American Mary (2012)

After a very lackluster 2012 Frightfest Festival with only a very few memorable films and much straight to video crap this came as a sensational blast. After a great deal of stuff showing rape as fan boy entertainment this was brilliant. The Soska Sisters have added a feminist spin to a Cronenburgesque tale of body modification and surgery. There is a lot of stuff here about body image and The reason this film was so compelling a many but include: 1. Oscar worthy central performance which makes it the best Horror acting for ages. 2. Sheer unpredictability 3. A horror film by and about women 4. Real setting not a suburban Disneyland 5. Cool and stylish direction that thankfully restrained itself when you thought you were just about to witness something that might need a sick bag. 6. Make up and prosthetics that showed you stuff you definitely won't see in the average Horror. I could go on but you really need to see this if you like Horror and it deserves to be seen by a wider audience (although I doubt ti will succeed with a multiplex crowd)

Fmovies: This is a truly wonderful and truly disgusting movie. Don't know how munch its true, just when i though i knew everything about deviant sexuality, this thing shows me new limits and just so happens to deal with medicine.

I loved the characters, this is not a good guy versus bad guy, this is bad ass vs really screwed up bad ass. Each character is more deviant than the previous.

I really like this twist ins the slasher genre, i had always thought that doctors (The successful ones $$$) are really smart little sociopaths.

Extremely recommended, the end is kinda disappointing to me, but makes sense.

Even at this early stage this interesting feature from Canada has the look of a future cult movie. It's decidedly left-field in subject matter. In it a female medical student with financial troubles turns to the shady world of underground surgeries. Before long she is carrying out more and more outlandish procedures. Pleasingly this one is directed by women. It's ridiculous in this day and age how rare it remains for women to be given the director's reigns. This film shows that the female vision can be very twisted and macabre indeed. The directors are identical twins Jen and Sylvia Soska who appear in a cameo as Eastern European sisters who crave bizarre body modifications. Their direction is very stylised but with grit where necessary. I'm not usually queasy when it comes to movies but I can honestly say that one surgical scene left me looking away. The third female presence is star Katherine Isabelle of Ginger Snaps fame. She is very good in a dark and sexy performance. She is a great anti-heroine and her revenge moment on a man who attacked her is one that had me inwardly cheering.

Seeing as this is a Canadian horror film perhaps a comparison with David Cronenberg is inevitable. But in this instance it's a fairly relevant one as in many ways this is another example of the body horror sub-genre. It's a film that combines contemporary sadistic horror with a view of an unusual subculture of people who modify their bodies through surgery. It isn't a very story driven film to be fair and it sometimes lacks a bit of overall dynamism but this is only a relatively minor observation and it is pleasingly original for the most part. Overall the feature could perhaps best be described as what would happen if Clive Barker was to direct a film that combined elements of Hard Candy and Audition.

American Mary fmovies. The body modification sub culture is sort of the like the old time carnival freak show. People surgically mold, sculpt and pierce their way into something else but the person on the inside stays the same. The 2012 film "American Mary" features Katherine Isabelle, the breakout star of 2001's "Ginger Snaps", as a Med student who finds herself performing body mod surgeries that she finds out is quite good at.

Being a poor college student Mary Mason answer's a Craig's List style ad for a sleazy strip club owned by an even sleazier younger guy. During her "interview" something goes terribly wrong outside and Mary if offered $5,000 to do some impromptu surgery on some guy. She is freaked out but does it. Word gets around to the underground body mod culture and she is approached by some pretty strange characters to help them finish their work. Isabelle plays Mary perfectly, she is desperate enough too take these strange jobs, but is still grounded and very professional. She provides a desperately needed service to the extremely rich who believe she is an artist who works in the medium of skin.

