Those of you who enjoy loud abrasive music and gory images (we know you’re out there!) will enjoy this over-the-top depiction of madness, sculpted in clay and entrails. The title translates as “mental images of a man losing his mind.”
Tag Archives: Mental illness
CAPSULE: MAY (2002)
DIRECTED BY: Lucky McKee
FEATURING: Angela Bettis, Jeremy Sisto, Anna Faris
PLOT: A girl with a lazy eye grows up as a social outcast with a doll as her only friend; she gets corrective lenses as a young adult and is suddenly set loose on the dating world with no social skills and a dangerously loose grip on reality.
WHY IT WON’T MAKE THE LIST: May, the character, is weird as hell; May, the movie, not as much, especially after it abandons the awkward character study of its first two thirds for a familiar slasher denouement.
COMMENTS: It’s easy to see why so many people relate to May. The film’s horror isn’t based on remote external threat of ravening psychos harvesting body parts, but on the uncomfortable internal reality of human loneliness. Angela Bettis, who strokes a stranger’s hand as he naps and grins inappropriately when she tells a story about a disemboweled dog, makes for an unforgettably awkward and desperate May. She can’t even stand up straight; she’s always quivering and tottering on her feet, a woman who can’t find a stable footing in the social world. Her “lazy eye” affliction, which is suddenly cured by modern advances in contact lenses, is a brilliant device to explain how this otherwise attractive girl could have grown up so gawky and socially damaged.
For this script’s purposes, May can’t just be a common fat ugly cow who never gets a second look. She can’t just be constantly rejected by everyone she meets, sitting alone in her room night after night talking to her doll Sally; she needs to be desirable and attractive enough to have potential paramours to play off of. She gets a terrific pair in an amateur horror director played by Jeremy Sisto, whose fascination with the macabre leads him into a dangerous flirtation with this creepy character, and in Anna Farris’ predatory lesbian party girl, who thinks she’s as kinky as May but has no concept of what it’s like to be genuinely twisted. The early reels show geeky May impressing a date with a home cooked meal of mac and cheese and Gatorade and trying to decide what to do when the guy doesn’t call her back after she misreads his social cues and wrongly assumes he’s into cannibalism. This part of the movie is excellent and uncomfortable; we genuinely root for the pathetic girl to find true friendship, while at the same time being relieved we’re not the ones who have to supply it.
Bettis plays May like a female Travis Bickle, but when she finally cracks, it’s the movie that loses it. All of May’s endearing, ungainly mannerisms suddenly fall aside as she becomes a confident killer enacting a weirdo’s revenge fantasy against the cool kids. The more competent and dangerous she becomes, the less creepy she is. What had been an engagingly freaky character study suddenly bows to psycho movie kill conventions, and we spend the last third of the movie just watching the secondary cast get slashed. Although the final scene restores May’s vulnerability and is gruesomely memorable, it doesn’t redeem the movie’s sin of abandoning its freak spirit for horror movie conventionality.
May is more of a “weirdo” movie than a “weird” movie; there are only a few scenes—blind kids crawling on glass, May crying blood, and a schizophrenic crack-up montage—that break with narrative realism in any meaningful way. It’s an above average horror outing sporting superior performances, but it’s not a revolutionary genre movie, and given the film’s socially ghoulish first two thirds, there is a sense of a missed opportunity to do something truly special. “I like weird, a lot,” says one of May’s would-be seducers. The joke is that he’s merely a tourist observing human oddity for a lark, and he’s not prepared to handle sincere, dangerous weirdness on May’s level. To some extent, the same thing can be said for the film; it’s fascinated by its weird character, but it’s not interested in descending into the ultimate depths of depraved weirdness.
The May DVD includes two separate commentaries, each hosted by director Lucky McKee but featuring different cast and crew members. The second commentary includes reminiscences by May‘s craft services provider (i.e. the film’s caterer), which turns out to be a funny concept (he reveals the secret to Jeremy Sisto’s heart—jalapeno poppers—and explains how you supply jujubees to a set on a non-existent budget).
WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:
“A bizarre (and sometimes repulsive) exercise that’s a little too willing to swoon in its own weird embrace.”–Robert Denerstein, Denver Rocky Mountain News (contemporaneous)
(This movie was nominated for review by “Br.” Suggest a weird movie of your own here.)
CAPSULE: SESSION 9 (2001)
DIRECTED BY: Brad Anderson
FEATURING: Peter Mullan, David Caruso, Josh Lucas, Stephen Gevedon, Brendan Sexton III
PLOT: A hazmat crew removing asbestos from an abandoned asylum uncover secrets about the long-dead but deeply disturbed residents—and, arguably, more chilling secrets about each other.
WHY IT WON’T MAKE THE LIST: The weirdometer registers only trace amounts of bizarrity in this eerie, complex psychological horror. It’s worth a viewing for fright fans, but not thanks to its strangeness.
