| May Released: 2002 MPAA Rating: R Genre: Psycho-Killer Nuts and Bolts: Parents always tell us that we should go out and try to make some friends. And that is EXACTLY what May Canady plans to do. Summary: We are first introduced to our title character May Canady at a very young age. Now May probably wouldn't be all that different from your typical blonde haired kindergartener, but for the fact that she suffers from Amblyopia (Lazy Eye). Her mother is not very sympathetic either. She encourages May to cover her face when in the presence of others. For her birthday, May's mother gives her an ornate yet fairly creepy looking porcelain doll named Suzie. Now Suzie is the sort of toy that modern collectors would refer to as MIB (Mint In Box). She is encased in a wooden coffin box with glass panels on all sides. This is cool for most action figure collectors, but for a six-year-old girl this blows chunks! Who the fuck wants a doll that they can't play with? Personally, I don't trust any toy that I can't undress and scrutinize for anatomical correctness. May's mom even gives her crap for tearing open the wrapping paper! What a bitch. Anyway, this little preamble goes a long way towards setting the stage for what will be a life of isolation and loneliness. So now we flash forward and find May (Angela Bettis) as a young adult working as an assistant at the Sarkizan Vetinary Hospital in California. May is something of a freak. A shy little door mouse, she barely speaks above a whisper and rarely in complete sentences. To counter-balance May's introverted personality is her co-worker Polly (Anna Faris). Polly is equally weird, but in that fun extroverted sort of a way. She's attractive, outspoken, quirky and a lesbian. Now May does her best to correct her sight problems. She starts off by wearing these over-sized sunglasses, which makes her look like one of the visitors from the V mini-series. But she eventually chucks the shades in favor of a special contact lens to cover up her funky eye. May always finds herself fascinated by little physical details. In particular, she notes how Polly has an attractively slender neck. After work, May finds a guy that she really digs, Adam Stubbs (Jeremy Sisto). She watches him as he works at Paul's Auto-Body shop taking note of his supposedly 'perfect' hands. She innocently follows Adam around and even begins taking her lunch break in the same coffee shop that he does. While sitting at another table, May notices that Adam falls asleep while reading a book about Dario Argento. His hand is propped upright and May saunters over and begins rubbing her face against it. She is really obsessed with this dude's hands! Adam naturally wakes up from the contact and they officially meet for the first time. The exchange between the two is a fairly uncomfortable one, but they meet up again later at the auto-body shop. May meets up with Adam again later and they enjoy lunch in the park. May comments in her own mousy way about how weird she is. But Adam remarks that he "likes weird". He invites May to tell him about the most gruesome thing she had ever seen working at the animal hospital. May always expresses a quaint smirk of satisfaction whenever the subject of violence is broached. Adam either isn't aware of this fact, or he simply doesn't care (There's also a bit with some blind kids fucking off in the background. This isn't important right now, but we'll revisit it later on in the movie). Adam invites May back to his apartment. We find out that Adam is a little bit of a freak himself, but not quite in that serial killer/sexual predator sort of a way. His room is decorated with various noir posters and he keeps a collapsible knife on his mantle. Adam and May begin getting intimate and it turns out to be a rather embarrassing moment for the poor girl. She's never had a boyfriend before and doesn't really understand the intricacies of physical romance. Adam backs off from her, inquiring, "Who taught you how to kiss?" May returns to her home mortified. Enraged, she slaps the side of the Suzie box creating a small crack in the glass pane. Now May is coming to the most fragile point in her life because she fears rejection. But to make things even more bizarre, she now has to fend off the advances of co-worker Polly. Did I mention that Polly is a lesbian? Polly forces May to dance with her in the break room of the Animal Hospital. She also asks if May can take care of her cat for her since her landlady won't allow her to keep pets. Unwilling to face rejection, May agrees to take care of the little furball. After the uncomfortable exchange with Polly, May decides to go hang out in front of