The monsters in Marcel Sarmiento and Gadi Harel's laborious Deadgirl neither chomp nor growl nor spread a genetic mutation that causes you to become the living dead. Instead, they brood over sunny, short-shorted vixens, mope around to Radiohead, and get self-righteous with their drunken stepdads. They also, from time to time, go to gym class.

Best buds Rickie and J.T. (Shiloh Fernandez and Noah Segan), both looking as if they should be applying for graduate school rather than prepping for the SATs, play hooky one day and decide to drink some warm beer at the abandoned mental hospital. Amongst the chaos of broken glass, clattering chairs, and busted shock treatment machines, they discover a zombie woman strapped to a gurney in the basement, hidden behind a rusted-shut door. Rickie wants nothing to do with it but, after beating her, snapping her neck and shooting her three times, J.T. comes to the conclusion that she's his perfect gal.

The filmmakers, handling a tissue-thin concept from screenwriter Trent Haaga, aim for immoral satire -- wouldn't every young, horny boy like his own zombie woman to rape? -- but the end result is atonal, bloated, and uncomfortable. Rickie pines for his grade-school sweetheart JoAnn (Candice Accola), a beam of redheaded sunshine, but J.T. wants nothing but his Deadgirl... and perhaps a fellow humper to join him. Enter their friend and meta-stoner Wheeler (Eric Podnar) to shares holes and moral decay with J.T., who has all but moved into the Deadgirl's lair.

As per usual with this sort of D-grade horror, the makeup and special effects team get most of the glory. The Deadgirl, convulsed more than portrayed by model Jenny Spain, is all cold sweat and dead skin with a swampish patch of pubic hair; a mildly inventive, low-tech take on the zombie model. Things get really messy when Wheeler convinces JoAnn's boyfriend to attempt a tryst with the Deadgirl's mouth, which culminates with his intestines hanging out his backside. Blood bursts aplenty, the film hits its final stride when J.T. decides he needs a new Deadgirl after the jock gives his favorite a beating.

Stylized in an arty gloom, Deadgirl ends by suggesting that raping your sweetheart is alright, as long as she's dead. It's a tasteless film but it doesn't seem to even enjoy any of the politically correct totems it so openly sprays its bodily fluids over. If there's a pull to the film, it's Segan's portrayal of amoral introversion run amok, but the film eventually runs screaming back to the moral center of Rickie, turning what would have been a sufferable 80-minute cult item into 100-minute marathon of clunky melodrama encasing a few seeping wounds.

DVD extras include a making-of featurette, still gallery, and deleted scenes.