Review of American Mary (2013) by Andrew F — 13 May 2017

I think it's good, but nowhere near as good as it could have been. To judge from the extras, the directors thought it was more comic horror than anything else, but it's really not so much comic as quirky, which is good.

Katharine Isabelle is superb. But the storyline is incoherent, as it's made from a lot of disparate elements - there's feminism, there's individualism, there's narcissism, there's delusion, there's sexual violence, possessiveness, revenge, and, apart from the fact that some of them are inadequately developed (there are too many of them to be dealt with properly), they all struggle against each other rather than bond into any whole.

In one way this is good, as it mirrors the fact that the film is "Shakespearean - everyone dies" (they don't actually), but in another way it's bad, as it leaves a feeling of confusion and dissatisfaction.

Confusion in a body-shock movie? Yes, because it wants to be a morality tale, but it fails really. Generally speaking the film seems anti-body-mod (and absolutely everything in it is make-up, apart from a few guest-cameos), so I wonder if the body-mod community even enjoyed it that much.