American Mary is a 2012 Canadian slasher flick from identical twin directors Jen & Sylvia Soska, who you may recognise as the directing team behind the bluntly titled “Dead Hooker in a trunk“. On a cosy Friday night, Laura and I were browsing through the recent releases section of Sky Movies, shovelling chilli into our mouths, when we came across this film. The synopsis piqued our interest, and we decided to give it a go.
The story begins with Mary Mason (played by Katharine Isabelle), a daydreaming medical student who’s going through a rough financial patch (we’ve all been there!) With the student loans company and her phone provider constantly on her back, she decides to become a stripper to raise some funds. The interview takes an unexpected turn, however, when sleazy strip-club owner Billy Barker (Antonio Cupo), takes her to a basement room downstairs to a tortured man. Amongst some slightly choppy dialogue, Billy essentially says “Mary, you’re a surgeon right? Fix up this man and you can have $5000”. Mary reluctantly accepts his offer and gets to work.
It turns out that Mary did a very good job on this man, and word starts to spread of her surgical skills. The next day she’s approached by a woman who calls herself “Beatrice” (Tristan Risk), and it transpires later in the film that she’s a chief figure in the Body Mod community. Beatrice models herself on Betty Boop. When seeing her for the first time, we almost spat out our chilli across the room in shock. Her appearance in the film is nothing short of discomforting. Surely this can’t just be the work of good makeup, can it? Whatever it is, it’s super effective. Good work!
“Boop boop a doop!”
After Mary transforms Ruby (Beatrice’s client) into a real-life doll by removing her nipples and sewing up her vagina, Beatrice decides to show up unannounced at Mary’s hospital (where she’s training to become a surgeon) and congratulates her on a job well done. Lecturer Dr. Walsh (Clay St. Thomas) oversees this exchange, and decides to invite her to a house party that’s taking place “for surgeons only”. Despite billions of alarm bells ringing at this point, Mary accepts.
Scantily clad and dressed to impress, Mary attends at the party and is greeted by a psychopathic Dr. Black, a calm Dr. Walsh and a slimy Dr. Grant (David Lovgren) (who is another of Mary’s lecturers and one she doesn’t have a good relationship with). Things take a really awful turn, when it transpires that Mary’s drink (which she is offered as she walks through the door) is spiked. Dr. Grant drags an unconscious and barely awake Mary to a back room where he brutally rapes her. Combined with the dark-red low level room lighting and dissonant droning tones in the background, the way this is presented in the film is incredibly stark and uncomfortable to watch. We’ll probably put this part of the film on the ‘Scene’s that will haunt us forever’ list, residing right next to the rape scene in ‘I Spit on your Grave‘, which is equally dreadful.
The rest of the film really peters out from this point onwards. It’s almost like the directors said, “Right, good job so far. Let’s leave it for now and go get pissed!” then woke up a few hours before it was due to be filmed. “OK, we’ve got the completed script ready to go?” “No boss, we still have another 1 hour to fill”. “Oh. Right Jen get some Red Bull and let’s blitz this fucker…” The rushed story writing really shows and completely dampens the experience.
Simply put, Mary’s profile in the ‘underground surgeon’ and body modification circuit continues to grow, the slimy Dr. Grant becomes Mary’s ‘experiment’ and he is transformed into a human teddy bear strung up by his skin (justice is served), Mary gains a few new clients (including Jen & Sylvia Soska who make an appearance as a pair of wannabe siamese twins with GOD AWFUL German/Russian accents), Mary’s antics catch the interest of Detective Dolor, Mary’s nan dies, Beatrice is killed, Ruby’s husband (angered at her transformation) stabs Mary whilst the cops bust her, and the film ends with Mary trying to sew her stab wound back together. Yep – that’s it. Fin. So, let’s talk less about what the film is about, and give you some insight of what we thought.
“What are you smiling at?!”
Essentially, American Mary is like a really good opportunity which is completely missed. It’s the film equivalent of going to the best burger restaurant in town and ordering a salad.
The film does have it’s good points:
- It serves it’s purpose as a gross-out slasher flick with gruesome scenes which will stick around with you for a little while. (If you’re at all squeamish, you might want to give this a miss and watch Finding Nemo or something instead.)
- Katharine Isabelle is a decent actress, and she plays the strong female protagonist fairly well with good insight into her character
- The dark, grimy scenes complement the film’s genre well and the camera work is pretty solid
Sadly though, it’s outweighed by these negatives:
- A lot of the acting is pretty dreadful. We’d like to take this opportunity to highlight two extreme cases, one from the Soska sisters and the other from the diabolically bad John Emmet Tracy, who plays Detective Dolar. The Soska sisters speak in this confused mix-bag of an accent which doesn’t quite know if it’s Russian or German, and we’re pretty sure that John Emmet Tracy was actually, at one point, a robot. His line delivery is incredibly monotone, his acting skills are more wooden than Pinocchio and he generally just seems disinterested during the film.
- As mentioned earlier, the storyboard really takes a turn for the worst after the graphic rape scene. Apart from Mary getting her sweet revenge at Dr. Grant, nothing really stood out for us during the rest of the film. There are plot-holes aplenty (why is Mary still a stripper when she’s earning big bucks? Perhaps she just loves it), a lot of the narrative and thematic ideas portrayed at the start of the film remain undeveloped, and the dialogue flows sloppily from one scene to the next with no real gusto or effort. Just refer to the Red Bull exchange earlier in this post, I think that sums it up best.
- The music is pretty damn bad – think of extremely dated 90s industrial german metal sung by a budget Placebo. “I love you…I hate you…I love you”….
- Some of Mary’s outfits are very unnecessary. We understand that the film has dark and erotica-industrial themes, but Mary is virtually naked throughout the entire film (even when she’s in theatre). Don’t get me wrong, she’s quite an attractive actress, but her costumes just give the film a bit of a ‘male fantasy’ image which doesn’t quite fit in. It’s quite like the film doesn’t know whether it wants to be a thriller, a slasher, a horror, or a porno.
In short, for fans of the horror/slasher genre then this film is a decent enough watch for the first half. If it’s a gripping plot and great story writing you’re after though, then look elsewhere as American Mary is a bit of a damp squib in that department.
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