"I don't want that dog messing with her. Anybody humps her leg, it's me."

What does it mean to be a man? The question has plagued teenage boys from time immemorial. Do you have to smoke cigarettes and drink beer? Do you have to shoot guns? Do you have to bench press a lot? Do you have to be captain of the football team? Maybe you just have to get a lot of pussy on the reggie.

I bring this up because the Louisville Zombie Walk is later this month and I've been watching a ton of zombie movies. I've seen gory, gross-out zombie movies. I've seen quirky, funny zombie movies. Sometimes they're packed with action. Often they're tales of survival that some viewers take as parables about disaster preparedness.

Yes, we all know at least one person who stockpiles ammunition and canned goods for the Armageddon of the undead, but the movie I want to tell you about is more of a cautionary tale about where you stick your dick and it's the most fucked up movie I've seen in a while.

This week's Thursday Thriller is Deadgirl.

Toxic masculinity is a central theme in this 2008 film about Rickie (Shiloh Fernandez) and JT (Noah Segan) two misfit teen-age boys who, during an afternoon of quaffing some brews and vandalizing an abandoned mental institution (you know, bro stuff) find a zombie girl chained to a table. JT can't pass up the opportunity to have sex that isn't quite consensual, but who's she gonna tell, right? Because it's the manly thing to do.

What could go wrong? Only a million things that you should probably expect during intercourse with a zombie. What if she gets loose? What if she bites you? What if you're too rough and her dead tissue doesn't heal back? What if she develops pus-filled, infected lesions on her abdomen?

The script by Trent Haaga leaves few if any such questions unexplored.

If it's not weird enough that JT starts routinely fucking the dead girl, he starts pimping her out to their dumb friend Wheeler (Eric Podnar). Rickie wants no part of JT's sick nonsense. He's too busy pining after Joann (Candice Accola), a redhead he went steady with in fourth grade or something. Joann is a cheerleader now and dating Johnny (Andrew DiPalma), a big, dumb jock who likes to rough Rickie up for looking at his girl.

In Rickie's defense, she is cuter than a whole bucket of baby toes. As the competition for Joann's affection heats up and the violence escalates between Rickie and Johnny, JT's personality takes on more dominant, alpha-type traits. He's King Hustler of the necrophiliac dungeon and he wields his authority with merciless abandon.

The cast delivers believable, sometimes funny, sometimes sad performances, but Segan is outstanding as JT as he struts around spewing villain monologues. Also, it's easy to hope that Rickie and Joann wind up together, no matter how much JT and Wheeler tell him it's never going to happen.

Deadgirl is the most beautifully disturbing zombie movie I've ever seen. It was directed by Marcel Sarmiento and Gadi Harel and it streams on Shudder.