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Rating: Opening scene, a medical student practices sutures on a large turkey. Schubert's "Ave Maria" in the background makes it all poetic in its own way.
The student is Mary Mason, a promising almost-surgeon perpetually broke who, to make ends meet, goes to an interview for a job as a stripper in a nightclub. This encounter (and her premature discovery of how rotten and perverse the world of surgeons she hoped to be part of is) leads her to meet the bizarre Beatress, a real-life Betty Boop, and her friend Ruby, who aspires to become slightly less than an inflatable doll. Not to mention the nightclub owner, devoted to torture, who takes advantage of Mary's skills to "fix" the injuries inflicted during his interrogations.
The traumatic event that occurs at a doctors' party, to which she is invited, leads Mary to leave the faculty and fully dedicate herself to the world of underground surgery, helping strange characters express themselves through implants, tongue bifurcations, piercings, and various mutilations. But she also becomes an avenging angel who punishes those who have harmed her.
Mary feels at home with the bizarre and dangerous characters she finds herself among; these "freaks" turn out to be much more protective and reassuring than the respectable bourgeois surgeons she previously dealt with. Those who, in hindsight, were her real tormentors.
The Soska twins deliver a rather feminist and extremely glamorous body horror, in its own way, where blood flows profusely but is never disturbing or gratuitous.
It would be simplistic to define it as a rape and revenge. The revenge is there, but it is not the film's catalyst element, in Mary's case. Yet, it is the element that leads the film to the only possible ending.
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