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Review of Revenge of the Living Dead Girls

by Dmitriy Kogan

Today I decided to review a bad French film. I don’t watch a lot of bad French films. I also don’t watch a lot of French films in general, and when I do they’re usually good. So I decided to watch a bad one.

Revenge of the Living Dead Girls has a production backstory as bizarre as the film itself. Jean-Claude Roy, the producer of this film, was known for directing French pornos during the golden age of French adult cinema (roughly mid-1970s to early ‘80s) under the pseudonym Patrick Aubin. He approached Pierre B. Reinhard, who was also a porn director, about directing a French gore film.

Although French audiences consumed American gore flicks, they weren’t quite mainstream in French cinema just yet. The mid-to-late-’80s was a particularly fertile time to capitalize on the craze, with Hollywood releasing such notable gore classics as Day of the Dead and Evil Dead II. Roy and Reinhard saw an opportunity.

It’s difficult to describe the plot of Revenge of the Living Dead Girls because it’s a complete mess. The movie starts with the driver of a milk tanker picking up a seemingly innocent hitchhiker named Sonia. He almost immediately comes on to her, and they have sexy time. Little does he know, this woman is a prostitute and part of a setup to contaminate the milk with a toxic substance.

Jacques Alphan runs the French branch of O.K.F., the company at the center of this scandal. His secretary, Brigitte, plots against him by hiring a sex worker to sleep with him. The secretary secretly films them and intends to use this recording as blackmail.

Three women drink the contaminated milk and die. Nimier—a man who Alphan hires to get rid of the waste—proceeds to dump it in the gravesite where they’re buried, accidentally resurrecting them. The first thing that they do is come to Alphan’s home and kill his wife. Then they return to the gravesite—where Nimier arrives to dump more waste—and they kill Nimier.

They return to Alphan’s home and drown Alphan while waiting for him in his pool. But killing Alphan is not enough for these three ladies, because they need to take their titular revenge on everyone else connected to the contamination scheme. Remember Sonia from the beginning of the film? They go after her next. They abduct her, strip her, and literally kill her by stabbing her in the pussy. After that, they track down the motorcyclist who contaminated the milk supply and take him out after meeting him on the other side of a church confession booth.

Meanwhile, Christian Loren, a scientist at O.K.F., is investigating the chemical spill at the cemetery. His pregnant wife, Helen, inexplicably ends up giving birth to a mutant baby in the shower. The film explicitly shows this birth scene, which I found to be as disturbing as the pussy stabbing scene.

Brigitte ends up stealing the money from a briefcase containing O.K.F.’s $3 million blackmail payoff. She picks up the three zombie girls who are hitchhiking in broad daylight. At this point, there are two different endings depending on which version of the film you’re watching. In the theatrical cut, they encounter a police roadblock, causing the car to turn over. A priest throws a Molotov cocktail at the car and the car goes up in flames, supposedly killing Brigitte and the three girls. The alternative ending is much stranger: the three girls remove their zombie masks, revealing that they’re human and have been working with Brigitte all along and assisting her in her blackmail scheme.

The film had a limited theatrical release, and received little attention from the French press. Jean-Claude Roy later claimed that the film sold over 200,000 tickets throughout France. Like many odd cult horror films, it found a following on VHS.

I personally found the film difficult to watch, and not even due to the two most disturbing scenes. Mostly, I just found it to be really lazily made. The writing and the acting are some of the worst that I’ve seen as far as bad horror films go. The most memorable visual element is the masks that the girls wear. They look like cheap Halloween masks with a design that’s completely uninspired—almost comically so. If one needed any evidence that the entire film was a failed cash grab, the masks themselves seem to reveal that. You can almost imagine Roy and Reinhard sitting together over cheap French wine, taking a short break from profitable porno ventures, and saying to each other: ‘Let’s film the laziest, most uninspired-looking gore film imaginable with a bare-bones, confusing plot, and audiences will flock to its release!’

The only problem is that they were overestimating how easily French audiences would fall for such cheap bait. People can criticize Romero’s films or the Evil Dead series, but they’re at least packed with charm and a genuine love for the material itself. But here, you have two French guys who never made a horror film before, who were mostly known for directing porn, so the end result shouldn’t be too surprising. If the film has any lasting popularity, it’s mostly due to how strange the end result of their ventures was rather than any possibly cinematically redeeming qualities.

Revenge of the Living Dead Girls is currently streaming on Plex.