Revenge of the Living Dead Girls (1987)

 

Dir. Pierre B. Reinhard

Three young women in the French countryside die suddenly after drinking poisoned milk from a batch sabotaged on the back of a transport truck. Events start to unfold in plots of corporate blackmail, pollution, and embezzlement at the the local milk plant as the plant manager scrambles to avoid a scandal. Soon bodies start to pile up as the poisoned women are reanimated by the plant’s toxic waste, rising to take revenge on the corporate snakes whose greed has taken their lives...or so we think.

Helmed by pornographer Pierre B. Reinhard, Revenge of the Living Dead Girls is an incredibly horny movie. There are at least four sex scenes, only one of which really drives the plot in any way. Everyone is fucking and cheating on each other. There’s a scene that goes on for about a minute after it should have ended so that one of the main characters can take off her sweater and play with her breasts for no one’s benefit but the audience. The movie also manages to outdo Cronenberg’s Shivers in making sex seem so incredibly unappealing that it might make an effective tool in abstinence only sex ed courses. The supposed punishment of sexuality in American slasher movies can’t hold a candle to the dick-chomping, skin-festering, vagina-rapiering brutality on display in this droning French zombie flick.

If this sounds like a slam-bang sex and gore filled rollercoaster, well, it’s not. Sorry for getting your hopes up. Revenge of the Living Dead Girls is a slow movie, focusing as much time on white collar back stabbing as it does on promises of genre thrills. Perhaps most comparable to Jean Rollin, this lacks the nightmarish surreality of his works. I wouldn’t necessarily call it boring though. There’s enough baffling weirdness to keep it engaging even when it’s not exactly entertaining, such as one side character who’s hand, rapidly necrotizing out in the open, is ignored by himself and everyone else in the movie. And the gore scenes deliver when they finally appear, if not in technical quality, then in grungy extremity. But the film is still best viewed with tempered expectations, with a lot of runtime devoted to talking corporate conspiracy in various offices.

The end eventually comes around swiftly and suddenly, with a revelation that brazenly recontextualizes the entire film until about 5 seconds later when you realize it makes no goddamn sense. Still it was such an utterly baffling highlight that I couldn’t help but laugh. A silly ending to a silly movie. It’s aimless. It’s sloppy. It’s dumb. Sit back and let the madness wash over you. Just don’t drink the milk.