Review of American Mary (2013) by Daisy M — 01 Oct 2013

I would say this is a good horror movie that's actually a little unique in the approach to its story, as it shows the titular Mary, who after quitting medical school after a particularly horrifying experience, decides to make a career in the underground scene of extreme body modification and we see her 'rise up the ranks' so to speak as her work keeps improving.

So I thought the idea was quite good indeed, as was the dark humor. The big problem of the film is that it doesn't really have an actual story, it's mostly about seeing Mary find success performing these body modifications.

Personally I thought the movie would be more of a typical "revenge" thriller, even if it's using unique torture methods, as Grant raping Mary is what made her go into body modification full time.

There's also an investigation into Grant's disappearance which is the only thing you could call a story in this movie. And I use the term story as loosely as I possibly can because only like 10% of the film is dedicated to it.

And because of that reason, because there's no real story to speak of, the movie can certainly feel a little aimless and without purpose. The movie is still good, as you get to see how Mary gets to do increasingly weirder modifications.

But, at the same time, the movie does shy away from really being too extreme. Mary does the modifications, but the movie has a hard time showing them instead choosing to imply through pictures, drawings, etc.

There's only a couple of scenes in the movie where the movie really goes for the jugular. Not that I think the movie really needed more gore, but it needed to show more modifications and for the mods to get increasingly more extreme as she went along, as it would also help to showcase Mary's character and how she's becoming more psychotic as the movie goes along.

The acting is solid but inconsistent because Katherine Isabelle, while being good in some scenes, is really terrible in others. But, for a low-budget horror film, the acting is as good as could be expected.

The climax of the movie was also a little bit disappointing and it really came out of nowhere because they didn't set it up right. They had one quick little scene setting it up and it felt like a lame cop-out.

Almost like they were trying to find a quick and easy way to get out of the story without much thought put into it. I know it almost sounds like I didn't like this movie but I did, it has a good idea, some good dark comedy, and some decent performances.

It's just a movie where, I felt, that the Soska sisters were trying too many things that they then did nothing with. So while this is a good, and smart, horror movie, I think it had all the ingredients of being much better than it actually was.

So this is a slight disappointment to me, still good though.