Excision is a teenage body horror film. Mix Heathers with May and you get the tone of this one. AnnaLynne McCord plays Pauline, a delusional teenager obsessed with surgery and mortality. She's a social outcast doing everything in her power to convince her parents that she needs psychiatric intervention. Part of this is her clear issues with depression, but part of it is also jealousy arousing from her sister's special treatment. Her sister is treated differently because she has Cystic Fibrosis and is very close to requiring a lung transplant. Pauline is convinced if she learns how to be a surgeon she can save her sister, but her own erratic behavior and refusal to engage in genuine social interaction is certainly a hurdle.
Writer/director Richard Bates, Jr. hits it out of the park with Excision. Adapted from his award-winning short of the same name, Bates successfully creates one of the most unusual and disturbing body horror concepts since David Cronenberg had James Woods pull a gun out of the vaginal opening on his abdomen in Videodrome.
Excision is psycho-sexual horror from the perspective of an unpopular teenage girl. Pauline's dreams combine surgery with necrophilia in the same stark white glamorous world of Lady Gaga's The Fame/Monster music videos. Pauline, dressed like a supermodel, performs bizarre surgery on herself and others in her life while engaging in sexual acts with her patients, her nurses, and herself. Frankly, I think Bruce la Bruce (the creator of erotic zombie film Otto; or, Up with Dead People) wishes he could have come up with some of these concepts first.
This kind of body horror doesn't exist without some sort of external catalyst for the dangerous obsession. In Excision, that force is Pauline's mother, Phyllis. Traci Lords plays Phyllis as an uptight perfectionist. Everything her family does, especially her daughters, needs to be perfect. They need to be perfect little ladies to find perfect little husbands and make perfect little Christian families in the perfect little suburbs. Pauline's sister, Grace, is well on the path to this happily ever after; Pauline is not.
Pauline is a rebel. Annalynne McCord is stunning in this human Beetlejuice performance. Pauline doesn't view herself as a monster; she views herself as the solution to everything wrong with her mother's mindset. This includes refusing to conform to the perfect little housewife mentality. She refuses to dress up, fix her hair, or wear makeup like her sister and mother. She won't say "please" or "thank you" and does not acknowledge anyone's authority over her life. McCord makes you believe that Pauline actually thinks she can fail math class and still become the greatest surgeon in the world with her own personal course of study.
Pauline is J.D. in Heathers crossed with Mary Henry in Carnival of Souls. She is overly confident in her warped perspective on life, yet clearly so lost to all the signs of danger around her. Her plan for how to fix everything wrong with her family, her sister, and life itself is clearly flawed from the beginning yet she can't see that. She's too caught up in her own misguided teenage rebellion to see the damage she's causing to everyone who crosses her path.
Excision is a particularly brutal tragedy in the vein of Greek drama. The writing is on the wall from the beginning and no amount of intervention or logic will stop Pauline from pursuing her goal. What makes it a horror is Bates' refusal to give into catharsis. When things go wrong, and they do, there is no attempt at resolution. There's no rewind button. There's no do over. There's no deux ex machina descending from the sky to save everyone. Excision is a slow and excruciating march to destruction and it's utterly fascinating.
Excision can be streamed on Shudder, a new online streaming service for horror fans.
