Come What May

Photo By John Anderson

Angela Bettis has zero problems with the red stuff, which is good, since in Lucky McKee's new film May, she happens to be covered in it much of the time. It's not every actress that can ground an underground horror film/black comedy like May with just the right note of flinchy authenticity, but Bettis, a stage vet who in the past few years has also turned up in everything from Girl, Interrupted to Eudora Welty's The Ponder Heart, tackles the role with a toothy vigor that's alarming in its intensity.

A dead-black comedy that dances on the edge of David Lynch's territory before evolving into something wholly different, McKee's feature directorial debut mines the febrile young outsider caste for all its worth and ends up part EC Comics, part drowsy nightmare, and quite a bit good, old-fashioned grue. Against all odds, it's a winning combination (the film is going to go over like gravebusters among that all-important teen Goth girl demographic).

Bettis, an Austin native, plays the disconcertingly shy and painfully lonely May, a mousy string bean who spends her days as a veterinarian's assistant and her nights designing her own clothes and chatting to the creepiest doll this side of hell. When local grease monkey Adam (Jeremy Sisto, looking like a cross between Welcome Back Kotter's Juan Epstein and Kevin Van Hentenryck's character in genre favorite Basket Case) takes a shine to her and announces, "I like weird," May's heretofore cobwebbed world begins to brighten. And since true love is an emotion powered by a muscle whose only purpose is to pump lots and lots of blood all over the place, it's all downhill from there. Somebody get a mop.

Love it or run screaming from the theatre with your mind on fire, Bettis' performance in May is a singular achievement, marrying fear and self-loathing with tender, Kodak moments from just left of the abyss and enough doll parts to satisfy even Courtney Love.

"I kind of think it's the part of a lifetime for anybody," says Bettis, "but I don't know that many other people would think of it that way."

When asked how she prepared for a role in which she was required to wheel around a beer cooler of body parts when not macking down with co-stars Anna Faris and Sisto, Bettis defers to McKee: "I scavenged his brain. Really, it was totally Lucky."

A fan of the horror genre (she cites Italian auteur Dario Argento as a favorite director and John McNaughton's Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer as the most disturbing movie she's seen), Bettis, who took on the role of Carrie White in the 2002 television remake, says she has no qualms with being typed as the next scream queen, a fact that should go down well at Fangoria Weekends across the land.

"No problem at all -- I think that would be cool. And I also don't have any aversion to doing any more horror in the future."

Directors take note. And fan boys? Your angel has arrived.