I can eat a cheeseburger and watch people get slashed by axes and chainsaws all night, but when things get medical, with scalpels slicing carefully into flesh and deliberate organ removal, that’s when even a creep like me might get the ooks.
And I got a few satisfying ooks out of this twisted little story of what happens when one broke med school hopeful (Ginger Snaps scream queen Kathrine Isabelle, all grown up and doing fine with a Bette Page hairstyle) gets desperate and becomes a weird underworld doctor. She starts out performing an impromptu live-saver operation on the ghastly case of a drug user who looks like he tried to unzip himself out of his own skin. From there she gets sucked into the subculture of body modification freaks, who want to pay her big money for some seriously bizarre work.
When she gets drugged and raped, she gets revenge in the best way she knows, which is to kidnap the guy and use him as her living, breathing, bleeding, screaming test subject to further her knowledge of exactly what the human body can take. It gets nasty, but doesn’t forget to be clever, as well (I’m calling this one a black comedy more than anything else). I enjoyed it. It’s happily ugly, isn’t afraid of an occasional slow moment, is beautifully shot and seems to have gotten some of its costumes from Victoria’s Secret.
The trend these days in exploitation movies is lots of independent bad girls. Fine with me. Scary Dr. Mary is one of the baddest. Written and directed by sisters Jen and Sylvia Soska, who also take acting parts as twin sister headcases who want to submit to Mary’s knife.