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May
Posted On 03/30/2007 17:41:38 by DrBlood
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From the IMDB: "When May was a child, she was a lonely girl with one
lazy eye and without any friend but a weird and ugly doll kept in a
glass case given by her bizarre mother on her birthday. May becomes a
lonely weird young woman, working in an animal hospital and assisting
the veterinary in surgeries and sewing operated animals most of the
time. Her lesbian colleague Polly has a sort of attraction for her.
When the shy May meets the mechanic Adam Stubbs, she loves his hands
and has a crush on him. They date, but the weirdness and bizarre
behavior of May makes Adam move away from her. Alone, May has a brief
affair with Polly, but she feels rejected again when her colleague
meets Ambrosia. When her doll is accidentally broken, the deranged May
decides to build a friend for her, using the best parts her
acquaintances can offer."
I watched this on Zone Horror tonight. I'd seen it before but didn't think much of it to be honest.
But
tonight, because I was sufficiently bored after having to put up with
"Jamie's Chef" as the only vaguely interesting thing on telly due to
"The Brit Awards" (I think that was a typo!), I gave it another go and
tried my hardest to find the merits in this film that everyone else
does.
The
trouble is that this film is really slow getting off the ground and
relies on one character to carry the whole story. Unless you have a
really first class actor to do this, no matter what script you have, it
isn't going to work. In the trade they call such films "vehicles". In
short, this is supposed to be Angela Bettis' "vehicle" but it's one
that doesn't have enough fuel in it to take her anywhere.
Angela
Bettis is quite pretty but too skinny in that Calista Flockhart kind of
way which I don't find all that attractive. She isn't very charismatic
onscreen. Don't get me wrong, she did a good job in the role of May
(which is more than can be said of her performance in the TV remake of
"Carrie") but somehow I just didn't find her totally credible here
either.
The idea that she is slowly going more and more mad
because of her inability to make friends is the one I struggled with
the most. When she's all dressed up (and with certain camera angles),
she is absolutely drop dead gorgeous. Albeit with very thin hair and a
high forehead, pretty girls like her never have such socialisation
problems in real life. I also kept feeling that I'd seen this all done
better before in "Betty Blue", right up to the ending which had a
massive similarity.
The
second problem with this film is that it isn't scary. No suspense is
built up before May starts hacking her acquaintances to death. She just
talks to them normally one second and the next they've got a scalpel in
their neck or whatever.
There should be a shock value to this
but it doesn't happen. It all looks so fake; the blood is fake, the
death scenes occur without any major struggle, screaming or writhing on
the floor in agony. We don't even get to see how she gets the bodies
home. I just didn't feel anything one way or another with the killings.
Most of the "victims" deserved it anyway.
The denouement was
equally lame. May assembles all her favourite pieces of the people she
has killed and stitches them all together. At this point we are
supposed to believe that she has totally lost her mind but the acting
performance is as lacklustre as the rest of the film. There is a
certain gleefulness about her as she finishes her project but that is
the only significant change.
Of course the body lacks a head
and, most importantly, the ability to see which leads to a "surprising"
conclusion. I admit that I didn't see the ending coming (no pun
intended) even if it was purely Oedipal and just what Betty did to
herself in "Betty Blue" too. It was quite nasty but again not very
realistic.
The very last seconds of the film are totally
ridiculous and spoil the whole thing anyway. I think we are supposed to
believe that we are now in May's mind for the final seconds of her life
or something. It just doesn't work. It's almost as stupid as the end of
"Deadly Friend" and that's saying something.
So anyway, to sum
up, it's all supposed to be one of those "degeneration into madness
movies" in this case caused by a female Oedipus complex. It's not much
of a horror film then.
I would only rate it as 3 out of 10. I'm sure a lot of people who overrate independent films think more highly of it.
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