Movies: April might be pretty cruel, but it never chopped up its lovers and made a big freakin' doll out of their parts. Right?

Lucky McKee's debut feature film, the 2002 film May, is a fine addition to the long tradition of revenge-horror flicks.

Unbalanced underdog revenge is one of the more prominent themes in horror cinema. In the alternate universe of horror movies, it makes complete sense that, for example, being taunted and bullied as a kid would make you, later in life, an axe-wielding madman who got your kicks by turning nubile camp counselors into cutlets. Though a host of contemporary characters spring to mind (Carrie, Jason, Crowley from Hatchet, the melty-faced guy from The Burning, and so on), it is a remarkably old pattern. The Golem, one of silent film's landmarks of horror, follows the same pattern. You start with an underdog group (in this case, we've got an entire ghetto of Jewish residents instead of your mutant kid or awkward teenage girl), give them a means for revenge, and then let the revenge get out of hand.

From a filmmaking perspective, this theme does double duty: it gets you a motive for your villain and it's a clever bait and switch that suckers viewers into sympathizing with a character, thus pulling them into your flick.

It's a smart little way to exploit of our innate ethical sense of reciprocity. Some evolutionary biologists have suggested that a handful of hardwired prejudices are at the root of all moral codes. One of these inherent concepts is reciprocity: we expect people treated nicely to behave nicely and people treated poorly to behave poorly. We such behavior sensible and, regardless of the consequences, there's something comfortable in the word making sense. That is, of course, until the mechanics described in part one final start to disgust us. Horror films can exploit our perhaps ingrained sense of reciprocity by pushing it too and absurd and crazy level. By some weird quirk of film watching psychology, events viewed on the silver screen often seem to happen outside any framework of ethical scale. It doesn't make any sense, really, that Jason's mom would decide to arbitrarily show up and slaughter a random group of counselors because, years and years ago, a different group of counselors negligently allowed her boy drown. Why the wait? Why kill other counselors? But, in a film context, we somehow accept that blood demands blood and we accept the notion that it is a sort of permanent rupture – once there's a dead person, all the rules that would limit your response are off. The rupture is, in horror films, the essence of "crazy." Ironically, in action films, it's often not a sign of being crazy, but of holding a monopoly on appropriate violence because you're "justified." Imagine a world in which every kidnapping elicited an institutional response similar to what we accept as appropriate in Commando. In genre films, "crazy" and "righteous" function in pretty much the same way, the key difference seems to be in their selection of targets. What horror films do it find the limit of the mediated moral flexibility, showing how far we can let moral frameworks slide and remain in our comfort zone.

(As an aside, I suspect that the moral flexibility of cinema is a trait of all media, regardless of content. We often talk about content influences on the genre. One popular theory has it that Halloween is the product of news coverage of 'Nam – the latter making the violence of the former a possibility. What if, instead, the capacity to stomach violence and accept its extreme depiction wasn't a matter of content exposure, but something allowed by the medium itself. That is to say, what is the very fact of mediation changes what we will and will not accept as tolerable. We'll happily watch something on a screen that we wouldn't watch with our naked eye, regardless of what it happens to be. If this is true, what does horror cinema tell us about our reactions to, say, the news and what implications would it have for how we ethically evaluate political leaders? I don't have any theories on that. I just bring it up as something worth thinking about.)

May is a classic revenger's tale. The titular character, an awkward woman who had a lonely and psychologically traumatic (though, honestly, not that psychologically traumatic) childhood, finds herself suddenly involved with two lovers. The first is a garage mechanic who, in his off-time, is a would-be horror film maker. The second is a none-to-bright predatory lipstick lesbian who works with May at an animal clinic. These erotic connections start to bring May out of her shell, leading her to volunteer time at a daycare for handicapped kids and to adopt a cat. But, since this is a horror flick, it isn't long before May gets her fragile sense of self completely shattered. Neither affair ends well, the kiddie thing goes disturbingly South, and she ends up braining the cat (perhaps by accident). This all pushes May into a short and bloody downward spiral. Out come the shears and scalpels, off comes the body parts or friends and acquaintances, and everything comes to an appropriately nasty climax - culminating in May stitching together a human sized doll out of the parts of her victims. It all gets tied up with a curiously downbeat and almost gentle conclusion which would seem almost anti-climactic if it wasn't so appropriate.

McKee's direction is assured and he beings a low-key naturalistic feel to much of the movie. In fact, he's so good at making his weird story feel accidental and natural that it sometimes feels like you're watching an off-kilter slacker flick – Edgar Allan Poe's Reality Bites. Though McKee's more acidic view of the people who populate his world is considerably less self-serving then gently ironic flicks of Generation X's awkward twenties. This isn't to say that there aren't some efforts as visual lyricism. In this case, we get flowing scraps of fabric whenever May's at her sewing machine. These scenes are not embarrassing, but they're less compelling than when McKee and Co. are out on the streets, among the full mess of everyday life.

He and his production crew are also great at capturing the telling details of his characters' lives. After we watch a truly goofy black and white short film "created" by May male love interest, the film-within-a-film rolls credits and we see that the character has credited himself in Italian, as if he was an Argento.

Finally, the film hinges on a wonderful performance by Angela Bettis, who has to carry most of the flick. Bettis, who is really too good looking to convince us that May would live in isolation, manages to give us a character who is sad and painfully awkward, while never letting us forget that something really nasty is building up within May. The truly horrific stuff in May doesn't shake until the last half hour or so, and it is a testament to Bettis's chops as an actress that the lead-up never seems to drag.

