Megan Is Missing (2012) - 2.5/4

Megan Is Missing may be the most warped, perverse piece of exploitation filmmaking to come out in a long time. Not because it is contains the rough, explicit sex of a Max Hardcore video—it doesn’t. Not because it contains the gore of a Rob Zombie movie—it doesn’t. Rather, it's because we have Max Hardcore videos, Rob Zombie movies, and everything in between—all readily available, and much of it mainstream—that we haven’t had a need for anything truly warped and perverse.

Until Michael Goi came along. With the lurid imagination of a pulpit-shaking preacher, Goi’s deeply repressed perversions emerge as fantasies about the depravity of modern teenage life and the hellish sufferings coming to those who partake. Ordinarily, the sexually repressed, in our modern world, are self-conscious enough to keep their twisted sexuality inside—if not their minds, at least their small circle of perverted discontents. Not Michael Goi. If he’s aware his imagination is not shared by others (or reality), he doesn’t show it.

Megan Is Missing begins by giving us a few days in the lives of two teenage girls, Megan and her best friend Amy, using ‘actual’ footage from their online chats and video blogs. Megan is popular and Amy is not. Megan goes to parties and Amy ordinarily does not. A pretty simple setup. But for Goi, Megan can’t just go to parties. She has to go to parties and blow every guy in the room while lesbian teens make out in the background. She has to tell surprisingly long, detailed stories about giving a well-endowed teen a blowjob when she was only ten. Amy, for her part, can’t just be a little shy or naïve, she has to be totally oblivious.

What’s troubling is how Goi imagines this. Thuggish teen boys are constantly ordering teen girls to suck their dicks. The girls don’t bat an eye. Totally normal stuff for Goi. He imagines teen girls, or even pre-teen girls, dutifully sucking dicks left and right. These things sometimes happen. But at the feverish level presented in Megan Is Missing, it simply doesn’t. Teenage boys, as douchey as they can be, don’t order every girl to suck their dicks. And if they do, they don’t get their dicks sucked, they get beat up by her boyfriend. Teenage girls are not all complete sluts who live for random dick-sucking, drugs, and alcohol. If it did, so be it. But it just doesn’t. Goi, undeterred by reality, imagines it does and with righteous indignation—not because it bothers him, but because it gives him a boner beneath his bible.

To be fair to Goi, he does set up a realistic psychology to take Megan and Amy through the film’s second half. As a girl who is used for sex since childhood, Megan is extremely adventurous and susceptible to the flattery and scams of internet predators. Of course, most teen girls are adventurous and susceptible to flattery and scams of internet predators. But I buy Megan’s story. Amy’s over-the-top naivety and self-loathing are similarly grounds for what happens in the remainder of the film, although it's less believable.

What happens next is Megan gets introduced to a teen boy online. He is, of course, an internet predator who quickly lures her into his trap. Amy tries to expose him, but just arouses his fury. She ends up, albeit unwillingly, in his hands as well.

This half of the film is where Goi’s repressed sexuality serves him well. He doesn’t just imagine the predator raping and killing the girls. Instead, the predator has to place Megan in a highly-degrading fetishistic setup. Amy is spared the extreme bondage, but is raped on camera for several minutes. Goi perhaps thought showing only her face would be tasteful, but it’s not. Focusing in on the pleading, squealing, crying, and finally assent to the situation is just what a deranged, sexual sadist would enjoy seeing. (The sadist, after all--the predator, not Goi--put the camera there.)

The big finale for Megan Is Missing is a seemingly interminable scene of the predator digging the girls a grave while Amy relentlessly pleads and bargains for her life. I found myself shouting, “Just bury her already!” As annoying as it was, I imagine Goi’s point was to show just how detached from empathy the killer must be. Wow, really? I would’ve never thought.

There is a degree of realism, for better or worse, to this last half of Megan Is Missing. Enough realism to earn the praise of Polly Klaas’s father. (Mr. Klaas’s letter can be found on the Megan Is Missing website.) A sexual sadist preying on teen girls certainly will be brutal and merciless. It’s uncomfortable to watch and to no real purpose other than exploitation. The extremely clumsy attempt at making the film entirely found-footage, which means we have to believe every cell phone conversation is recorded in video and stored on the phones, is Goi trying to show he's being 'realistic' rather than merely exploitational. Reality is so bent in doing so that it only exaggerates how much the recorded material is all Goi's creative choice--a choice clearly perverse, voyeuristic, sadistic, and exploitational. But this is Megan Is Missing at its best—unflinching, unself-conscious exploitation.

What I do, nevertheless, find worrying about the torture scenes is how Goi almost seems to be imagining a fitting hell for the transgressive Megan, one that is re-enacted in the body of her best friend for our education. These girls are being blamed for their stupidity. Their lives of revelry and dick-sucking, and their comfortable perusal of the internet, are attitudes that must be punished. If teens were kept in fear and trembling, the film suggests, they wouldn’t have to be raped and buried alive. A hard truth from the pulpit of Michael Goi.