Up All Night with American Mary

Normally if I get home late, I sleep the moment I hit the sofa - or bed if I'm lucky - after my late night rum and coke under the stars. I am by inclination both a night owl and a morning lark, a lifestyle that it is always going to very tricksy to maintain, and a normally gruelling work schedule tends to put me into the lark category.

Because only larks have to get up at 530 am to cycle to work in a blue collar dump where hopes and dreams are slowly composted to nothing.

However, I'm on leave at the moment, and found myself last night as insomniac as I used to be when I was 20. I also had two new, well second hand actually, DVDs to watch from the market and decided to do some double ended candle burning to watch them.

"The Wicker Tree" came first, Robin Hardy's sort of follow up to the all time classic "The Wicker Man". I'm sure I've raved about that film often enough on here so I shan't go on about it, suffice to say that it must be rolling in its reputed M3 motorway foundation grave at how bad "The Wicker Tree" is.

Britannia Nicol tried to avoid "doing a Woodward"

Trashy chastity ringed country singer and boyfriend head to Scotland to convert some Pagans, and get caught up in Mayday rituals, with added unfunny comedy tone and breasts from someone who was in Foyle's war and in no way has Willow Magregor's allure. That's it. The film is dreadful, and if it does anything, it shows that the genius of "The Wicker Man" was down to Antony Shaffer's screenplay.

Summer is most definitely not "I-cumin-in"

That over and done with, I was still as awake as a moth on speed, so it was time to deploy "American Mary" on my eyes. As unwatchable at times as "The Wicker Tree", but for entirely different reasons, this film stars Katherine Isabelle, the wonderfully sneery-faced beauty of "Ginger Snaps" fame as a drug rape by her teachers leads her to abandon her medical studies for the world of aesthetic surgical body modification.

The Soska Sister's second film, after "Dead Hooker in a Trunk", the film establishes their brilliance as visualists and conceptualists of a new Cronenbergian Candadian horror, while showing that directing actors, and acting themselves, is not their strong point.

The Soska Sisters need some mods done

With its cast of Burlesque performers and tongue split Vancouver scenesters, the film has a rough and "out-there" tone balanced by the stylish corsets and medical fetish wear of Isabelle as the movie's protagonist. Indeed the movie's most alluring scene, that of Isabelle operating on the twins in black and red scrubs, is incredibly reminiscent of Cronenberg's Dead Ringers with the surgical near-performance art of Jeremy irons as the identical twin surgeons who lose their minds over a woman.

Surgery with style

The film, being what it is, suffers from bouts of awful acting and falls away badly towards its incredibly rushed ending. But the imagination and style behind it is so striking, it inspires you to search the depths of your own mind to see if you can think of anything conceptually better.

And so far, I haven't.

Copyright Bloody Mulberry 16.09.14