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benjaminfeatherston
Reviews
American Mary (2012)
An undeservedly-acclaimed torture flick
"American Mary" is the story of the medical student who is drawn into the seedy underworld of illegal body modifications. Despite the praise this film and its directors have received, it's a mess of lazy writing, stale revenge-flick tropes, and predictable torture scenes.
The first act is promising. Mary Mason is a medical student who is flat broke, and goes to a strip club to apply for a sleazy but high-paying gig that will keep her afloat while she finishes her medical degree. When the mob boss running the club suddenly needs to prolong a mutilated man's life, he enlists her help. Before long, Mary is getting lucrative referrals for increasingly bizarre surgeries.
Initially, the film appears to deliver on its promise. Katherine Isabelle is convincing as a competent but vulnerable woman who is out of her league. The narrative is smart and compelling. However, it does not take long for the film to go off the rails and lose us completely.
(SPOILERS FOLLOW)
Mary is invited to a university faculty party where she is raped by a trusted instructor. While many skilled writers and directors are able to handle the subject matter of rape intelligently, here it's used as a lazy plot device to get her to wholeheartedly turn evil and embrace a life of crime. This new Mary dresses like a dominatrix, enjoys inflicting pain, and revels in the criminal element which once frightened her. It's a huge change brought about in an extremely contrived manner, and it takes the audience out of a film in a way which never allows us to fully return.
Mary goes on doing more and more extreme surgeries, but there is nothing really driving the film from this point on. The revenge on the professor is dispensed with almost immediately. The story then plods on with surgery after surgery and the occasional bout of vengeance, but we already know how the story will end. There's no suspense, and we are left to wait until the directors have decided that they are done with us.
The Soska Sisters have drawn acclaim for being a much-needed female voice in the male-dominated horror genre. It is thoroughly undeserved. Even if this film had not used rape as a plot device, there is nothing here that hundreds of male directors could not have offered us. The body modification horror is actually quite banal; we're supposed to be shocked by suspension piercing, horns, and sub-dermal implants which are actually completely legal and known to anyone familiar with the real-world body-modification community. "American Mary" is the worst kind of horror film, the kind that fails to shock, scare, or amuse its audience.
From Within (2008)
If you are going to use your horror movie to sermonize, at least remember to scare.
"From Within" follows a small town plagued by an evil curse which drives people to kill themselves, then pass it on to the next victim. This story would be an uphill battle for most film makers, since the on- screen deaths lack any visual punch or visceral horror. The "Evil Dead" remake made us afraid we would soon be carving our own faces off; this movie's "suicide tag" is more risible than the deaths in "The Happening." Killing oneself is not innately scary unless you can make it look like it HURTS. Here the director's lack of budget and lack of imagination make the great evil of the story a repetitive mess.
It turns out that the evil was unleashed by the pastor of a local mega- church, and this is where the movie really goes off the rails. The Christians in this movie are a band of straw men and stereotypes used exclusively for venting the writer's anti-Christian bile, and the film suffers for the sermon. The Witches in the tale are treated with reverence, their persecution a horrible crime highlighting the hypocrisy of the church. Why exactly is prayer nonsense, but a teenager drawing circles on your arms and chest a reliable defense against evil?
The one bright spot is the montage of suicides played over the end credits, which is presented in an eerie and skilled manner. For this viewer it's too little, too late. I cannot imagine any scenario in which I would watch this movie a second time.