us off immediately to a latent perversity of character. Subject to verbal abuse from her prick of a professor, Dr. Grant (David Lovgren), despite being in the vanguard of her class, she leans on her nana from Budapest for moral support but refuses the fi- nancial assistance she desper- ately needs to continue her studies. To find this, she audi- tions for a stripping position at the Bourbon A Go Go nightclub, where her overqualifications as an aspiring surgeon amuse her prospective boss, Billy Barker (Antonio Cupo), until an emer- gency comes through the back door, prompting his urgent $5,000 offer to patch-up a butch- ered, nearly-dead employee. Subsequently, she is approached by Beatress Johnson (Tristan Risk)—a cosmetically modified Betty Boop lookalike with a But- terfly McQueen voice—to take on other illegal work. One such op- portunity involves “desexualizing” a large-breasted, anime-faced
blonde named Ruby Realgirl (Paula Lindberg) by turning her into the physical approximation of a Barbie doll, removing her nipples and sealing her vagina. Mary’s amateur success coin- cides with an an invitation from Grant’s superior Dr. Walsh (Clay St. Thomas) to attend a sur- geon’s party, which culminates in camcorded date rape for herself and other unconscious women. The incident kills her professional dreams, not to mention her pro- fessional respect, and pushes her into a lucrative, meteoric rise as the go-to person for outlaw sur- gical procedures that more re- sponsible hands would not touch. She also uses the skills she learns on the job to avenge herself against Grant, while Billy, hopelessly in love with the in- creasingly dehumanized Mary, takes care of Walsh. The storytelling strains cred- ibility at times, but it’s doubtful that realism was ever the Soskas’ goal with this piece. If DEAD
HOOKER IN A TRUNK is a Ramones lyric of a movie, AMERICAN MARY is a gritty “Girl’s Own Story” cautionary tale staged amid the uber-gloss trappings of a De Palma-lucid thriller. It advances their craft in ways other than the superficial; it probes new depths of charac- ter shadings and sympathies, and finds their sense of humor acquir- ing greater sophistication. One of the most poignant characters, ironically, is the Hungarian nana, whom we never see outside Mary’s iPhone display, while a recurring tickle comes from the marimba ringtone on that same device, whose boppy recurring melody is frequently summoned to undercut the severity of a pre- ceding scene—not unlike the use of the “American Bandstand Theme” in John Carpenter’s ES- CAPE FROM NEW YORK. By the same token, these foregrounded non-human elements mark the only real touchstones in Mary’s increasingly isolated life, which
Katharine Isabelle goes to work on David Lovgren in AMERICAN MARY.
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