AMERICAN MARY
D+
Canada (100 mi) 2012 d: Jen and
Sylvia Soska Official site
Doesn’t everybody just love a good horror movie? Well,
that’s not exactly what this is, as instead it’s kind of a tongue-in-cheek stab
at torture porn, a subgenre of one of the most hideously gruesome forms of
sadistic horror, and one that seems to have little if any redeeming value.
Apparently some find this sort of thing entertaining, however, as evidenced by
Eli Roth’s two HOSTEL (2005, 2007) movies, the first grossing ten times the
initial budget, and the highly profitable SAW (2004) franchise, where the
original was made for $1.2 million but grossed over $100 million dollars
worldwide, churning out nearly one movie a year ever since, where the latest,
SAW VII (2010), is a 3D effort. While torture porn appeals to the basest
form of crude and grotesque behavior, featuring explicit scenes of sadistic
torture, dismemberment, and mutilation, where the gory action sequences are
presented as freak-show sensationalism, the effects of watching this stuff is
largely unknown, though one would think the mentally unstable should stay away.
Some films, like Rob Zombie’s THE DEVIL’S REJECTS (2005), initially thrown into
the mix, probably don’t belong, as they pay homage to earlier 70’s era
drive-in, grindhouse B-movies, representative of the golden age of
exploitation, schlock films filled with buckets of blood and gore, where the
melodramatic hysteria is met with equally over-the-top visualizations, all made
for next to nothing, usually for satiric effect. The Kuchar Brothers, for
instance, were masters of the low budget aesthetic, working alongside 60’s
underground legends Andy Warhol and Kenneth Anger, which eventually spawned
John Waters and his outsiderist cult films of the 70’s, a director who
expressed an equal amount of joy and influence from highbrow “art” films and
sleazy exploitation films. But the father of modern horror pictures is
Dario Argento, who interestingly began his career as a screenwriter teamed up
with Bernardo Bertolucci and Sergio Leone for the spaghetti western ONCE UPON A
TIME IN THE WEST (1968) before venturing out on his own, where his claim to
fame is giallo films combining high quality, art film production values with
nudity, gore, and shocking horror, not the least of which might feature throat
slashings or decapitations along with unusually stylish camerawork. It’s
the unflinching content of high production slasher or splatter films that
establishes a connection to torture porn, where only snuff films remain an
untapped exploitive resource.
Unbelievably, even a snuff film was presented for the first
time at the Cannes Film festival this year, according to Scott Roxborough and
Patrick Brzeski from The Hollywood
Reporter (Cannes:
Ultra-Violence Peppers Competition Selection - The ...).
Pushing the envelope furthest is Atrocity Exhibition, showing in the
Short Film corner, which its director Ebadur Rahman has described as “Cannes’
first snuff film.” Says Rahman: “Cannes has been showing fake ‘extreme content’
for ages: Any film by Tarantino, Takeshi Miike, or Kim Ki Duk is at least as
violent as mine. What’s different about Atrocity
Exhibition is, I didn’t fake it.” Asked whether viewers might have to look
away during screenings, Rahman says: “I would hope so.”
Not only has the SAW franchise legitimized torture porn,
providing a large audience and a new avenue into horror films, always a
lucrative movie business, but South Korean filmmakers Park Chan-wook’s
OLD BOY (2003) winning the Jury Prize at Cannes (a Tarantino favorite) and Kim
Ki-duk’s Pieta
(2012) winning the Best Film at the 2012 Venice Film Festival, all but give
the genre the artistic seal of approval. Not so fast, some may scream, as
some parted company with Park Chan-wook’s next offering, SYMPATHY FOR LADY
VENGEANCE (2005), where Cinema Scope
and freelance writer Michael Sicinski writes an open letter of protest to New York Times critic Manohla Dargis in
condemnation of the film (see reviews dated 9/15, 2005 Toronto International Film
Festival), calling it “a repugnant piece of shit.” This kind of
outrage is a natural extension of the product, as it’s meant to be revolting,
just as Mary Harron’s over-the-top use of surreal horror in American
Psycho (2000), something this slightly resembles, is meant to be
outrageous, which brings us to Canada’s the Soska sisters, Sylvia and Jen,
interviewed here by The Guardian’s
Steve Rose (Guardian:
Soska Sisters):
Horror was a natural direction for
the Soskas. As kids, they'd lurk in the horror section of the video store
looking at the backs of the boxes, they say. "Mom eventually caved in and
let us watch Poltergeist when we were
10," says Sylvia. "We were like, 'We can handle it mom.' Then bedtime
came and we were scared… fucking… shitless. And my mother did something that
would forever change the way we look at horror movies. She sat Jen and me down
and explained what we had actually seen. She explained the director, the
actors, the prosthetics, the sets, everything. And she told us how these were
very talented artists who collaborated with the intention of scaring the
audience. We were like, 'Wait a minute. It can be your job to scare people for
a living?'"
