Remember those fetid middle school health videos about eating disorders? The concerned best friend, the bespectacled guidance counselor, the implied offscreen self-abuse. The gorging. The vomiting. The inevitable dramatic hospital visit. Excess Flesh isn’t quite that but Patrick Kennelly‘s wannabe horror feature is still very much the cinematic version of binging and purging. It crams a bunch of junk down your throat only to yuck it back on the screen as watery, indistinct gook. Kinda like the next day stomach movement of a truly ripping kegger. Kennelly’s narrative circle of hell exhumes outdated and/or overplayed models of violence towards women and the violence women inflict on themselves to ill-effect. Aided by a predictable and heavily cliched script from Kennelly and co-writer Sigrid Gilmer (starring bottom-feeding lines like “You’re not gonna get away with this, you know”), Excess Flesh is at once an obvious and oblivious body dysmorphia thriller that’s more than a little flabby. And by curtain time, it, like a half-starved model, has totally collapsed off the runway. Read More