Ah, Dead Girls. A slasher that tries to mix death metal, social commentary, and low-rent cabin-in-the-woods horror, but instead plays like the result of what would happen if Josie and the Pussycats got stuck in a weekend-long Unsolved Mysteries marathon. Directed by Dennis Devine, this 1990 straight-to-video gem is proof that if you throw a wig on mediocrity and crank the reverb, you can almost trick people into thinking they’re watching something dangerous. Almost.
The Premise: Headbangers and Headaches
The setup sounds promising on paper: a female-fronted death metal band called The Dead Girls (subtlety clearly wasn’t invited to the writers’ room) takes a retreat to a remote cabin to recover from bad press. Why bad press? Because one of their songs allegedly inspired a mass suicide pact among fans. Yes, really. The band is blamed for corrupting innocent youth, which is basically the kind of PR most death metal bands dream of—free notoriety without the effort of writing a good riff.
But don’t get excited. This is not Spinal Tap with gore. It’s more like your community theater’s attempt at Friday the 13th—but with a boombox blasting second-hand riffs stolen from an Ozzy Osbourne lawsuit.
The Characters: Rock Stars Who Couldn’t Rock a Swing Set
Each band member comes preloaded with a bargain-bin stage name: Bertha Beirut, Lucy Lethal, Nancy Napalm, Cynthia Slain. It’s as if the screenwriter flipped through a Mad Libs: Metal Edition and just rolled with it.
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Gina (Bertha Beirut): The “serious” one, who looks like she’d rather be working at a library than fronting a shock rock band.
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Dana (Lucy Lethal): Supposedly “lethal,” but spends most of the film whining like someone forgot her order at Denny’s.
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Amy (Nancy Napalm): The military-obsessed one, who gets maybe ten minutes of screentime before being turned into axe chow.
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Susie (Cynthia Slain): The prankster who fakes deaths onstage, which is exactly the kind of foreshadowing you’d expect in a movie that treats irony with all the grace of a sledgehammer.
And then there’s Mark, the drummer. He’s Juilliard-trained, which is about as useful in this movie as being CPR-certified on the Titanic. His idea of “art” is sneaking a groupie into the cabin for a quickie before she’s promptly murdered by our masked killer.
Also on deck: a creepy handyman named Elmo, a nurse with the bedside manner of a DMV clerk, and Gina’s religious nut ex-boyfriend, Mike. Because if there’s one thing this movie teaches us, it’s that if you’re in a slasher, your ex will either try to kill you, save you, or both.
The Killer: Skull Mask Discount Bin
The murderer wears a mask that looks like it came free with a six-pack of Pepsi in 1989. He skulks around, kills people in ways that are neither imaginative nor particularly bloody, and somehow manages to cut the phone lines, trap victims in barns, and plant bombs while keeping his mask perfectly clean. He’s less “terrifying stalker” and more “guy you’d ask for jumper cables in a Walmart parking lot.”
The big twist is that it’s Mike, Gina’s childhood friend turned religious zealot, who believes the band is spreading Satan’s message. Imagine Ned Flanders with a butcher knife, except less funny and somehow less threatening.
The Murders: Gore on a Shoestring Budget
One girl drowns in a lake. Another gets chopped with an axe. Someone’s killed on the toilet with a snake, which sounds like a Florida headline rather than a slasher set piece. By the end, the barn is packed with corpses like it’s hosting a clearance sale at Spirit Halloween.
The gore effects are about as convincing as a ketchup packet fight. At one point, Amy sets up a potassium nitrate bomb, which feels less like horror and more like a lost MacGyver episode. It does finally kill Mike, though, so points for wrapping things up in a vaguely scientific way.
The Tone: Soap Opera with Screams
What Dead Girls really suffers from is tone. It can’t decide if it wants to be a serious condemnation of heavy metal hysteria (a la the Ozzy Osbourne lawsuit that inspired it), a goofy slasher with gallons of fake blood, or a public service announcement about the dangers of poor stage names. Instead, it awkwardly stumbles between all three, creating a cinematic chimera of boredom, preachiness, and unintentional comedy.
The film takes itself so seriously, which makes its failures even funnier. When Susie’s body disappears, one character actually suggests it’s just one of her pranks. Because, of course, nothing says “good joke” like gasping for air in a lake until your lungs fill with water. Hilarious.
The Music: Death Metal? More Like Deathly Dull
For a film about a death metal band, the soundtrack is astonishingly toothless. The songs sound like rejected B-sides from a high school garage band that just discovered distortion pedals. There’s no menace, no energy—just endless droning that makes you long for the sweet release of silence, or at least the return of Muzak.
If you’re going to build your entire plot around the “dangerous” allure of heavy metal, maybe—just maybe—spend more than $20 on the soundtrack.
The Ending: Screw You, Gina
The grand finale has Gina tied up in a barn surrounded by corpses, while Mike rants about evil and sin like a televangelist with a head injury. But then—whoops!—he accidentally triggers Amy’s homemade bomb and blows himself up.
Gina survives… only for the nurse to discover her, decide she’s clearly complicit in some sadistic band prank, and just leave her to die. Yes, the final note of the movie is that the only surviving “hero” is abandoned to starve to death in a corpse-filled barn because the nurse has better things to do. Roll credits. Merry Christmas.
Final Thoughts: Dead on Arrival
Dead Girls is a slasher that fails on almost every level:
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The characters are obnoxious caricatures.
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The kills are dull.
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The killer’s motivation is laughably cliché.
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The soundtrack can’t even fake being dangerous.
But in its failure, it becomes perversely entertaining. Watching this film is like watching a talent show where everyone forgets their lines and falls off the stage—it’s painful, but you can’t look away.
In short: if you want a so bad it’s good slasher about death metal, look elsewhere (Rocktober Blood says hi). But if you want to watch a movie that takes itself seriously while tripping over its own shoelaces in slow motion, Dead Girls will scratch that itch.
