it to where you hear the complete version of “You’ve Got to Kill Yourself,” but Hard Ticket to Home Video is not liable if you do what the song says:

Although you can barely understand it because the audio for this movie sounds like it was recorded with a Talkboy at the bottom of a gravel pit, the song isn’t horrible as far as punk/metal/suicide songs go.

Band Rating: It’s tough to say based off the one song, but I would see these girls at a state fair just to observe the magic tricks by the keyboardist and watch the lead singer choke herself with the American flag. But I have to penalize them for their limited discography.

Overall: This movie is a dog, a total bummer. As I mentioned, it’s an almost unbelievable length for a movie like this at 1:45, and should have been trimmed by at least 30 minutes, if not by an hour and 45 minutes. It does absolutely nothing you haven’t seen before and does it with film stock and audio equipment stolen from a Big Lots dumpster. It tries to do 19 different twists at the end and none of them work and they just make everything confusing and you don’t know who killed who and why. The motivation of the superbitch in the Dead Girls would have been fine, or have Brooke’s therapist be crazy, or Brooke herself, but whatever (although I guess Brooke’s therapist does inadvertently murder Gina). It’s best to leave Dead Girls buried in the $2.99 horror movie bin at the gas station.

Bled Girls

Also, I’m almost 86% sure that the women on the home video cover up above (not the Aerosmith one) aren’t the same Dead Girls in the movie. They probably all ritualistically committed suicide after filming wrapped. Or maybe the budget was so low the kills were real! You be the judge.

Score: 2.5 Lethal Cases of Poison Oak (out of 10)