Rufio - 21 September 2009 05:53 PM
SPOILERS FOR DEADGIRL BELOW!!!
I don’t know if I saw a different cut of the movie or what? But this is how the ending played out to me. Joanne didn’t get bitten by Deadgirl, she was stabbed by JT. And as Ricky is holding Joanne telling her he’ll get her help, you can hear JT say that the only way to save her is if he(JT) bites her. Then when Ricky is professing his love to Joanne, she coughs up blood and tells him to grow up. So when the scene ends and fades to black for like 5 seconds, I was left on an totally ambiguous note. Would Ricky get her help and save her life or would he allow JT to bite her so that she’d become his personal “zombie”? It was very effective and well handled. As the next scene opens we see Ricky smiling and walking somewhere. It’s still unclear what Ricky decided. Is he going to the hospital to visit a recovering Joanne or is he heading back to the mental institution where a zombified Joanne is locked up? When we’re shown the familiar dilapidated hallways, it’s finally revealed that Ricky is a complete asshole and chose to make Joanne his deadgirl. At first I was kind of upset because after all the grimness, I wanted a happy ending. But looking back, it makes perfect sense how things played out. The scene where Ricky is trashing the institution with JT and the scene where he’s shooting his gun take on a new light and illustrate how he has some serious issues. His devious ploy to get the jock’s penis bitten off. The moments with Ricky at home denoting his unhealthy relationship with his family. All those scenes make the ending that much more organic.
To be fair, you’re ending is the same as the ending I saw. However, the sound on our copy was very low and any “quiet” dialogue was all but lost so I didn’t hear JT tell Ricky that he would bite her to make her a zombie and I didn’t hear her tell Ricky to grow up when she coughed blood onto him. See, I’m glad you explained it because watching it it didn’t seem like the deadgirl bit Joanne but, again, because I didn’t hear that bit of dialoge, it was the assumption I made based on the ending. I like you’re take on Ricky’s character always having been an asshole and certainly, I don’t think he was an “innocent” character. I did have a different take on the his ending, though, that dovetailed with what I felt about the rest.
Since I felt that, faced with the thing they really wanted (easy, repeatable sex) the other teenage boys wouldn’t make the right choice but that because Ricky was a bit deeper and wasn’t as much in need of that as much as he was in need of a “clean” conscience he didn’t cross that line but then when faced with the one thing he really wanted, just like the others, he made the wrong choice. I’m not saying your take is wrong by any means, I’m just saying that’s sort of how I interpeted it.
