If you see only one film this year, for the love of god don't see May. This film is not for people who don't get out much. It's for those who are bored of movies, willing to embrace something prickly, to laugh at things others might find shocking. It's a film of bizarre ambitions, perfectly realized. And wouldn't you know, it's gone straight to video in Canada.

When it debuted at last year's Sundance Film Festival, this campy tale of a lonely, lazy-eyed veterinary assistant (Angela Bettis) who goes to horrifying extremes to make friends quickly caught buzz and was snapped up by risk-taking distributor Lions Gate Films for a cool million, recouping the film's modest budget. May did the festival circuit for a while, then played in a few US cities this spring. When it came to Chicago, Roger Ebert gave it a whopping four stars. By all rights May was poised for cult superstardom.

Then Lions Gate's House of 1000 Corpses stink-bombed, so the company seems to have cut their losses on the horror genre by shuffling May off to video. May would probably never have reached a mass audience, but surely it deserved better than Rob Zombie's clueless slasher flick.

Lions Gate VP of Theatrical Distribution John Bain explains that the decision to bypass theatres was purely a business one. May's writer-director, 27-year-old Lucky McKee, looks on the bright side. "Most horror films don't get shown in theatres any more," he said on the phone from LA. "For some reason it's a genre that's really hurting. But with something like May, we're already getting requests for midnight screenings, which means my film will be playing in theatres a lot over the years as opposed to just a quick theatrical run and then it's gone forever."

One of last year's best films, Donnie Darko, also went straight to video, so May is in good company. And Lions Gate's loss has been McKee's gain. He's parlayed his underdog cachet into a job directing a horror film for United Artists (which had been called The Woods until M. Night Shyamalan commandeered the title). Though McKee didn't write this film, he's excited about being a hired gun on a bigger-budget project. "I want to dance back and forth, make popcorn movies as well as my own bizarre, personal experiments. It's kind of hard to mix those things together."

Not that he thinks May is all that bizarre. "I mean it's intentionally quirky, but if people think May is extreme, look out for what's sitting in my drawer," he says.

May began life in McKee's junior year of the University of Southern California screenwriting program, inspired by Nirvana, Frankenstein and especially his transplantation from the sticks of Northern California to a world where everyone could be his best friend, if only they weren't all crazy in some way. His title character is just winsome enough to attract a lesbian co-worker and to go on a few dates with hunky mechanic Jeremy Sisto, but also wacked enough to have conversations with a porcelain doll in a cracked glass case and to take scissors to her friends when they disappoint her.

McKee thinks a fairy-tale logic underlines May's actions, making them more palatable than they appear on paper. "I always loved the original Grimms' fairy tales, just the bizarre ways that these characters think, like Cinderella's sisters chopping their heels off to fit in the glass slipper," he says. "It sounds really brutal when you say it but in the context of the story, it sort of makes sense. With May, it's that same thing -- her brain just processes a sentence like 'make a friend' in a different way than you or I would."

Five years after showing his script to a fellow student, that student called to say he'd formed a production company and wanted to make May his first project. Edward Lucky McKee lived up to his name (which is real -- he says, "it was either that or Luigi"), avoiding the usual shop-it-till-you-drop syndrome of first-time filmmakers.

He put together a production team that included a cinematographer who built his own lights to create the film's pre-Raphaelite look, and a casting director whom McKee credits with finding "a bunch of good actors and not just a bunch of models who memorize lines." Casting Bettis was a coup -- her performance walks the fine line between high camp and deep truth, inspiring male horror fans who saw the film at Rue Morgue's recent screening to fall inexplicably in love with her.

"I don't know exactly why that is," says McKee. "Everybody connects with loneliness, and just her oddness, I think. She's an extreme version but everybody's kind of awkward when it comes to relationships. And Angela's just a captivating person." With any luck, lonely little May will finally get the attention she craves on DVD.

Email us at: LETTERS@EYEWEEKLY.COM or send your questions to EYEWEEKLY.COM
625 Church St, 6th Floor, Toronto M4Y 2G1