Reviews
[REVIEW] ‘Excision’ (2012) Cuts Deep
Few filmmakers can perfectly articulate an auteur style from their feature directorial debuts alone. Typically, the style grows and evolves with the filmmaker as they age and learn. Richard Bates Jr. is one of the rare filmmakers who knows their style, and what works for them, right out of the gate. Slicing his way onto the scene in 2012, Richard Bates Jr. quickly proved himself a genre force to be reckoned with–creating loud and garish spectacles to wow and upset audiences. Excision meshes the ideas and troubles of adolescence with goopy, bloody, unsafe-feeling body horror that would make Cronenberg blush. When thinking about gore-centric films for July, this film is the first one that came to mind.
A Disturbing Yet Empathetic Protagonist
Pauline (AnnaLynne McCord) is not your typical all-American teenage girl. With aspirations of being a surgeon, and a deranged mind, she finds herself alienated from the majority of people. One of her only friends is her younger sister Grace (Ariel Winter), who is afflicted with Cystic Fibrosis. Her overbearing zealot mother, Phyllis (Traci Lords), and her father, Bob (Roger Bart), don’t make her life any easier. Things soon go downhill for Pauline as her extended fantasies quickly bleed into reality.
Excision is, by definition, a gory film. We have excessive blood squirts, organ removals, and general debauchery, but what’s most impressive about this film is how creative it is with the gore. Bates consistently toes the line between good and bad taste; edging the audience with their trust in him. Each viewing of this film feels just as visually disgusting as the previous time and never loses its yuck factor.
Body Horror as Character Development
What makes Excision feel all the more impactful is the mixture of its gore and practical effects and how it perfectly molds the character of Pauline. Pauline has some…deadly sexual preferences. She is undoubtedly a late bloomer, and her social awkwardness (and general demeanor) don’t necessarily help her gain any friends. It also doesn’t help when she asks her sex-ed teacher Mr. Claybaugh (Matthew Gray Gubler) if you can get an STD from a corpse, in front of the class. That question pretty much sums up a good portion of her sexual identity. The best way to describe Pauline would be Wednesday Addams on DMT, with a dash of dissociation.
Bates started the bar high with his screenplay for Excision and his creation of Pauline. He found a way to craft this incredibly tragic character you can empathize with even after committing such horrific acts. While a surface viewing of the film may seem like nothing more than a subversion of teen-led horror films, the character of Pauline is expertly crafted. Finding ways to use body horror to tell a character’s backstory is welcomed in a genre chock full of overly expository screenplays.
A Cast Packed With Genre Icons
The cast is stacked with some incredible actors who Bates would continue to collaborate with, like Matthew Gray Gubler and Ray Wise, and would also star John Waters, Marlee Matlin, Malcolm McDowell, and Ariel Winter, to name a few. It’s clear that Ariel Winter and AnnaLynne McCord carry this film. McDowell gives his usual post-2000 performance style of reading lines that were probably emailed to him a few days before. But just seeing these amazing stars on screen for such a wild project makes this film that much better.
Excision finds a way to one-up itself, scene after scene. The gore and body horror feel unique and creative, making the viewers feel as if they watched a much gorier film than they actually did. (That’s not to say there is a LACK of gore.) Richard Bates Jr. started strong with Excision and hasn’t lost his enthusiasm one bit. If there were ever a filmmaker you should drop everything for to do a marathon, it should be him.
Haunted house stories are a staple in the horror genre. But it’s not often that a haunted house film digs its way under your skin and stays there long after the credits roll. Enter Recluse, celebrating its world premiere at the 2026 Tribeca Film Festival.
A Disturbing Return Home Fuels Recluse’s Story
Joan Wyatt, a young and troubled audio engineer, is called back to her childhood home following a bizarre accident in which her father, the famous artist Lawrence Wyatt, was engulfed in flames and left in critical condition. Joan has been estranged from her father for quite some time, so when his longtime housekeeper Lydia leaves a voicemail telling her that he likely doesn’t have a lot of time left, she ignores it. But then Lawrence himself calls, telling Joan that he’s been seeing her mother—who disappeared when Joan was a child—around the house.
Joan arrives to find Lydia armed with a crossbow to ward off Lawrence’s obsessive fans. Her father is bed-bound with severe burns, and is being cared for by a hired nurse around Joan’s age named Emily. Lawrence, who notoriously experimented with psychedelics and occult practices during his career, is barely coherent and keeps his face concealed underneath a crude plaster mask. He keeps asking about his “little spider.” It’s disturbing and deeply upsetting, especially since Joan already has a lifetime of trauma associated with the house. Now that she’s back, she begins to suspect that these “ghosts” aren’t metaphorical. Lawrence was not a good man… but something even more sinister may be lurking in the house.
Henry Chaisson Reinvents the Haunted House Formula
Recluse, written and directed by Henry Chaisson, is a masterfully crafted debut feature that takes familiar elements of the haunted house genre—like a remote mansion as the setting, traumatic family secrets, and supernatural mischief—and twists them into something fresh and, well, twisted.