The eventual film-making course
didn't go well, though. They became so disillusioned that their graduation
project was a fake trailer, partly inspired by Tarantino and Rodriguez's Grindhouse and partly by the film
school's list of things not to put in a graduation movie. "Necrophilia,
bestiality, vomiting… we put in everything we could," says Jen. "Half
the audience walked out, and the other half was laughing so hard you couldn't
hear the intentionally disgusting language."
Horror tends to be an exclusively all-male domain, where
women are used as fetishistic objects to scare out of their wits, from Fay Wray
in KING KONG (1933) to Jamie Lee Curtis in HALLOWEEN (1978), where scantily
clad girls are seen staying in a secluded cabin in the woods from I SPIT ON
YOUR GRAVE (1978) to THE CABIN IN THE WOODS (2011), but there are notable
exceptions, such as Takashi Miike’s AUDITION (1999) where the roles are
reversed. AMERICAN MARY will not be for everyone, as it’s graphically
disturbing throughout, but it is a horror film with a uniquely female
perspective. Much like Tarantino, the Soska sisters not only have an
admiration for the horror genre, but a certain reverence for its form, where
the film is basically a series of horror set pieces filled with twisted and
strangely unlikable characters. Seen almost entirely through the
impressionable eyes of Katharine Isabelle as Mary (talk about a working
actress, IMDb lists 10 movies made after this one with another four either
filming or in post production), an attractive young medical student who is
having trouble making ends meet, painting a much rosier picture to her
Hungarian grandmother on the phone, but despite getting harassed by an
over-controlling professor, even though she’s the best and most promising
student in class, she needs to make money fast. So she answers an ad for
what she thinks is a dancer at a strip club, but due to her meticulously
detailed resumé that indicates she’s in medical school, the sleazy owner Billy
(Antonio Cupo) pays $5000 cash up front and sucks her into an under-the-table,
highly specialized offer of stitching up mutilated bodies that have been
pulverized and left for dead from vicious beatings. Afterwards, she
immediately starts receiving calls from the Diane Arbus world of the bizarre
requesting “extreme body modification.” While Mary is a professed innocent to
this looming underworld of desired body disfigurement and mutilation, where
despite the unpleasantness associated with the often gruesome task, the
lucrative offers are extremely generous, making it difficult to turn down.
The film’s saving grace is the exaggerated tone throughout,
something of a satirical spoof, where Mary has an absurdly comic dialogue with
many of her patients, some of whom feel more like a childlike collection of
dolls or specimens than human beings, where it’s as if her subconscious has a
voice through her exotic bodywork, giving her a titillating sense of
empowerment. Dressed in skimpy outfits, stalkings and stilleto’s, she’s
always dressed for the male idealization, as if Xena the Warrior Princess has suddenly been transformed into
someone’s idea of a male sexual fantasy, where working out of her own
apartment, she becomes an underground cult sensation, dropping out of medical
school and maintaining a thriving practice, where she quickly picks up the
affectionate online nickname “Bloody Mary.” The Soska sisters themselves
appear onscreen as a pair of batshit crazy sisters that surgically wish to
exchange arms with one another, so there are obviously other issues at play
here, all of them disturbing, including an underlying thread throughout of
nonchalant sadism, becoming an anatomically precise horror show of
disfigurement. Delving into SAW territory, Mary even holds her professor
captive (as it was after all he who crossed the line), as she experiments with
particularly difficult procedures on him just for practice, leaving him
something of a whimpering human stump. Where the film does tread new
ground, expressed with demented relish, is portraying a highly distinctive,
feminist sense of controlling one’s own body image while also adding, just for
good measure, a righteous sense of feminist anger and revenge, going where no
one has gone before, so to speak, as it has the desired effect the sisters are
looking for, where much of what we see is pretty disgusting. The heavily
artistic production design might actually be called outlaw biker fantasy porn,
as biker guys get off on drinking heavily, naked girls, and beating the crap
out of people, and here they get to watch their fantasy sweetheart stitch their
mangled victims back together again, where every last detail is explicitly prohibited
outlaw behavior. While the underlying comic element may be subversive,
there were no laughs heard in the theater, as the experience is meant to be
nauseating and revolting. This may be highly appealing for deviants of
all kinds, or people who enjoy watching sadistic behavior for their theatrical
entertainment, but there remains an open question whether this graphically
grotesque material adds anything significant to the world of cinema.
