A brief about me: Nothing is sacred. I regularly get challenged with the classic lines: "Oh, have you seen ____?" If I have, I say yes. If I haven't, I usually track is down and form my own opinion. I also dig through Netflix and Hulu for fresh meat, even if a lot of it is painful, badly made crap. But you don't find the little gems unless you do that. So I'll get this out of the way now.
Yes, I have seen:
Poughkeepsie Tapes
A Serbian Film
Martyrs
Inside
Oldboy
Cannibal (fill in the blank)
And a bunch of others that send most casual horror fans running for the door. It's hard to keep track sometimes, but those are the ones that usually come up. I own one of those above films. I refuse to see a different one of them ever again. I won't tell you which, because I won't influence anyone's choice to watch any of them. Go ahead, love 'em. Someone should.
American Mary
An interesting, if convoluted ride. One wonders if there's a backstory to the final product, because a few characters that aren't important get more time than an important one. Decently gory, but not as much medical gore as there could be. The Saw series has much more, and a worthy warning here of a rape scene. AT least it's not completely exploitative.
But it's revenged. There's something about this movie that bothers me, and it may be down to execution (pun aside). The use of police to step in and sniff around for the source of the blood loss is sometimes ignored, but not here, and maybe that's the problem-- this seems a peculiar cross between American Psycho and I Spit On Your Grave. But then the police procedural trope keeps butting in and throwing off the progress of the story, rather than advancing it, and Mary makes a few stupid choices that could've kept her out of trouble longer. You empathize with her, there are efforts to make the audience understand her choices, but in the end it's a decent time killer that was stuck between sending a message and delivering the gore.
Would I watch this again? Yes.
Would I own it? No.
No comments:
Post a Comment