Going, Going, Gone

I kept my expectations pretty low for Girls Gone Dead. Considering the biggest names in the film are Beetlejuice (of Howard Stern fame) and Ron Jeremy, wrestler Jerry Lawler and Linnea Quigley (all in bit parts) I aimed pretty low for this one.

Jumping on the Girls Gone Wild craze about ten years to late, the film follows a young woman with a m0m to the right of Margaret White. The girl in question is going on Spring Break with her slutty friends. Once out of the house, everybody gets changed into their “I’m naughty” outfits and start partying.

Then a hooded killer with a medevil warhammer shows up and starts killing people entirely at random. It ultimately turns out to be the girls really religious ex boyfriend and her mother.

The movie is poorly acted, weak in script and general story and lacking a single original moment. I suspected as much going in. Why cover it? Because the film covers one of my least favorite thriller/horror tropes.

The Religious Killer. Not because it cannot be done well. John Doe in Fincher’s Se7en is positively chilling in his logic and resoning. But the truth is, it is almost consistently done poorly. It is usually revealed that the killer is a sexually repressed deeply religious person. And they are always out to punish sexually active young people. Because, you know…virginity drives people homicidal…?

The reason John Doe worked is that he was not hung up on sex…he was hung up on the worlds lax and casual attitude towards sin. The religious killer in most films seems completely unconcerned about other sins. I am pretty sure most Christians believe murder is a sin, and do not make an exception for the sexually active crowd. Where are the religious killers obsessed with liars or people who cheat the poor?