If you don't like this, we can't be friends.

It's not great by any means, but it's a pretty good movie that didn't leave me filled with regret for investing time in it.

As somebody who had not heard any of this before, it became a curious phenomenon to sit and watch a film and slowly have the realities begin to click into place.

It is an exhilarating, distressing, funny and profound film, with one of the more memorable film scores in years,

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.

The film starts out in a very interesting manner but completely dies through time. The extreme overall creepiness kinds of gets the toll on the spectator and kills the novelty. Without taking into consideration that it really lacks any real action scenes. It becomes then quite repetitive and the end completely reflects that decline I believe.Katharine Isabelle is extremely cold, cynical and quite disturbing. That's a start. Her psychology evolves from being a "normal woman" to a total 'controlled' psycho or even a serial killer to say the least. But I hardly could really differentiate when she was her 'normal' self in the first part of the movie and before that dramatic event for her from these phases of psychopathy. Either her acting was too perfectly suited for the film, which I think it was at certain phases or either it was really uni-dimensional bordering boring at times. At such a point that her true emotions were rarely convincing actually, or if she had any. In other words, she cold as boiling water when she is a lovable princess and still in a similar state when she is in lock-down psychopath mode so, it really does ask the question why did they really try to paint out these two versions about her ? Was just to really build the cheap scenario ? The focus on her life pre- psychopathy is like 3 minutes of the film and there is like literally no build up towards Jekyll.Overall the movie appears totally creepy, disturbing at times no only with the surgical practices that she did but also the certain characters who are literally just weirdos. The combination of 'Mozart'- like music and creepiness tries to pull it almost as an art but not so much.Concentrating on the detective, John Emmet Tracy, his role is actually quite laughable. A true filler for the poor scenario. Casper's invisibility cape was working full time there especially when the end of the film is taken into account. I'm not sure why they actually played this card when they did not expand it to its full powers. The relationship between Katharine Isabelle and John Emmet Tracy is poor, falls completely flat especially when you as a spectator expects a build-up tension, conflict [...] none of it. Which makes me say that he was a complete filler and a cheap excuse to try and diversify the scenario.This film did not really know where it wanted to go. Full vengeance mode, in that case they should have created a better build-up (something which makes me remember Kill Bill, a reference) or a crazy serial killer and in that situation I would have expected a better relationship between the serial killer and authority. And if it was purely about decadence, then the psychology of Katharine Isabelle is somewhat well represented, though, again, you feel that there's always still that rope holding them back and preventing them from really pushing the movie far.Another poor relationship is the one between Katharine Isabelle and Antonio Cupo. You always had the impression that they were to fall in love or have a relationship. Certain scenes make you even believe that she was in love with him, yet, again, all this is really very poorly developed.So my overall and final feeling is American Mary is tame. The relationship between essential characters is left to be desired. Her acting was one-dimensional. But, it had potential which was very badly developed.

While this dark, twisted thriller delivers some great gross-out moments, it ultimately falters under the weight of its own sadism and is seriously let down by sub-par acting and some scattershot plotting. First off, I should say that overall I did enjoy the film. It kind of works as body horror, and the premise of body modification surgery allows for some fairly gruesome and grotesque sequences. However, this concept is never really allowed to cohere into a compelling story. The overall narrative deals with a broke medical student, Mary, who goes into the world of body modification surgery to make some extra money. That in itself is fine, but the way in which she's motivated to begin this work is rather cliché, becomes a half-ignored subplot and is then resolved in a rather mundane, anti-climactic way. The movie seems more interested in showing how weird it can be than really telling a story. Another problem with the film is the acting, because nobody (the lead included) really delivers a good performance. Some things I liked about the film was the rather eclectic soundtrack, which included dubstep, electronic pop and classical music. There was also one scene in particular, which takes place in a bathroom, that really stood out as building effective tension and conveying a sense of claustrophobia and fear. Also, the sequences where Mary does her body modification thing were (mostly) tastefully done. Overall, it's an OK movie but the experience is cheapened by poor acting, a muddled and poorly resolved plot and often taking itself too seriously. For me, a better movie that's similar to this would be EXCISION, although this wasn't bad enough to not necessarily recommend.

Yes, it's Halloween. Apart from fobbing all my past-it's-best-before-date confectionery onto hapless trick or treaters, and jumping out from behind corners to try to give old people heart attacks. I've seen an alleged scary movie. And you're reading the review of it right now. Go you.It's all about this lady, see? She's in training to be a surgeon. After being assaulted at a party by her lecturer, she decides to chop his arms and legs off. Now THAT'S vengeance. Then she quits medical school, and becomes exclusively involved with performing body modifications on the weirdos in our society. Including: A girl who literally wants to become a Living Doll, two sisters who want to exchange their left arms as a sign of their closeness(?) and a dude who fancies a crack at looking like Beelzebub himself... Horns and all. It LOOKS good, but I thinks his dreams of working the till at his local Co-op are well and truly shattered.Will you want to avert your eyes on a few occasions, at the sight of split tongues, severed limbs and more blood gushing out than you'd find in a vampire's larder? Probably. But are there any moments, where you feel the hair prickle on the back of your neck, as something unknown creeps around the darkness, ready to strike...? Nope. It's all rather dull, with our heroine interacting with some not-quite-interesting characters, before getting busy with her operating table for long, drawn out procedures. Not too much of note happens, apart from the repetitive presence of REAL LIFE freaks as extras showing off their mutilations. Nice, guys.As for the ending... It must have been early opening time at the pub that day, as it seems such a arbitrary afterthought that even using the term tacked-on doesn't do it justice. It's all a little lightweight, and will soon be forgotten by the OTHER horror film I plan to watch tonight before beddy byes.OOPS, gotta go there's another knock at my door.. Now where did I put that Xmas 2011 candy... 4/10