Excision - seriously messed up

It's a long time since I saw a film and I thought it was completely fucked up, but Sunday night reset the timer on that as I watched the independent American production Excision.  I think this appeared on my film-radar after a RedLetterMedia review of films-you-probably-didn't-see-yet highlighted it as weird enough to bother watching.  The story follows Pauline, a moderately disturbed teenager living somewhere in American suburbia with her frustrated-but-trying-not-to-be parents and younger sister - who suffers from cystic fibrosis.

Pauline is fairly weird, but on the surface no weirder than one might expect from the average teenager.  She has bad hair, bad skin, dresses awkwardly, hates the cool kids and worries about her changing body. Oh and she fetishises dead bodies.  Amongst the film's many scenes that seem to exist purely court controversy, Pauline dreams about having sex with a cadaver missing half its head.

It's almost as if the film-makers are trying to get as much in as possible that will wind up middle-America.  There's a scene in which Pauline seems to fantasise about having an abortion.  There are several comic scenes in which Pauline appears to pray to god with joking repentance as if she were chatting to an older sister.  She obsesses over a used tampon and losing her virginity when she's on her period.  Just your normal teenager then?

I suppose the subtext to all this is that being a teenage girl is weird - this isn't something I have actual experience of, but I'm assured it's a very trying time in the lives of all woman.  Pauline's mother expresses many of the things that the world expects her to do, crucially though she understands the difference between what society expects and what goes on behind closed doors - whereas Pauline does not.  She gets annoyed when Pauline kisses a random boy at a high-society dance, but at the same time seems to understand what's going on and approves when Pauline goes off to have sex with a random boy from her school.  It's the rules of society and etiquette that Pauline doesn't get and doesn't care about.  Basically she's a teenager.

Pauline also wants to be a surgeon.  She obsesses about blood and viscera and dead bodies.  If you can't work out where the film is going with all this then you need to try harder.  Given it's 80 minutes long I wouldn't go so far as to say that Excision was a total waste of my time.  I laughed out loud 2 or 3 times, and for fans of horror there's certainly something nasty about the stuff that Pauline gets up to.  Overall though, this isn't a film I would really recommend to anyone.  It's more of a cinematic curiosity than anything else, proving that the American film industry does have a dark side that sits outside the Holywood mainstream.  Excision - if you're going to watch it, don't eat anything while doing so.