The Red Circle

The Long Good Friday: Underseen Early 2000s Indie Horror

by Tom Nix

In semi-continuation of our first Out of Obscurity column, this week’s Long Good Friday features a trio of recent independent horror films that simply didn’t get an audience. These flicks deserve more eyes.

May // 2002 // dir. Lucky McKee

May is a socially inept, shy, kind of off girl. Growing up with a mentally and verbally abusive mother who wouldn’t even let her take her doll out of its glass casing to play with, May has always been a little awkward.  She has a lazy eye, and her doctor suggests she wear an eyepatch to correct her vision. Needless to say, this doesn’t get her any friends either.

Some one once told her that if you don’t have any friends, make a new one. And that’s what May does. She meets a whole group of new people, and even starts to fall in love. But her oddness prevails. These people eventually turn their backs on her in her 20’s just as they did when she was small.

May decides then and there that none of these people were perfect for her. Only parts of them were perfect. So, naturally, she starts killing them and cutting them up to make a life size doll out of their perfect parts.

May is a genuinely disturbing movie, with an incredible anchoring performance by Angela Bettis. The movie, shot for $500,000 by a first time director, is comfortable with blasting through barriers that would normally be considered taboo, even now. In addition to some shockingly effective gore (this movie looks like it cost 8 times the actual budget), this movie features lesbian trysts, self-mutilation, and irreversible damage to blind children. It also features what is probably still the creepiest and unexpected ending in a horror flick in a good while. May is the real deal.

Love Object // 2003 // dir. Robert Parigi

Certainly the most deserving of the “indie” tag of this week’s title, Love Object is an eerily effective no-budget flick about the dangers of falling in love with a sex doll. Yeah, that’s right. Long before Ryan Gosling took the love of a rubbery broad to pseudo mainstream audiences with Lars and the Real Girl, Robert Parigi was examining the psychology (emphasis on the psycho) of a relationship in which only one of the participants has a heartbeat.

The movie tracks Kenneth, an awkward technical writer at a firm that specializes in electronics manuals. He is eventually assigned to a big project with the attractive new temp, Lisa. Unsure of how to approach and entice her, Kenneth instead orders a sex doll that is tailored to look exactly like Lisa and begins living out what he imagines is their real life relationship.

With his new found confidence from his new “girl,” Kenneth eventually starts to win over Lisa in real life. And the more time he spends with her, the less time he spends with his doll. And that’s when things get really weird. Sure, the doll begins to get jealous and starts to torment Kenneth’s love life. But the real greatness of the film is how rapidly it pushes past the idea of a homicidal fucktoy and into the true nature of obsession, delusion, and insanity.

I could never call Love Object a great film, but for a movie that is refreshingly DIY, it shows a ton of originality and a fearlessness unmatched by a lot of first time directors. It shies away from the really gory stuff almost out of necessity of conserving the funds for the shoot, but still has the ability to shock with how far it is willing to push the situation developed in this completely psychopathic love triangle. I hope someone gives Mr. Parigi a real budget one day, because the man could be dangerous. I mean hell, he managed to snag both Udo Kier AND Rip Torn for a movie about a man and his silicone sperm depository. Give the man some respect!

Below // 2002 // dir. David Twohy
Written by Darren Aronofsky. Directed by David Twohy of Pitch Black fame. Ignored by everybody.

Below is a taut, suspense driven haunted submarine movie set in World War II. The USS Tiger Shark is an American submarine sent out on a mission to destroy German warships. After a successful attack, the captain of the boat is killed on deck, allegedly by falling overboard attempting to collect a souvenir from the destroyed ship.

The new captain, Lt. Commander Brice (the always reliably great Bruce Greenwood), rescues three people – a British nurse, and two sailors – from the wreckage. They are from a British hospital ship taken out several days earlier.

Shortly after these people are taken aboard, however, strange things start to happen. The crew starts seeing things. The sub starts experiencing unexplained mechanical failures and inconsistencies. Stories are being told that maybe old Captain Winters isn’t quite dead. The sub is constantly trying to steer itself back to the place where the German ship was destroyed.

Below may not actually be as independent as the rest here. It features a full submarine set, lots of explosions, a huge cast, and some crazy CG effects. What it does share with the rest is that it is a genuinely unsettling flick. The tight, cramped, uncomfortable spaces of a WWII submarine are even smaller and more terrifying when the unexplained is happening all around. The movie makes very little use of blood and gore, and instead opts to use these cramped quarters as well as just the appropriate amount of atmosphere to give the viewer the creeps.

Very few things are what they seem in the world of Below. It even features a very restrained and complete performance by Zach Galifianakis as the boat’s resident “mystic.” Below was notoriously included in the Dimension Films Fall Dump of 2002 with a little flick called Equilibrium. They both were treated to about 50 screens for two weeks.

But unlike that other film, Below is actually worth watching.

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