Adam's house. She just stands there like a zombie in front of his door for two hours. She doesn't knock or anything, she just waits for him to come out. Adam eventually emerges and May's presence scares the hell out of him. He makes some mention of a student film he had just completed, and May offers to make him Macaroni and Cheese if he'll let her see it. So Adam brings his film over to May's place and they eat dinner. Afterwards, they sit on the couch and watch an amateur film called Jack and Jill. Set to the tune of Hanky Panky, Jack and Jill is basically a video about a couple having a picnic. Halfway through lunch however, they each turn into ravenous cannibals and begin ripping and tearing at each other's skin. May is REALLY turned on by this and uses the movie as an excuse to get closer to Adam. Adam still doesn't realize that May is a freak. They eventually move on to the bedroom where they begin groping around with one another. May bites Adam's lip hard enough to cause it to bleed. Repulsed, Adam backs away from her. May doesn't understand his reaction, since she was just trying to imitate the couple from Adam's film. That mysterious ephemeral 'clue' that had avoided Adam for so long has finally set in. May is a nut-burger. He breaks off the relationship and leaves her house. A few nights later, May goes over to Adam's house. Despite the fact that she totally repulses him, she is still a lost little girl in love. But upon stepping up to the front door, she overhears Adam and his friends talking shit about her. At one point, Adam outright says that May is a lunatic. Bursting into tears, May leaves the front step before anyone even realizes that she was there. Having nowhere else to turn, May seeks solace in the arms of Polly. Polly takes this opportunity to explore her inner freak and the two engage upon a rather evocative lesbian scene. May is not inherently homosexual, but she is so desperate for approval that she finds herself falling for Polly as well. During the lovemaking scene, May notices that Polly has this really hideous mole on her index finger. However, she makes no comment on it at this time. The following day, May decides to get a job at a daycare center specializing in disabled kids. She specifically requests to work with the group that she had seen a few days earlier in the park. One of the children that she meets is a girl named Petey. Even though Petey is blind, she is hard at work at the kiln making a clay ashtray. Why do kids always make clay ashtrays? What's the challenge in that? I don't care if you are blind or not, a clay ashtray is just a sign of a lazy sculptor. If this brat really wants to impress me, she should make a clay effigy of Pinhead or Freddy Krueger. Hell, at least THAT'S something you can sell on ebay. Nobody is going to shill a bid for a clay fucking ashtray. This ashtray shit is for the birds. Anyway, Petey makes the stupid thing and even carves May's name into the bottom of it. Loser. Shortly after, May has a chance encounter with Adam at the Laundromat. Upon noticing May, Adam claims that the only available washing machine is broken, and he will have to take his clothes to a different one. As Adam leaves, May inspects the so-called broken machine and finds that it is operating perfectly. Adam just wanted to avoid any physical contact with the Lazy-eyed freak. So once again, the distraught May seeks to drown her romantic sorrows in the soft lesbian arms of her side-dish lover Polly. But when she arrives at Polly's house, she finds that there is another woman there named Ambrosia. Polly tries to play it cool with May and even invites her in for a threesome. But May backs down. BITCH! Why didn't you take up Polly's offer? Horror fans would have paid 100% above ticket price to see a three-way with Anna Faris! This is the kind of kinky high-octane shit that would make the carpet-crunching scene from Mulholland Drive look like an episode of Charlie Brown. Anyway, May races back home repulsed by the fact that she has been betrayed by both her ex-boyfriend and her ex-girlfriend. On top of that, she has to deal with Polly's annoying fucking cat. May's sanity recedes like the tide and with a burst of rage, she hurls Petey's stupid fucking ashtray at the cat killing it. Now this is what movie moguls would probably call a cathartic moment for the May character. Not only does she express zero remorse over killing the animal, but also a small side of her even seems to enjoy it. She carries the dead cat around with her occasionally spraying it down with Lysol. The following day, May decides to make a concerted effort to bond with the blind kids at the daycare