Strictly average movie

Disturbing yet enthralling

How wonderful it is to see this fine actress carry a film and carry it so beautifully.

The first must-see film of the year.

While original and well-made, "Mary" never rises to much. The premise is your basic rape revenge story given a modern twist but it doesn't take things further or deeper. In some ways this is more fetishistic and illogical than the legendary but somewhat cartoony "I Spit On Your Grave". This film's heroine is nothing like the classic victim: she's confidant, vain and has a sour attitude. But she grows tiresome and unlikable before anything bad has even happened to her. When your feminist heroine surrounds herself with gangsters and creeps, how can she be surprised that she is raped. The film promotes this narrative that female liberation = being used by men and then blaming everyone but yourself for it. American Mary works as a twisted fantasy and cheap wish fulfillment for victims, but it never becomes a halfway believable or intelligent criticism of misogyny or sexism. It wants to be as poetic, brutal and entertaining as Diablo Cody's "Jennifer's Body" but doesn't nail any of it, coming off like a cash-in only.

Desperate to make ends meet, a promising surgeon ends up taking a one-off job as an extreme body-modifier only to find that her skills and success in the field draws her into the world even further and become increasingly concerned about leaving with her sanity.This here was quite the disappointing and rather troubling effort. One of the main problems here is the rather overt and extremely clumsy manner in which this one goes about integrating her into the cosmetics field here, which is one of the central parts of the film as a whole. The way of which she gets put into the society, initially as a freak occurrence at a job interview that requires her to take the offer for an extreme cosmetic offer at the last second, which by itself is quite a coincidence that is purposefully built into this one for no real reason other than giving her something to get her into the world required here only that's incredibly clunky and ham-fisted by tying it more into the strip club than the medical school. On the whole this is a facet that makes more sense than how it plays out here as that's quite a clumsy read which brings about quite a bit more useless moments here detailing her in the club than it really should knowing how this one really plays out. Moreover, that makes for quite a lot more bland and overall unneeded moments here where we follow her around and generally aren't that impressed with what happens as it's a series of scenes with her simply brooding over what she's done and turning herself into, and all of this is so flimsy and shallow that it really makes her gradual turn into a serial killer and butcher seem all the weaker due to how over-the-top silly it all appears. This one really could've made the build-up into that section of the film quite a bit more appealing since the character-study aspect of her turning away from her schooling to a more lucrative and appreciative society would've turned this one around considerably as the gradual turn into becoming a body modifier becomes coherent and realistic rather than just simply to get off on showing all the crazy procedures dreamed up to disfigure the human body which is what this one really feels like. That aspect is well-handled with plenty of rather gruesome and somewhat intriguing displays of her work as she goes along and starts gaining notoriety, being able to showcase the work she does rather well with plenty of graphic images about the different surgeries and what's going on with her descent into madness as that becomes part of what's going on giving it rather bloody and disturbing which marks the film's best parts. Still, it's quite sizeable flaws really bring this one down.Rated R: Extreme Graphic Language, Extreme Graphic Violence, Full Nudity, a Rape scene and drug use.

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.

There is something just so bloody good about a horror film that is nice and gory. "Ginger Snaps" alum Katharine Isabelle returns to the big screen as a medical student named Mary. Barely destitute but desperate, Mary answers an ad for a strip club, but is interrupted to perform surgery for a large sum of money. She begins in this vein as a very innocent and frightened young woman, who doesn't understand the world she is thrust into, but a thirst for revenge quickly spirals her into a realm of darkness and fury. This film screams for me to love it, and I do easily, thanks to its insatiable blood fest, grotesque imagery of surgeries, Katharine Isabelle's cold and conniving performance as Mary, and the exploitative antics on screen. Her professor (Lovgren) is probably the most gnawing thing about this film, because his behavior is insufferable, and his warped sense of entitlement over his students is just not realistic. I know we're supposed to hate him and that's the reason why he is designed in that way, but he's just so blatant about it. Mary changing to a bloodthirsty horror villain over his crime seemed a bit extreme. The ending was also anticlimactic for the story set up, and came out of nowhere. Otherwise, this film brutally entertains, and does so with all the lust and plasma it can muster.