Review: EXCESS FLESH Makes You Uncomfortable To Make A Point
Jill (Bethany Orr) is a typical misfit, a painfully shy girl who doesn't fit in in L.A., much less in her own apartment, which she shares with the superficial, abusive Jennifer (Mary Loveless), a class-A bitch who wolfs down bags of Doritos and dully throws them back up, never gaining an ounce. Stuck in this rut, it doesn't take long for Jill to snap.
Patrick Kennelly's Excess Flesh is initially like one of those 90s-style "Roommate From Hell" thrillers ala Single White Female, but no Hollywood director would go to the extremes this one does; ditching any pretense of glitz or style, this is a straight-up grimy and unpleasant experience.
Kennelly is clearly lashing out at the vapid L.A. scene, the one made up of anorexic models and wannabe pretty boy actors. It's a shallow, surface-deep culture, one where someone as awkward as Jill clearly doesn't belong - she thinks it's a good idea to use Last Year at Marienbad as a pickup line. And for a while, you're sympathetic to the poor girl, until she goes all Annie Wilkes on her equally unlikeable roomie and you're left with no one to root for.
Give credit to both actresses, since they commit fully to the material even if it makes them look unflattering most of the time; Loveless goes through a gauntlet and Orr is really good at playing an unhinged, off-putting psycho. Setting it mostly in the girls' dump of an apartment, Kennelly clearly wants to shock; even the shots of people eating are so disgusting you'll lose your appetite in record time.
But it's not shock for shock's sake, since this movie actually has a point to make about body shaming, torturing oneself to reach that ideal that society and fashion magazines say is the norm; it's particularly worse in this film's snapshot of L.A. and it's "beautiful" people. In a way, this is a revenge fantasy for everyone who's always felt shamed like Jill.
Excess Flesh is more than a mere exploitation movie, but with no one to have any interest in, it becomes a somewhat unpleasant watch you might not want to sit through more than once.
Excess Flesh is available on VOD on March 8.