center. She brings her encased doll Suzie with her. Now this is an exorcise in futility if ever I've seen one. May refuses to take the doll out of its case, because it's 'special'. So these blind kids have to feel around the glass box trying to imagine what may be inside. This is just cruel. And the kids aren't having it. You can't tease a child with some mysterious box and not expect them to pursue their curiosities. So the blind kids, desperate to find what is inside the box begin pawing at it until the box falls onto the ground shattering. Now since these kids are blind, they have no idea that there is now glass all over the floor. They begin crawling through the broken glass tearing their legs to ribbons in an effort to get to this toy. Most of them begin convulsing in pain and rolling around (Which only exacerbates the situation). Ultimately however, little Suzie is torn to shreds by the mob of attention-starved blood bags. Although it is never shown, I think it is safe to assume that May gets fired from the Daycare center. This event is the last straw for poor May. Some time later, she is sitting on a bench when some weird punk rocker named Blank attempts to befriend her. May is willing to take any kind word she can get, even if it DOES come from the president of the Johnny Rotten fan club. She takes Blank back to her house where the punker begin putting the moves on May. May is impressed by his tattoos and his well-defined biceps. Blank decrees that he is overheated and requires massive amounts of ice cubes to cool his nipples down. May tries to stop him from opening the freezer door but she is not fast enough. Blank opens the door and finds the frozen remains of Polly's cat wrapped in Saran Wrap. Naturally, Blank decides that he doesn't want to be May's friend anymore. The poor girl simply can't wrap her medulla around the idea that freezing cats is BAD! She picks up a pair of sewing scissors and drives them into Blank's head killing him. So now May has graduated from kitty killer to punker perforator. The following day, Adam approaches May who is sitting in the park. He tries to apologize to her for their uncomfortable relationship, but May keeps acting like a whack-a-loon and begins obsessing about Adam's hands. Adam rolls his eyes and realizes this is a fruitless effort. Hey, you can't fault the guy for trying right? Once again, the dejected May seeks solace in the arms of Polly. But Polly is still mucking about with Ambrosia. May comments on Ambrosia's shapely legs, but Ambrosia just thinks she's a freak. Once again, May leaves feeling like a loser. From here on out, things pretty much go full-tilt, so consider this your spoiler warning for the climax of the movie. It's Halloween night, and May fashions her own costume. She steals a bunch of surgical equipment from the animal hospital and goes to Polly's house. Polly and she become slightly amorous, but thanks to a couple of scalpels (Or scoopels), May liberates Polly of that beautiful neck she adored so much. Ambrosia returns to the house and May has her way with her as well. She drives the scalpels into the sides of Ambrosia's head letting all the air out. She then gets to work acquiring Ambrosia's highly coveted legs. Leaving Polly's house, she drags the severed limbs in a blood smeared ice cooler down the street. She stops in at Adam's house whose entertaining a young ho dressed up as a cat. (Bad move ho! May doesn't have a good relationship with cats!) She stabs the ho in the throat with a scalpel and then stabs Adam through the stomach. She takes them home and begins sewing various body parts to one another. She creates her own headpiece from scraps of linen and broken pieces of her doll Suzie. But the big problem comes when May realizes that her new Frankenstein toy cannot 'see' her. This is the final straw for the poor girl. She gouges out her own deformed eye and then places it onto the patchwork body in the hopes that it will be able to look upon her with new vision and acceptance. May, of course bleeds to death from the wounds just as the quilt-person's arm rises to comfort her. Acting/Dialogue: Angela Bettis fucking rocks! This role must have presented quite a challenge for her. This is the sort of character that could too easily be turned into a caricature if not handled by the right actress. But Angela will blow you away with her immense talent. She easily keeps you riveted to the screen and she'll take every vein and artery leading into your heart and pull and tug on them until they burst free from their housings spraying blood and gore all across your stomach. Angela also knows when its time to play it safe. She's very careful