“You’re horny for a dead girl.”  I can’t recall a line from a film as startling as this.  It’s even more alarming because the line doesn’t seem as disquieting during Don’t Let Me Die on a Sunday, the latest French romp through such topics as AIDS, necrophilia and other forms of deviant sex.

Sunday begins by chopping two different scenes together.  One shows 19-year-old Térésa (Élodie Bouchez, The Dreamlife of Angels) being slipped a mickey while she’s at a smoking rave party.  The other shows two guys double-teaming a girl in what appears to be a hospital, or some other type of sterile environment.

The two separate stories quickly merge as Térésa hits the floor like a sack of potatoes, is pronounced dead and taken to the local morgue, where the two tag-team partners are employed as attendants.  One of the men is Ben (Jean-Marc Barr), an apparently sexually frustrated chap who has been on the job for four years and has clearly flipped his lid.  He waits to get Térésa's body to himself, and then performs unknown carnal acts upon it (unknown because, thankfully, they don’t show it).

Then, in every necrophiliac's worst nightmare (or their ultimate fantasy … I’m not sure I care to know), Térésa wakes up while Ben is slamming away at her.  The authorities are stunned, but for some reason, Térésa won’t press charges, so there’s nothing they can do.  Ben is suspended, and followed first by the girl’s father, who beats the shit out of Ben, and they by Térésa herself.  Naturally, she finds herself drawn to the man that fucked her back from the other side.

Térésa and Ben link up to perform some pretty strange sexual acts, although never on each other.  Ben introduces her to a small group of his friends, who are equally as bent sexually.  One is dying of AIDS in a hospital, and Ben’s friends perform a late night kidnapping to take him to an isolated cabin to spend his remaining days.  And straight from Girl on the Bridge, there’s a scene where Térésa and Ben save a man who is about to off himself on a viaduct.  They incorporate him into their sexual games.

Sunday was written and directed by Didier Le Pêcheur, whose film isn’t nearly as good as Lynne Stopkewich’s Kissed, which was about a woman having sex with dead guys.  The film’s subtitles are tough to read against the white lab coats that are prominently displayed throughout the film.  Bouchez and Barr do a decent job acting, with the latter looking like a bizarre cross between Jeremy Piven and Croupier’s Clive Owen.  The film may be trying to deliver an important message about the state of sex in a world full of various deadly, sexually transmitted diseases, but it comes off as something made just to get a rise out of viewers.

1:28 –

for nudity, strong sexual content, violence and adult language