Excision
★★★
(2012)
Teenage growing pains evolve into something seriously disturbing in Richard Bates Jr.'s debut horror comedy. The first time feature, expanded from the directors own short is part Cronenberg part John Waters, featuring a fine central performance from a wonderfully uglied up AnnaLynne McCord who plays Pauline, a teenage girl, hunched like a monster, acned, grimacing and angry. Paulie's controlling mother (Tracy Lords) and her feckless father (Roger Bart) are unable to curb our girls disdain for pretty much everything.
As Pauline's dreams of blood-letting grow stranger and more sexual in nature, the young girl savagely and hilariously singles out a high school jock in a direct order for him to take her virginity, she butts heads with her mother, with her teachers and her counselors, losing faith in anything and everything around her. Though her younger sister Grace and her battle with cystic fibrosis are treated as background through most of the film, it's this detail which will eventually spin Excision in to disturbing but seriously muddled final act.
Excision is sadly fairly clunky and uneven as both a horror and a comedy, the stark difference in Bates' low budget film however is its casting choices and its influences are so wonderfully married. Her teacher is none other than king of the Clockwork Orange droogs Malcom McDowell, her high school principal is Ray Wise, better know as Laura Palmer's father in David Lynch's Twin Peaks and her priest/counselor is the daddy of out there teen cinema, John Waters himself. Three iconic trouble makers guiding a lost teenager through the most troubling time of her life is a smart move by Bates but it isn't enough to save the film.
McCord is great here though, nearly in every shot of the film, playing Pauline like a werewolf unable to stop both her blossoming dangerous desires or, perhaps more accurately, a vampire afraid of the broad day light. Overly full of scenes which repeatedly retread the same ground, it does suffer slightly from being an extension of a short film, finishing with a flat slap rather than the gut punch you know Bates was hoping for. None the less it's an intriguing and interesting expansion on the feminine horrors of DePalma's Carrie and more recently McKee's wonderful May.