not to overact any particular segment, but at the same time she doesn't downplay May's shyness to the point that you become bored with her. I really want to see this chick do some more stuff. Anna Faris is decent enough as well. Although she's not as memorable as Angela Bettis, her perky presence and cute laugh will keep you smiling the whole time. My only criticism against Ms Faris is that her character doesn't really seem all that different from the Cindy Campbell character from Scary Movie. Many of Polly's gestures and facial expressions are similar to Cindy's. Jeremy Sisto plays a goon in this movie. In fact, Adam Stubbs could be the twin brother of Sisto's character Vassago from Hideaway. To be honest, poor May probably would have had a better chance with Vassago than she did with Adam. Jeremy's got a lot of talent, but only a little of it seems to come through in the character of Adam. His best work here is done through reaction shots. Gore: The gore is used sparingly, but when it DOES get used, it's by the bloody chunk baby! My personal favorite is Adam's student film featuring two picnickers gnawing on one another. They begin eating at each other's fingers, thighs, breasts and other interesting biological regions. The most disturbing scene in the movie is watching the little blind kids crawl across a floor of broken glass. It's rare to see brutality of this nature on film, but director Lucky McKee doesn't hold back. Then of course, there are the amputations. These aren't graphically illustrated to us, but occasionally we'll find a spare leg or something lying around. Finally, we have the intense visage of May stabbing at her eye with a pair of scissors. Again, this isn't a particularly graphic scene, but the overwhelming pain that such an action suggests is just as gruesome as anything Tom Savini could have cooked up. There's also this really cool scene that occurs when May kills Ambrosia. Ambrosia is in the midst of drinking milk out of the carton when May kills her. The milk carton falls and her blood runs down inter-mingling with the milk on the floor. Very pretty. Guilty Pleasures: There's no nudity but the Lesbian love scene is enough to give you half a stock. For the ladies, there's a quick scene of Jeremy Sisto pulling his shirt off. I'm still bitter that we never got that 3-way tango that Polly proposed. The Good: Holy shit. This is one FUCKED UP picture guys! May incorporates a blend of several different cinematic staples including Carrie, Taxi-Driver and Frankenstein. But unlike the previous films, the character of May is never presented to us as the antagonist. In fact, even as she is driving two scalpel's into little miss slut-bag's head, we find ourselves wanting to stretch our hands out to May, pleading with her to let us help with the evisceration. And this sort of viewer response is not exclusive to slut-bag only. No matter how extreme May becomes, we never feel as if she is a villain. The soul of May Canady is perfectly reflected in the eyes of her best friend Suzie. Like May, Suzie is a delicate and unique figure forever trapped in a transparent world, unable to make any real contact with the environment outside. Like Suzie, May's life is one of suffocating isolation. She doesn't ask a lot from her life. She merely wants a companion with whom she can share her life. May's slow downward spiral into madness is likewise reflected by the status of the doll-case at any one time. After her initial embarrassment with Adam, May slams her hand against the doll-case putting a crack in the glass. At every juncture where May's psyche deteriorates, the crack on the glass widens and becomes more pronounced. The incident at the daycare center is the keystroke moment for both May and Suzie as they find themselves irrevocably shattered. May's character is shattered emotionally, while Suzie is shattered physically. Now the story of May is much more than simply finding a boyfriend. She is quite literally trying to create a life; a life for herself to be exact. She is desperate to break free of the restricting confines represented by the doll-case metaphor. May finds herself taking bits and pieces from every person she meets, and I'm not necessarily talking about their body parts. For one example: May is not a smoker. But Adam introduces her to the splendors of whooping cough by way of a pack of Bilson 100s. Even after Adam and she break up, she continues to smoke his cigarettes. More specifically, she smokes a cigarette every time a perceived life-change is about to overcome her. She also becomes seduced by Adam's passion for horror films. In a shining example of life imitating art, she