Sasha Frolova Leads an Exceptional Ensemble Cast
Sasha Frolova stars as Joan, delivering a performance that is both believable and compelling. She’s easy to root for throughout the film, especially as she contends with her father’s unwaveringly loyal housekeeper Lydia, brilliantly played by Toby Poser. Mia Vallet’s portrayal of Emily is also noteworthy, commanding attention from her first appearance all the way to the end. Kimball Farley plays Lydia’s son and Joan’s friend Todd with the perfect balance of levity and tension. Frankie Seratch is enjoyable to watch as the opportunistic nepo baby art dealer Tom. Rounding out the cast is Xander Berkeley as Lawrence; even from behind a mask, his performance is intense and chilling. Berkeley even provided some of his own art to be used in the film.
Sound Design and Cinematography Create Unrelenting Terror
The cast is far from the film’s only strength, though. Sound design by Matthew Rollins will have you death-gripping your seat in the best way, and serves as an integral part of the story itself. Production designer Yulanda Yo-Rong Shieh and art director Ana María Kalvo absolutely nailed the set and made the Wyatt family mansion simultaneously sprawling and claustrophobic.
Finally, we have the beautiful and (appropriately) haunting cinematography by Bryce Holden, supported by the editing prowess of Nik Voytas, Josh Lobo, and Henry Chaisson. Not only did they maintain an air of unrelenting suspense throughout the entire film, but they also executed some of the most disturbing and bone-chilling jump scares I’ve seen in recent years.
Seriously: One of those jump scares made me feel physically ill. You’ll know it when you see it for yourself.
Recluse had its world premiere at Tribeca Film Festival 2026.
One of my favorite special interests is the Mormon-millionaire-real-estate-tycoon-owned Skinwalker Ranch. Mormon millionaire Brandon Fugal has crafted a wonderfully apophenic history in his post-Bigelow ownership. His perfectly curated release of pseudo-information through the lens of a History Channel TV show did wonders not just for his wallet but for docu-dramas as a whole. Fugal did what The Curse of Oak Island could have only wished to accomplish. BUT, three years before Joseph Smith’s teachings made their way to the Uinta Basin, a group of filmmakers set out to capitalize on one of America’s strangest phenomena. Skinwalker Ranch is a film that is as perplexing as it is insufferable.
Skinwalker Ranch: Missing Children, UFOs, and Found Footage Chaos
In 2010, Hoyt’s (Jon Gries) son disappeared in a blinding ball of light. Some time later, Modern Defense Enterprises sent a team of experts to Hoyt’s property to study what happened to Cody (Nash Lucas). Upon arriving at the property, MDE sets up a reality-TV-like number of security cameras in the hopes of finding anything. But what they found may just make them wish they hadn’t set foot on this property.
The Real History Behind Skinwalker Ranch Lore
As stated, the story of and behind Skinwalker Ranch is one of my favorite bits of Americana. From the Sherman family’s story, through Robert Bigelow’s ownership, all the way to its current Mormon occupation, the history behind Skinwalker Ranch runs deep. Dire wolves, dino beavers, and disappearing orbs, oh my! Whether you believe in the stories or not, Skinwalker Ranch is one of America’s biggest pieces of lore.
One of my favorite theories is that a resource-observing beacon was placed by, for lack of a better term, aliens when Pangea existed. Throughout the years, the dissolution of Pangea shifted the location of where the aliens placed the beacon to what is now considered the Mesa on the northern portion of Skinwalker Ranch’s property. The said beacon could very possibly be what causes the mysterious 1.6 GHz signal on the ranch, or why there are so many UAP sightings around the Mesa.
How Skinwalker Ranch Wastes Its Fascinating Premise
Now, I know all of this has been discovered post-Skinwalker Ranch (movie), but Hunt for the Skinwalker and Skinwalkers at the Pentagon, by Colm Kelleher and George Knapp (and James T. Lacatski for Pentagon), had already been released. Dino beavers on Skinwalker Ranch had already been discussed. The true terror of Skinwalker Ranch had been disseminated by three highly regarded UFOlogists. So, for writer Adam Ohler (and story by Devin McGinn, Steve Berg, Ken Bretschneider, and Murphy Michaels) to craft such a plain story that doesn’t even scratch the surface of what makes Skinwalker Ranch even slightly interesting is confounding. It feels as if the writer/story creators heard the term “Skinwalker Ranch” and decided to focus on that, and that alone. Skinwalker Ranch has zero world-building, and hopes that the title is titillating enough to get someone to click ‘play’.
The singular great aspect about Skinwalker Ranch is the casting of Jon Gries (Uncle Rico in Napoleon Dynamite) and Michael Horse (Deputy Hawk in Twin Peaks). Gries does enough carrying in this film to make up for dropping that winning pass. And it’s just wonderful to see Michael Horse in a film, even if he’s cast as a token Native American whose only purpose is to make the writers feel better for capitalizing on Native American lore. Besides that, the acting in Skinwalker Ranch is beyond atrocious. In fact, the acting feels so unnatural that I honestly thought the team from MDE was going to turn out to be the aliens that kidnapped Cody. Turns out, the story doesn’t even attempt to be 1% as clever as that.
A Massive Found Footage Failure
Skinwalker Ranch not only fails at being an interesting sci-fi horror flick, but it also fails at being a found footage flick. Full of awful CGI, bad acting, and an even worse script, Skinwalker Ranch exists as nothing more than a time waster. In fact, Travis Walton’s experience in Fire in the Sky would be more entertaining to take part in than watching even two minutes of this film–I’d rather get dry probed by the Hyperboreans than ever think of this movie again.
