What do you think teenage boys would think of (if not necessarily do) if they came across a zombie woman who was chained down and happened to be young and reasonably attractive, or would have been in her formerly living years? This film answers that question and yes – what you're thinking is exactly where it goes.

The premise might be gross and make you think it's going to be a camp grindhouse effort, but I was reminded a little bit of Bobcat Goldthwait's film Sleeping Dogs Lie, where a woman has to reckon with and live with ramifications of the fact that she once gave a dog a blowjob. Where you expected that movie to be a crass comedy full of cheap gags it treated its subject and heroine surprisingly (and deftly) seriously.

This film does the same thing. The character who ends up the main antagonist, JT (Noah Segan) ends up a very smooth, well portrayed villain and Segan both looks good and acts really well.

JT and Rickie (Shiloh Fernandez) are average high school seniors who want to goof of and ogle girls, and one day they decide to cut school and ride their bikes to the abandoned local asylum to explore and find stuff to destroy.

After they plunge deeper into the bowels of the facility, they find a comatose young mute girl chained to a table who isn't only completely naked but doesn't respond to them as they try to communicate with her.

Rickie immediately wants to do the right thing like free her or call the cops, but JT has a much darker idea. She obviously can't talk and is barely conscious – why don't they have their way with her? Rickie is horrified and, when JT insists, he leaves in disgust, intending to never talk about it again.

But things take a turn the next day when JT tells Rickie something incredible and disturbing has happened he has to come and see– when he was indeed on the job with her, she sprang to life and attacked him. In retaliation, JT beat her to death, yet she's on the table, still alive.

Though the word 'zombie' is never mentioned, the boys realise they have the undead on their hands, and JT leans in, deciding to keep the unfortunate ghoul as his personal sex toy, even going so far as to move in and sleep in the dingy room to take her whenever he wants.

Rickie is horrified (even while tempted), but he figures as long as JT doesn't blab about it they're safe. But when JT actually brings a slacker friend in on it, Rickie wonders how long they can keep it contained before someone learns what they're doing.

Things go from bad to worse when the two school bullies – one of them the boyfriend of the girl Rickie's held a candle for since they were little – get in on the action and their undead lover manages to spread whatever virus is causing her condition to others, threatening not just that everyone will learn what JT and Rickie are hiding but that a full blown zombie apocalypse will ensue.

The whole film has a very effective and well handled tone of menace (especially as JT's character develops) and it's a proper horror movie, but that doesn't stop at least three scenes of outright horror comedy – when their zombie lover finally takes care of the guard dog, the result when one unfortunate partner is goaded into having her give him oral sex, and when JT and their stoner friend try to abduct a replacement for the girl in a gas station parking lot and pick the wrong mark.

There's a scene right at the beginning (might be over the opening credits, I can't remember) of the camera slowly focusing on urban scenes of hasty abandonment – it seems to be foreshadowing where the story ends up when the girl of the title inevitably escapes – but it ends in quite a different and much more disturbing way.

Other than that, it's the most effective and well handled film you could imagine seeing about a subject as repugnant as two boys sexually assaulting an undead woman because she's chained up.