May

Its a few years late arriving in 2002, but this is a very 90's movie. It reminded me a lot of Season two Episode two of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, an episode called "Some Assembly Required" in which two high schoolers are assembling the perfect girl from bodyparts of murdered schoolgirls. Though admittedly this movie is a lot more nuts. That's thanks largely to an incredible performance by Angela Bettis who manages to switch from awkward mousey weirdo to sexy confident phycho impressively - she really does come across as unstable. I particularly enjoyed her lazy eye, even if it was laying it on a bit thick.

Looking at Angela Bettis' filmography she seems to specialise in horrors and films about crazy people and I'd say she's definitely correctly identified her niche. She's either a very good actress or needs to seek help. Jeremy Sisto with his chiseled good looks, looking like a more Caucasian, more manly Gael Garcia Bernal and Anna Farris, playing her usual ditsy rampant bimbo character help bolster the supporting cast as the main objects of May's attention (hands and neck respectively) but the film really does rest on Bettis' shoulders. The film itself is a Frankenstein's monster of a movie with various genres stitched together with a nice comedic thread. It's fun because that's also what the movie is about - stitching parts together. The movie initially comes across quite twee: an introverted vetenary assistant seeking love starts to find confidence after getting corrective contact lenses. With a generic 90s Alanis Morrisette type on soundtrack this almost seemed to be going down a rom-com route until our protagonist begins to get a bit bitey. There's also a plot thread involving a creepy doll enclosed in a glass case, which was gifted to May by her mother, which hints some Child's Play (Chuckie) or Annabelle vibes, but that ultimately kind of goes nowhere. There's liberal irreverent animal mutilation and when things ramp up to a fully fledged murder spree it's treated just as casually. A ploink of a scalpel; a splash of blood on the floor and we cut away to May striding contently away with her wheelie luggage bag pack with body parts. Like the film's protagonist, director Lucky McKee has stitched together a bunch of established ideas with his own blackly comic tone to create something new and maybe it's not quite the sum of its parts but it's definitely interesting and very much alive.

3 1/2 severed body parts out of 5