She is first pursued by Beatrice who has transformed his/her body into Betty Boop. After completing a surgery on her for $10,000, her friend Ruby comes calling next. Rudy is transforming her body to look like an anatomically incorrect Barbie Doll and has a few things cut off and one thing sewn up. The film has a darkly comedic thread throughout. Ruby, Beatrice and the others are all portrayed as good people on the inside, but different on the out. While the exact opposite is true about the other so-called normal people.

Back at school Mary is invited to a swanky party thrown by one of the big shot surgeons, but she has unknowing just stepped into the lions den. She is drugged and raped by the surgeon, but little does he know the unique skills that Mary has recently acquired. Mary exacts swift and painful revenge upon the Doc. Making him her test subject for new procedures, keeping him alive and aware the whole time.

"American Mary" is full of interesting unique characters and well played throughout. It was written and directed by the Soska twins, Jen and Sylvia, who also play parts as customers to Mary. They bring a real sense of authenticity and care to the film, that would have been lost had it been done by anybody else.

There's no doubt she is by far my favorite actress and all started when I watched Ginger Snaps. In my opinion she is definitely an underrated actress who's acted in several movies but few of them have played such an important role in her acting career like this one and of course Ginger Snaps. American Mary is a well-developed movie that I very much liked it because it combines blood, flesh, drama and a good storyline with such a great acting from Katharine Isabelle besides I must confess that I'm totally delighted by her work, I really but really loved it. The movie is interesting from beginning to end, funny at times but mostly intense and what I liked the most was the evolution of Mary, at first you're gonna see a student, pretty and very smart living alone, working and doing little things in order to get some money but you'll end up seeing someone totally different, a girl with no fears, vindictive but mainly unstable. Well, in case I hadn't said enough I wanna add the fact that unlike the typical gore movies where you'll only see deaths and blood with no sense, American Mary has a very good storyline about revenge.

Now you might be wondering why after this review I gave only 8 stars out of 10 and that's because of the ending, I didn't like it but I'm not sure if another one could have been better. Anyway, it's worth watching.

One of the most original horror films of recent years American Mary is a darkly comic gore- fest about revenge and back-street body modification.

Mary (Katherine Isabelle) is a promising and dedicated medical student who, like all students at one point or another in their studies, falls foul of financial difficulty. Lured into the world of body modification by the handsome prices offered by weirdos with a desire to make themselves more unique, Mary finds a way to continue her studies whilst earning some pretty good money. Wrongly assumed to have become a prostitute by her creepy professor she is invited to a sleazy surgeons party unaware that he has ulterior motives that make her new found profession start to take over her life.

American Mary is one of few horror films that's focus is on the female character's strength. Mary goes from being a hardworking model student to a psychotic body modification surgeon in a seedy strip club where she originally auditioned to work. The transformation from quiet student to headstrong surgical dominatrix after being violated is both empowering and contradictory of the traditional representation of women in horror. Katherine Isabelle is as charismatic as she is beautiful and she completely owns the character. She maintains an air of mystery which makes you constantly question her intentions towards the people she meets and her performance will keep you on your toes.

Darkly comedic and completely twisted American Mary is one damn good reason for women in the media to be more prevalent in the horror genre; there's no fluff in this film, no cliché crap and very little predictability. It has no eye-roll moments of exploitation and Isabelle's performance is empowering for women as well as easy on the eye for the men; a good balance that excludes neither gender from the audience like so many horror films do. The Soska sisters show their love for the horror genre and its brutality but also its more sexy side (which is weird considering all the blood, but there we go!) and American Mary is clearly a labour of love and not just some uncared for cliché torture porn that's been churned out as a money maker. The settings are seedy and dark and the sleazy underbelly of society is well portrayed but in an almost desirable fashion that enables us to see how easy it is for Mary to get sucked in to this world where money comes easily if you're willing to leave your comfort zone.

If you can ignore the occasionally questionable performances American Mary is an all round brilliant horror film that sucks you in to this brutal, seedy, sexy universe for 100 minutes and refuses to let your attention slip. What happens to Mary's professor is as genius as it is disturbing, but you will have to watch to find out for yourself.