American Mary

Katharine Isabelle

Jen and Sylvia Soska's American Mary is a superior exploitation film from the Canadian duo that was released in 2012. It is a body horror flick, laced with black humor, in which a medical student named Mary Mason (Katharine Isabelle) resorts to performing body modification surgeries in order to pay off her student loans. This plunges her into a subculture that, at first, nauseates her, but by film's end she has joined the ranks. Towards the end of the film, she rejects a potential customer as too "vanilla."

Mary stumbles upon her calling when she applies for a job at a strip club. The drunken manager of the club (Antonio Cupo) and his henchman (Twan Holliday) end up helping her with the more grisly aspects of her craft. Her clients range from a stripper who wants to look like Betty Boop to a gal who wants to resemble a human doll. The Soska twins treat their menagerie of supporting characters not as freaks but as humans with ridiculous foibles and fetishes like the rest of us. The characterizations and performances are a cut above most exploitation films of this level. Even the thug gets a winning monologue which Mr. Holliday nails. The visuals are restrained and attractive for a film featuring multiple amputations. The Soska sisters appear in the film as does their mother and father. Apparently, it was all hands on deck. 

The Soska twins were a little too early to get the praise that such recent feminist body horror films like Titane and The Substance have garnered. In my burg of Portland, body modification raises nary an eyebrow these days. Still, the sisters have soldiered on in their beloved genre and I urge horror mavens to visit their website. American Mary is streaming on Tubi.