COMMENTS: Before Session 9, director Brad Anderson was best known (if he was known at all) for his romantic comedies. Anderson co-fashioned Session 9‘s complicated, haunted script to take advantage of the availability of an abandoned mental institution, a dream location to shoot a horror movie, and wound up finding a more successful niche as a specialist in psychological suspense. Disdaining shock violence and other teen horror tropes, Session 9 hoes a tougher row by creating its suspense through characterization, hidden secrets, and (for the most part) by encouraging the audience to imagine unspeakable carnage rather than to get off on seeing it laid out in splattery crimson glory. The idea here is to throw five average Joes into a pressure cooker situation (finishing a three-week asbestos removal job in one week) inside a suggestively creepy locale, and let the tension build organically as they begin to crack under the stress. Gordon is the most preoccupied of the bunch: he may lose his struggling business if he doesn’t complete this contract on time, and he’s got a newborn baby back home to feed. Phil, his right hand man, has his own tense dynamic with the obnoxious Hank: they share an uncomfortable history with a common woman. Mullet-headed young Jeff is the neophyte kid who gets picked on by the others, and Mike is the thoughtful guy who’s too good for this job (for unknown reasons, he’s dropped out of law school to schlep around in a hazmat suit). The characterizations aren’t deep, but they’re efficient; we know these guys, we get their conflicting agendas. Mike’s discovery of old tape recordings of hypnotherapy with a schizophrenic woman—reels labeled sessions 1 to 9—provides a parallel dramatic line, as we periodically hear a tranquil doctor probe the mind of a psychopathic woman with buried issues that may continue to haunt the hosptal’s halls to this day. Like the Overlook Hotel in Session 9‘s closest ancestor, The Shining, the empty spaces of the asylum are virtually a separate character (there are plenty of tracking shots down abandoned corridors to remind us of Kubrick‘s horror). The grounds are full of memories of the departed: Satanist graffiti scrawled on the walls by the teens who broke in to party there on weekends, old mementos and clippings pasted onto the walls of the patients rooms, and broken bric-a-brac left there by the long-gone staff and by homeless squatters. Everything is linked by dark, dank underground tunnels connecting the various buildings. It would be almost impossible to shoot a film in this setting that didn’t raise at least a couple of hairs on the back of your neck, and Anderson’s restrained direction and the ensembles’ paranoiac acting ably amplify the institution’s inherent creepiness. The ending is too obvious to qualify as a twist, and I wish Anderson had shown Kubrick’s courage to go shamelessly over-the-top every now and then, but Session 9 satisfies as a mature, eerie, and mostly quiet horror—a type of film that’s all too rare nowadays. What could be scarier than an isolated, crumbling building that may be full of ghosts? The answer: an isolated, crumbling building that may be full of schizophrenic ghosts.
The asylum in the movie, Danvers State Hospital, was a real abandoned mental institution in Massachusetts. It holds the dubious honor of being known as the birthplace of the prefrontal lobotomy (a fact referenced in the movie), and later became infamous for overcrowding and inhumane treatment of its inmates. Most of the buildings on the sprawling campus were torn down in 2006 to construct an apartment complex. The units burned down in 2007 in a mysterious fire, though they were soon rebuilt. A 12-minute featurette on the DVD documents the cruel history of the institution.
WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:
(This movie was nominated for review by “Jack Mort.” Suggest a weird movie of your own here.)
CAPSULE: BUNNY AND THE BULL (2009)
DIRECTED BY: Paul King
FEATURING: Edward Hogg, Simon Farnaby, Verónica Echegui
PLOT: An agoraphobic young man remembers (or hallucinates) a trip he took across Europe with his hard-drinking, sexually voracious, gambling-addicted pal Bunny.
WHY IT WON’T MAKE THE LIST: It’s a mildly surreal comedy that’s in the weird ballpark, but it’s not nearly unhinged enough to make the List on weirdness alone, and too uneven to be counted among the best weird movies ever made.
COMMENTS: Bunny and the Bull begins by introducing us to Stephen Turnbull, an shut-in with severe OCD issues who files his used dental floss and checks the pH of his urine every morning, then shows in flashback how he degenerated from a functioning neurotic to a full-fledged basket case. An emergency involving rats violating his boxes of hermetically sealed vegetarian lasagna forces him to phone Captain Crab for a takeout meal, unlocking a flood of memories. The logo on the takeout box inspires Stephen to remember the time he was stood up by a girl he intended to propose to at a Captain Crab. In the movie’s first anstract sequence, he imagines a restaurant constructed entirely out of painted paper; even the fish swimming in the aquarium are cardboard cutouts. The motif carries over in the next scene, where an entire horse race is re-enacted with similar animated, spray-painted two-dimensional figures. These two scenes set up the expectation that the entire movie will carry through this hazy-dream-version-of-a-high-school-play look, but as Stephen and Bunny begin their tour of Europe, subsequent sequences are shot on realistic looking sets, though sometimes employing blurry rear-projection or other random visual trickery. Then, halfway through the movie the cinematographer pulls out a new look: a world full of gleaming brass CGI clockwork contraptions. The different visual signatures each look great on their own, but the schizophrenic hopping about from one to another makes you wonder if they switched art directors halfway through film, then ran out of money in the special effects budget. Bunny‘s visuals are frequently likened to those of The Science of Sleep, but that comparison only holds for the cardboard-cutout scenes; the lack of a Continue reading CAPSULE: BUNNY AND THE BULL (2009)
SATURDAY SHORT: REDUCTION (2010)
Reduction is an intriguing, visual theory of what happens when one limits what thoughts they allow to enter their consciousness. The world around them becomes “reduced.”