HEAL THE SICKNESS
I’d seen this knocking about on Amazon for a while but it wasn’t till someone recommended it on DeadPost (facebook) that I finally decided to invest, think I just needed a little push. Anyway at £5.99 on Blu-ray, you know. It arrived today and Traci Lords and Malcolm McDowell are in it, cool. Well, the thing I’ve been wondering is what excision means:
ex•ci•sion (ɛkˈsɪʒ ən, ɪk-)
n.
1. the act of removal; an excising.
2. the surgical removal of a foreign body or of tissue.
3. excommunication.
I can’t be the only one. Anyway, the film. Excuse me while I crack open a Red Stripe. The film’s about a girl called Pauline (AnnaLynne McCord) who lives with her parents and her younger sister Grace. Grace has Cystic Fibrosis. Mum’s played by Traci Lords, Dad by Roger Bart and Grace by Ariel Winter.
Pauline’s a bit of a misfit in her everyday life and has some very strange erotic fantasies. And then there’s the tampon scene, that bit’ll haunt me for a while. And the deflowering scene, wow! Oh but there’s plenty more where that came from. This film revels in being weirdly explicit which is in equal measures both commendable and a little sickening.
On the upside there’s a lot of stuff you won’t have seen before. One of its greatest strengths is that you never know quite how it’s going to try and repulse you next so in that way it keeps you watching. It’s a pretty strong visual experience especially during Pauline’s fantasies/daydreams which really were the highlight for me, good and gory too, I just wish there’d been more focus on that.
But the Donnie Darko/American Beauty quirkiness the rest of the time was a little grating to say the least. Now I found Donnie Darko interesting if a tad boring, I really liked American Beauty, I’m just not a fan of that style in horror films. No one does it better than Twin Peaks anyway and the film Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me (1992) is vastly superior to this, Donnie Darko and American Beauty in every respect, in my opinion. Ray Wise (Twin Peaks) does have a small role in this.
At its best, this is a very hypnotic film that doesn’t shy away from originality or gore. The acting is faultless by the way. If you stick around it reaches a very decent conclusion too. It does become a bit of a chore in places during the ‘getting there’. Everyone’s quite profound all the time which I must stress is a personal bugbear and may not be quite as much of a problem if you like that kind of thing.
I’ll probably throw it away.
