Director: Jen Soska, Sylvia Soska
Cast: Katherine Isabelle, Antonio Cupo, Tristan Risk, David Lovgren, Paula Lindberg, Clay St. Thomas, John Emmet Tracy, Twan Holliday
Screenplay: Jen Soska, Sylvia Soska
103 mins. Rated R for strong aberrant violent content including disturbing images, torture, a rape, sexual content, graphic nudity, language and brief drug use.
American Mary is one of those you movies that you will remember…for a couple days at most. It tells the story of Mary Mason (Katherine Isabelle, TV’s Endgame, Ginger Snaps), a wannabe surgeon excelling in the craft but without the focus on actual schoolwork and completely devoid of any cash flow. She is about to lose her apartment, her phone, and her respect. She decides to become a stripper, which completely seems characterless, and when she shows up to her interview, her potential boss Billy (Antonio Cupo, TV’s Bomb Girls, Elegy) needs her for something else: surgery on one of his clients or lunkies or somthing. I stopped caring the plot at this point. Mary’s impressive skills pull her into the underground world of body modification, and she isn’t sure she can get back out or if she even wants to.
This is a stupid unlikable movie. I struggled to sit through the entire thing. Katherine Isabelle is the kind of lead actress you get when the previous five actresses on your list won’t take their tops off. Her performance is neither subtle nor nuanced in any way. That leads me to the script, which tries to play off the plot as a series of freakish incidents with the intent unsure. I’m still not sure what the purpose of most of these plot points were. I think writer/directors Jen and Sylvia Soska (Dead Hooker in a Trunk, See No Evil 2) were trying to make Mary more likable, but they failed horribly, creating a laundry list of poorly drawn characters, each less enjoyable than the last.
Then you get Antonio Cupo, who has a performance more wooden that Charlie from Charlie’s Angels. This guy acts like he is reading from cue cards. The same is true of most of these performers.
The cinematography is lazy, the editing is trying to be a Saw film (and fails), and the sound is clunky.
Can I just say it? This movie sucks.
1/5
-Kyle A. Goethe
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