attempts to pantomime scenes from Adam's student movie in her bedroom. Ultimately, she becomes confused when Adam rejects her seemingly obvious devotion. The same dynamic can be seen with her relationship to Polly. As noted earlier, May is not by nature a homosexual. But she feels a kinship with Polly and as such wants to take from a small portion of what makes up Polly's overall personality. It took me a little while before I figured out how Polly fit into this whole scheme. At first, I thought that she was merely put there as a contrast to May. But I think her presence goes a little deeper than that. In fact, to say that Polly is May's opposite would be a gross error. Polly is who May WOULD have been had her mother not been such a materialistic cow-whore. This becomes evident in the third act when May asks Polly about having her mole removed. Polly replies by saying, "My mother always said that it's our imperfections that make us beautiful". Now this is the exact opposite of the sort of treatment May routinely received from her own mother. May's mum was ashamed of her daughter's deformity and reacted to it as if it were more of a hardship for her than it was for her daughter. Mom constantly taught May that she must lock up her insecurities and hide from the true world. This point is made all the more clear when she gives May an encased doll. The fact that she won't let little May play with it suggests that Mom feels the doll is too good for her daughter. Polly on the other hand, appears to have grown up in an open and loving environment free of all inhibitions. I think this is why May was so receptive to Polly's homosexual advances. May saw not only the person she wanted to be, but also the person she SHOULD have been. This movie is a sad tale of tragedy and desire. Director Lucky McKee cuts to the heart of May's character and we watch in haunted melancholy as this innocent girl's life descends into a whirlpool of blood, misery and scoopels. The Bad: These depressing ass flicks piss me off! How dare they try to force me to betray my rough macho exterior by having me cry like a little bitch with a skinned knee! I'm a manly man dammit! I never get sentimental! I haven't balled this much from a movie since Michael shot Fredo. Okay…that's a lie. I never cried when Michael shot Fredo. Fredo was a punk. He deserved it. But I still stand by my point! Quit trying to turn the Headhunter from a rugged steely-eyed square-jawed, bare-chested tough guy into a sensitive, teddy bear hugging, weeping willow pansy boy! In all seriousness, if dour movies are not your thing, then you probably won't enjoy May very much. This film is about as maudlin as you can get, and if your emotional fortitude isn't up to snuff, then you best stay clear. Now those of you who frequently dine on movies such as Schindler's List or Requiem For A Dream will probably feel the exact opposite of what I'm now saying. But regardless of the film's quality, some things need to be said. If this sort of downbeat thriller isn't your cup or cocoa, then don't watch it. My only real complaint against May comes from the side of the editors. I think there are a few scenes peppered about here and there that really don't contribute a whole helluva lot and probably would have been better left collecting in a pile on the cutting room floor. The first example that pops into my brain is a rather silly moment that occurs in the Laundromat. May turns and bends over to pick up a basketful of clothes and Adam peers over her inspecting her pink panties, which are cropping up over her waistline. This scene is pointless and should have been nixed. The movie likely could have done without a few of the vet scenes as well. The scene with the guy's three-legged dog is overlong and comes off as nothing more than a forced gag. It's still kind of funny all things considered, but I think it only serves to pull the audience out of the movie. The same applies to the vet Doctor Sarkizan. Sarkizan constantly mis-pronounces things and Polly runs herself ragged trying to translate his gibberish. Example: He pronounces scalpel as scoopel and pronounces a cat named Miss Kitty as Miscatay. Overall, the humor is misplaced and only serves to cheapen the dramatic elements of this otherwise great film. Great Lines: "Do you like pussy…cats?" -Polly coming on to May "Leave a message after the scream. AGGGHHHHHH!" -Adam's answering machine. "You have beautiful gams." --May complimenting Ambrosia's legs. "Who taught you how to kiss?" -Initially spoken by Adam, but later mocked by May herself. Overall Rating: 9 out of 10 severed heads. |
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