May is not a by-the-numbers horror flick. Most of the films is a slow burn character study of a figure who wobbles on the line between sympathy and repulsion. In that, it reminds me of Romero's excellent Martin (another M name title – hmmmm – a pattern perhaps?).

Movies: “Whatever it takes to get through the night. Right, Count?”

George Romero has gone on record saying that his underappreciated 1977 vampire flick Martin is his personal favorite of all his films. Considering the fact that his justly famous Night of the Living Dead stands as an ur-text for just about every zombie flick made since and is universally considered a modern horror landmark, Romero’s love for this relatively unsung flick is initially surprising. At least, it is until you see the film. Martin is one of the most engrossing and innovative vampire flicks ever made and it ranks easily as Romero’s most thoughtful and emotionally involving film.

Martin begins with our title character, a pale and awkward man in his late teens or early twenties, taking a train from Pittsburgh to the town of Raleigh, Pennsylvania. As the train rolls through the endless, anonymous landscape of suburban blight, a legacy of the financial downturns of the late 1970s that can still be found on long stretches of the Eastern Corridor’s right of way, Martin notices a young woman traveling alone. That night, as most of the passengers retire to their berths or sleeping compartments, Martin attacks the nameless young woman. He breaks into her sleeping compartment, injects her with a heavy-duty sedative, undresses her, possibly rapes her, before, finally, opening up her forearm with a razor blade and lapping up her blood. Then, calmly, methodically, he cleans himself up, positions the body, and scatters sleeping pills around the sink in her compartment lavatory to make it look like a suicide. Martin leaves her cabin and returns to his seat. He takes out a small paperback about stage magic and reads distractedly.

This is our introduction to Martin.

We learn later that Martin is on the train because he is being sent to a small town far from Pittsburgh. There he will stay with his uncle, Tada Cuda, an old Eastern European who has taken charge of Martin in order to, as Tada tells Martin, “save your soul and then destroy you.” Martin’s family line, according to Cuda, is cursed. Every generation or so, one of the family becomes nosferatu. Martin, according to Cuda, is just such a creature. But it isn’t that simple. For a vampire, Martin’s a pretty lame specimen. Sunlight bothers his eyes, but it doesn’t kill him. He’s not particularly fond of garlic, but that’s a matter of personal preference. He’s got no aversion to crosses and even attends church with his uncle. He can’t hypnotize ladies (he’s kind of afraid of girls) or turn into a bat. He doesn’t even have fangs. Even Cuda, who clearly expected something more majestically sinister, seems a bit under-whelmed by this supposed creature of the night.

Cuda’s granddaughter, a thoroughly Americanized young woman (played by Romero’s wife) thinks that Martin is just a poor, mixed-up kid who has been driven crazy by his family’s twisted Old World superstitions. In her opinion, Martin is the unwitting actor in a grotesque psychodrama sustained by the family. He needs therapy, not an exorcism. Although, if that’s true, why does Martin maintain he’s more than 80 years old – despite the fact that he’s clearly younger than his uncle’s granddaughter? And what’s with the flashes Martin has to scenes of him killing a young woman in what appears to be 1920s Europe? Are these head trips the movie-fueled delusions of an insane wannabe vampire or is Martin remembering the early days of his unnaturally prolonged life?

Martin is Romero’s most meditative film and its wounded and haunted central protagonist is Romero’s most carefully constructed character. In many ways, the surreal mix of the mundane decay of small town Pennsylvania, the dark struggles of Martin, and the guilt-ridden actions of his family make if almost Kafka-esque. It has this uniquely American take on what I feel is a very European sort of dreadful absurdity. If Samsa had awoken to find himself a vampire instead of a giant insect, the Metamorphosis would have resembled this film. I say the film is uniquely American, however, in that it strips away the mist shrouded gentility of the fussy European Gothic aesthetic, even going so far as to lightly lampoon that lush sensibility. Despite the leisurely pace of much of the film, Romero knows his audience and delivers several exciting and tense set pieces, mostly gathered around Martin’s efforts to secure blood. Without the powers of your standard cinema vampire, getting blood is a major undertaking.

As an aside, I suspect gorehounds will find Martin a serious disappointment. The body count is tiny and the blood, what there is of it, is that cherry red latex paint stuff that seemed to be go-to blood stand-in for ‘70s horror flicks.

The film has its flaws. Romero’s filmmaking consistently falls short of his creative ambitions and his intellectual aspirations. He understands the complexity of the characters and the uncanny beauty of their decaying landscape, but too often his set ups are uninspired. I can’t help but wonder if, as a young indie guerilla-style filmmaker, Romero found such success that he never bothered to advance his art. Even as his budgets and scope have increased, he continues to rely on a remarkably small vocabulary of basic shots and set-ups. This leads to the other amateurish aspect of the film: a sort of naïve belief in the power of the camera to render things interesting. Part of the meditative pacing comes from Romero’s unfortunate tendency to just linger on a scene or shot long after it has been drained of significance. This could be a long and silent shot of people walking to their car or an over-long moment of Martin watching empty train tracks. The line between introspection and self-indulgence is a thin one and Martin wobbles across it more than once.

The creativity and intelligence of the film, however, far outshine the films few short comings. Martin is not my favorite Romero flick (that’s still Dawn of the Dead) but it is genuine masterwork from an accomplished legend of the genre and I recommend it to anybody interested in thoughtful, moody horror. Using the revamped and improved Named Summits of Georgia Movie Ranking System, I’m giving Martin an unqualified Hickory Knob.