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.
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.
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.
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.
