Excision

It’s hard to discuss what’s so amazing about Richard Bates Jr.’s offbeat teen horror picture Excision without talking about what happens at the end, which is predictable, but in the best way. The last five minutes or so of Excision is the gory, appalling, Vault Of Horror eight-pager that the entire film has been building to, and pays off all the weirdly beautiful gore effects that Bates has previously strewn throughout the film’s stylish dream sequences. Yet what makes Excision such an original is what precedes that payoff. AnnaLynne McCord (in a gutsy performance, at once monstrous and sympathetic) plays a pimply, gawky high-school senior who has sexy fantasies about mutilation and spends her spare time researching ways she can help her sister Ariel Winter, who suffers from cystic fibrosis. The whole movie is as body-conscious as its heroine, watching with real fascination as McCord pierces her own ears, sniffs her used tampons, and imagines herself crawling across naked men and women so that she can submerge herself in a gore-filled bathtub. Long before Excision turns into the story of an adolescent mad scientist and her sick scalpel skills, it’s already been a celebration of viscera.