At of today, November 1, 2020, and I think this might be the first non-fake review of this movie. So there's a certain gravitas to that, I guess!
"Incision" is not terrible, but it's a horror flick that doesn't really deliver on its promise, which is gruesome body horror. After the obligatory cold open, we are introduced to our protagonists and, as is sadly the case in so many horror flicks, they are a bunch of intolerable creeps. We meet Alexa, an "influencer" with millions of followers, her boyfriend Lee who is a football player, Lee's friend Calvin who is some sort of record producer, Trinity the pop star that Calvin is dating and producing, Calvin's hanger-on Kenny who uses his proximity to Trinity to entice hot girls to sleep with him, and Alexa's sister Becca who just left rehab because she was assaulted. We spend the first half of the movie with these entitled jerks who live in mansions and while I think it's to get us to care, they just get more and more annoying until we are almost begging the movie to get them to the crazy surgeon. (to be fair, though, Caylee Cowen's 'Becca' is the only character that escapes this fate -- she is the one character that is made sympathetic and as a result, we like and care about her).
Then, when Calvin goes to play Trinity's "great new single" for the gang, it turns out that Kenny -- for reasons never fully explained -- took the Mac Book that contains the lone copy of this tune and was galivanting around the city with it and somehow lost it. Becca teaches them how to use the "Find my Mac" feature on the iPhone, and they send Kenny out to retrieve it. Somehow (also not explained), it ended up in the house of Dr Gene Cunningham, a plastic surgeon, and his extremely weird family, which consists of the good doctor, an older woman, his older son, and a creepy kid who is his younger son. When Kenny doesn't return, the others pile into a car and go look for him. The doctor greets them, and captures them all, promising to "make them all beautiful." But as you might expect, the doctor is certifiably insane and his views on "beauty" might not be yours....
The biggest problem is that "Incision" promises gruesome body horror but it just doesn't deliver. In a movie like this, we're waiting for extreme set pieces. But they are just not there. The doctor promises to do all manner of horrible things and then... well, either they cut away or something happens to avoid it. So while there are a couple of "close calls", it turns into more of a standard run of the mill "run around trying to get out of the evil house" slasher flick. And when you build up characters as annoying as they are in the this movie, we're in it to see them get it bad. And the direction and editing is off-putting... several times the scene will end, everyone will just sort of "stop acting" and the film just slowly fades to black. Then we're on to the next scene.
There are some good things, though -- the Cunningham family is plenty creepy, and James Allen Brewer is an absolute hoot as the insane plastic surgeon. He is almost worth the price of admission itself! And as I said, Caylee Cowen as Becca gave us a character to root for.
Not a terrible way to spend 90 minutes, but nothing special. I'm probably rating it a little higher than it deserves because the Doctor and his family are unnerving enough to make it sort of entertaining.
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