1. DEADGIRL
Written by Trent Haaga. Directed by Marcel Sarmiento and Gadi Harel.
(Watch the preview here.)

I am willfully admitting that a film like Deadgirl will probably end up having more detractors than champions – and chances are, it should. Deadgirl is not for everybody. It’s probably not even for somebody – and yet, here I am, freely confessing to one and all that it is in fact my favorite horror film of 2009.

As we are nearly close upon, or have already found ourselves completely immersed within an utter glut of zombie movies – riffing within this cinematic niche (zombie house-pets! zombie strippers! zombie Bill Murrays!) is quickly becoming a tired bi-product of an increasingly bloated subgenre. Given the fact that the zombie metaphor is expansive enough to encompass a broad spectrum of societal ills, as George Romero made famous with his original trilogy of Living Dead films, micro-indie filmmakers have continued to scavenge the undead-metaphor for their own narrative purposes, whatever they may be, overcrowding the sub-subgenre with such dull fodder as Fido, Zombies Anonymous, American Zombie (not to mention Romero’s own recent Diary of the Dead) and on and on and on.

Not so with Deadgirl.

It’s the male libido and its various permutations into perversion that are being explored here, as the film poses its central question to the audience – What would you do if you found the perfectly intact, perfectly functional body of a(n undead) girl?

Would you alert the authorities? Would you keep it for yourself?

Two teenage boys, Rickie and J.T., end up skipping school to ransack the local closed-down sanitarium. Boys will be boys the movie insists, detailing their destruction of the shuttered property before coming upon a secret room in the basement. It’s in this room that they discover the naked body of a young woman – bound to a table, gagged, wrapped in clear plastic and long-since forgotten. Common sense insists that she should be dead – and yet, here she is: Moving.

Striking a queasy-tone that is equal parts torture porn, early-Romero zombie flick, the early 80’s cult masterpiece Rivers Edge, and the post-Columbine disaffected suburban youth films of Gus van Sant, all wrapped up into one – Deadgirl does what the best zombie movies do: use the metaphor of the zombie as a means in which to explore our society’s ills while shocking the hell out of us. As Romero used zombies to comment on racism in the 60’s or consumerism in 70’s or Reaganism in the 80’s – the metaphor here is inverted upon itself and turned towards the living (male) characters of the film, focusing less on the undead and rather their (masculine) sexual impulses.

Deadgirl is not – and I repeat: not – an easy film to watch. But the level of ambition on the filmmakers’ part, along with some brave performances from its cast, permits this movie to transcend its own morally reprehensible story-line to probe something much darker, much more disturbing, and much more real… which is what the best metaphor-laden horror movies do: Allow the audience to explore the horror within themselves.

HONORABLE MENTIONS:

Most Excruciating Foreign Horror Film (tie):
MARTYRS (Pascal Laugier)
(Watch the preview here.)

ANTICHRIST (Lars von Trier)
(Watch the preview here.)

Ugh. I didn’t want to list either of these movies – but there you go. I’m a bit bored with the brutality of French horror at this point, given that it stinks of this torture-porn one-upmanship, but Martyrs just dives down the rabbit-hole of depravity and never crawls back out. Ever. And it goes deep, my friends. Very, very deep.

Antichrist, to be honest, was built up far too much in my mind from all the Cannes hullabaloo – so that when I finally saw it upon its U.S. release, cliterectomy and all, I couldn’t help but feel a little let down. But: as grotesque and gruesome as these two movies are, I’m loathe to say there’s a certain curiosity factor to both that makes them worth viewing. May God forgive me.

Best Horror Documentary (tie):
AMERICAN SCARY (John E. Hudgens)
(Watch the preview here.)
and
NOT YOUR TYPICAL BIGFOOT MOVIE (Jay Delaney)
(Watch the preview here.)

So American Scary was made in 2006, but I just recently watched it and now I want to whole-heartedly recommend it to other fellow horror film fans. It’s a scrappy doc, for sure, but it conjured up memories of my hometown’s late-night cable access creature feature Dr. Gruesome’s Movie Morgue. For anyone who ever snuck down to the living room after everyone else had gone to bed and turned on the television to watch their own schlock-host pun his way through some heavily-edited horror movie – this doc is a family scrapbook of horror-hosts from all over the country and well worth digging for.

Not Your Typical Bigfoot Movie is the Anvil of the Bigfoot-hunters documentary niche. On its surface, the film follows two men who have dedicated their lives to the hopeless pursuit of documenting the existence of their own Ohio-bound yeti. But below lies a complex (and true) story of two men and their complicated (and fascinating) friendship to one another. Their shared passion to prove to the world that Bigfoot exists ultimately becomes their undoing, and nearly decimates their friendship in the process – but much like the arguably-objective American Movie, where the audience has to decide whether they are laughing with or laughing at the subjects of the documentary, Not Your Typical Bigfoot Movie explores a touching relationship between two men rooted in a belief system that few others believe… but they sure made a believer out of me.

Best Sci-Fi Film (tie):
DISTRICT 9 (Neill Blomkamp)
(Watch the preview here.)
and
MOON (Duncan Jones)
(Watch the preview here.)

District 9 was a so-so story that’s visual realism elevated itself onto such a higher level. The metaphor of aliens-as-other in the slums of South Africa holds strong, for sure – but the action-movie man-on-the-run posturings of the second third grew a little predictable in my book. But given its documentary-style and its crisp special effects, there’s no way this film couldn’t transcend its own narrative underpinnings and resonate long afterwards.

The less said about Moon the better – other than it was hands-down one of my favorite movies of 2009. If I had attempted to write that kind of best-of list, Moon would have been number two (second only to The Hurt Locker). Sam Rockwell has proven time and time again to be an asset to any film he’s cast in, whether he’s in super-eccentric mode (The Green Mile) or super-toned down mode (Joshua) – or both, as he is in Moon. I can’t recommend it enough and I can’t wait to watch it again in 2010.

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