Poster // Troma via IMDb
By: Magnus Blanchard-Rockhill
Staff-Writer & Advertising Co-Manager
This review contains spoilers for “The Newlydeads” (1988). It also contains some discussion of real and fictional violence against transgender/gender non-conforming people.
This film, produced by Joseph Merhi and distributed by Troma (probably best known for the “Toxic Avenger” series), is a perfectly passable B-movie slasher.
A quick summary for clarity’s sake: a bunch of newly married couples stay at a resort and are picked off by a ghost who has a clear connection or obsession with the owner of the resort. She seems to be trying to eliminate competition so she can have the owner, Lloyd, all to herself. Kris, one person staying at the resort, has psychic abilities, which help her figure all of this out.
My main criticism would be that there are way more characters than there need to be. Almost none of them get enough screen time to be relevant. I admit that slashers in general tend to do this, but almost none of these characters get interesting enough on-screen deaths to make up for lack of screen time.
This isn’t to say that the characters aren’t memorable, though. Unnecessary? Yes. But all of them were distinct enough from each other that if it had been a longer movie that could expand upon them more, I would have welcomed it. An hour and 17 minutes is not enough time to warrant 13-ish characters, though. At least in this case.
I also do not fully understand how the ghost works. I know she’s a ghost, so she can basically do what she wants. That said, how does a ghost set up a physical booby trap? How far from the resort can she travel? The movie doesn’t really get into the details other than to explain how to defeat her, and even then it’s pretty unclear.
Any other problems I have with quality are really just what you would expect from this second-rate, 1980s slasher. The acting could be better, the direction could be better and maybe another edit or two could’ve helped the pacing.
There weren’t a great many things that I thought were remarkably good about this outside of the comedy. My favorite part is that one of the couples somehow completely manages to avoid all of the horror plot points happening to them, and the last scene is them sitting in the woods, smoking pot and talking about how much they love how quiet the resort is.
I would like to now talk about the ghost herself. I have deliberately left out an important detail about both her and the movie in general – something revealed in the very first scene. Jackie, this ghost who follows the resort owner around and kills all other women she perceives as competition, is trans. Or a cross-dresser. Horror tends to make very little distinction.
I feel conflicted about this movie. Opening on a scene of violent transphobia that serves little real purpose in the story is upsetting. It feels too real against the goofy, sexed-up, B-movie backdrop. Countless trans and gender non-conforming people die to transphobic violence every year, particularly in the context used by the movie.
Jackie just wanted a room to stay in for the night. She flirted with Lloyd, a man known for trying to get into the pants of any pretty woman staying at his resort. He reciprocated, but when he found out she wasn’t exactly what he expected, he killed her. The movie then sort of expects you, at least on some small level, to sympathize with his troubles.
Unfortunately, I still think this might be better trans representation than the more highly produced, higher-budget stuff that was coming out with the same tropes. Jackie’s story was one of fairly understandable revenge. Even if the audience is supposed to side with Lloyd, he is still framed deliberately and clearly as a weird asshole. That’s a lot better than you can say for something like “Dressed to Kill” or “Silence of the Lambs.”