ihavebeenfloated

I’m going to get hell from my girlfriend for this review, because she loves this movie. I haven’t felt like reviewing anything lately, but this one grabbed me and, I warn you, much like my review of The Constant Gardener, this is going to be a bitter review. Warning in mind, onward we go…

May falls into a category of film and entertainment that I’d like to classify as “dark fairy tales” that mainly appeal to people who buy lots and lots of Emily merchandise at Hot Topic stores. In order to explain this, I define fairy-tales as stories that are surrealistic, simple in both story and character, and often forgo all common sense in an attempt to cater to younger readers imaginations. Fairy-tales are not without artistic merit, I must stress that point, but dark fairy tales on the other hand…

A dark fairy tale, in my opinion, is a fairy tale that is plagued by someone’s over-eager attempts to be edgy, twisted, or strange. I say plagued, because often times the common sense isn’t forgone in an attempt to cater to young imaginations, but instead it is forgone in an attempt to appeal to people who think twisted things are awesome to the point of pure stupidity. There is no imagination in dark fairy tales, they spend their time trying too hard to be macabre that they leave nothing to the imagination what so ever.

With that in mind, on with the movie.

May follows the title character, overacted purposefully to a painful extent by Angela Bettis, through a small snippet of her demented life. Opening with the first of many overly obvious allusions to her overly obvious psychosis, we see as her mother forces her to wear a “pirate eye patch”—called thusly on the DVD synopsis to further cement the childhood trauma May experiences into your consciousness!—to her first day of school due to her lazy eye. Her mother intones something along the lines of, “If you want people to like you, you’ll have to wear this!”

I wonder what screenwriter and director Lucky McKee had in mind with this scene! It couldn’t have possibly been that May was driven at a young age by her mother to assume that imperfect people are flawed and utterly worthless, would it? No, no I’m sure McKee couldn’t have possibly been trying to be that obvious. That would just be stupid.

We cut to a scene in which her mother gives May a single birthday present. May starts to tear open the paper, but her mother interrupts her. “Now it’s ruined!” her mother says, then proceeds to open the present herself in a more suitably perfect manner. (I can’t imagine McKee expected us to infer anything from that scene, either!) The present appears to be a doll in a wooden and glass box. Not just a doll, but an extremely creepy looking doll. So creepy looking, in fact, that anyone in reality would think the doll was so creepy that it should be burned before it comes to life and starts killing people. But, no, this is just the first doll May’s mother ever crafted and she thought that May should have it, because, “As I’ve always said, ‘If you can’t find a friend, make one.’” She instructs May that she should never take the doll out of the case because the doll is special.

So, May is befriended at a young age by a doll locked inside a case. Children make fun of her because she has a lazy eye, or an eye patch. Does this seem like a recipe for a socially isolated and completely insane adult? In dark fairy-tale land: Yes, of course! In reality, not so much, but we left reality a long ways back when we saw the creepy split-second shot of grown up May holding her hands over a blood-gushing eye socket at the very beginning of the movie.

Flash forward many years… May is more socially inept than you could ever imagine. She works at an animal hospital, which is the one thing about the movie that I appreciate. Having worked in an animal hospital for many years, I know first hand that only the most social inept people work at animal hospitals, along with the people who contain the most seething hatred for humanity.

May sits on benches on the street, watching people walk by, saying things like, “So many pretty parts, no pretty wholes.”

It’s kind of hard to not see the obvious coming, but I’d hate to ruin the movie for you.

May is surrounded by a few stereotypical but sometimes slightly off characters: The lesbian co-worker who makes extremely forward moves on May, who discovers through May that she likes to be cut with scalpels; the auto-mechanic who is the one slightly likable character in the movie, who has a taste for slightly grisly cinema; the veterinarian from India whose English is so bad that it’s more offensive than it is funny, and I’m not uptight; a reclusive blind child who, get this shocking twist, responds somewhat positively to May’s presence; and, of course, May’s very own doll who isn’t really a character what so ever, just a stereotypical plot device.

And, perhaps, that’s my main beef with this film. May only contains one real person, and that is Adam Stubbs. Perhaps Adam is only so due to Jeremy Sisto’s inability to overact on purpose, maybe in that way Adam is just a fluke as a character. But, the fact remains, May is full of characters who are written to be so purposefully weird that any credibility the film might have had is extinguished.

If May even took itself seriously enough to think of itself as a movie full of characterizations of normal people, it may have been good. As it stands, the film doesn’t even take it’s own stupidity seriously, and I can’t respect something that does that. Campy horror, I can take. Dark comedies about psychopaths, I can do that. But a movie that is a dark comedy about a campy horror movie that’s been bogged down with dark comedy about a psychopath girl and eight thousand cliches thrown in… well, I can’t put up with that.

As it stands, May has “cult classic” written all over it. It’s a terrible movie that lacks any sort of artistic merit what so ever, and that is enough right there to make people drop to their knees and worship it. This fact saddens me, but that’s how it goes, I guess.

If you’re curious about this film, keep the following things in mind.

The main critic quote on the cover of the DVD is, “One of the Best Films of the Year!” – Ain’t It Cool News. Keeping in mind that Harry Knowles said that Jeepers Creepers was the best creature horror film he’d ever seen. Aside from Harry Knowles’ complete lack of credibility, it’s funny how that quote actually doesn’t appear anywhere in Knowles’ review of May.

As said before, you will love this movie if you fit at least three of the following criteria.

1.) You’re female.

2.) You hated high school.

3.) You have caused bodily mutilation to yourself at one time or another.

4.) You shop at Hot Topic.

5.) You own socks that have stripes of two (no more, no less) colors on them.

6.) You own anything with Emily on it.

7.) You say morbid (and usually stupid) things to your friends (e.g. “I want to step on a fetus and watch blood squirt out from under my boot, I think it would be pretty!”) and they giggle and laugh like you’re hilarious.

8.) You lack anything resembling good taste.