Katharine Isabelle plays Mary Mason, a medical student specialising in surgery. In the opening half hour of the film we see Mary referred to by her teachers has having huge potential as a surgeon - imploring her to not 'fuck up' as she sometimes appears a little distant in her classes. She is an unwealthy student though, and so she applies to be a dancer / masseuse in an underground burlesque club in town to make a bit of extra cash. When the sleazy owner of the bar discovers she is a trainee surgeon though, he asks her if she would like to make $5000 cash by doing a bit of impromptu surgery there and then. She reluctantly agrees, hoping for this to be a one-off. Later though she is approached by people from the local body modification community who heard about her work in the club, they are eager to see her practice her underground skills on them.
After something terrible happens, Mary quite rightly loses her faith in her profession. But her reaction is to go psycho, start dressing in fetish surgery garb (yes - apparently that exists), perform a variety of weird surgical procedures and have little compunction about killing people who wind her up. As so far as the plot goes, there isn't really much of one - except to say that Mary no longer holds much truck with the medical community she once idolised. Instead she throws herself into a dark fantasy world of tongue-splitting and limb re-attachments in which she is idolised by an on-line community obsessed by barely-legal surgical procedures.
The film then becomes a revenge fantasy much in the same mould as Django Unchained. The difference being that American Mary is much less fun than the Tarantino film, dwells for quite a long time on the actual surgical procedures and has a central character who performs a reality-defying personality flip in which she becomes a crazed surgical dominatrix overnight. The plot gets very screwy in the final act (something about the sleazy club owner fantasising over Mary, so she has to frighten the dancer who was giving him a blow-job. For some reason. Something like that?) and there is at least one scene of terrible acting. In short, with all that blood and darkness I can see why many horror fans could get a lot of enjoyment from American Mary, but there are too many downsides for me to make it any more than an average-to-meh film. IMDB's current rating of 6.1 is a little too high in my opinion - but if you're into fetish surgery this is probably a must-see!
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