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Page 1 of 2 Tim Connolly is the prototypical man-child: at an impressionable age he was witness to violent sexual acts between his parents and their friends. Flash forward many years later, and Tim is still that same psychologically damaged little boy, but now in a man’s body. His father is dead from AIDS, and his mother is a histrionic bible freak who regularly humiliates and debases her son, ostensibly to “purify” him and remove him from the devil’s influence. These procedures include micro-managing his whereabouts, bare-ass spanking him when she is in a good mood, beating the fuck out of him (no pun intended) with a broom-handle when she’s really pissed, and even keeping his bowel movements under her thumb. There is a scene where she force-feeds him Milk Of Magnesia and locks him in the head until he drops a deuce – if you’ll permit me a moment’s indulgence, I’d like to examine that symbolism real quick: Milk of Magnesia = MOM. With me on that? And then we have Tim standing there in his underwear, mouthful of viscous white liquid dribbling down his chin. Okay? Okay. Just wanted you to know what you are dealing with here.
 | When Tim gets to work, things aren’t that much better. Sure, he has seniority, but no respect from the co-workers underneath him. They either ignore him or outright belittle him, adding to his feelings of powerlessness and helplessness. There is nary a whiff of subtlety in this film: Tim is purposefully a character that embodies every dismal feeling the audience has ever had. He taps straight into any vestige of low-self esteem you’ve ever felt, plumbs the depths of your terrible memories of being an ungainly teenager, awkward and unaware of your own limbs, and brings them painfully to the fore. So when the new girl starts, and she is sort of pretty and looks a little awkward herself, you won’t be able to help cringing as Tim has utterly no capacity to relate to her in any social way. In fact, he bumbles around her like a three-year old, and doesn’t even know enough to let her walk through a door first. |
Given all that, is it difficult to understand why Tim hires prostitutes, has them go down on him, and then, right as he reaches the magic moment, grabs their heads and literally chokes them on his dick? Well, actually it is, but that’s what he does. We see the first emergence of the split in his personality, the brutality he sees in the sex act, the only way he feels he can have power over another person. But like any good serial killer, escalations are bound to happen. Soon merely death is not enough. He needs souvenirs. His mother makes him massage her feet, how does Tim deal with that? Simple: cuts a whore’s big toe off. The girls at work call him Creepy Tim, and insinuate that he is the Prostitute Killer and the author of the horrendously misspelled Zodiac Killer-type letters sent to the local paper? Well, I will let you watch what he does about that. *shudder* | But the last straw comes when the new girl, Louise, takes up with one of Tim’s most hated aggressors at work, Andrew. The idea is simply unconscionable to Tim, and propels him to cross the final line and descend into proper madness, which ends up leading to, amongst other things, what is apparently the longest murder scene of a child under 11 in film history. It also leads to the finale of the film, and a scene that will shock the hell out of you, now matter how hardened you are to genre fare. I say this from experience, because it happened to me, and I watch a lot of odious movies. |  |
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Second to last sentence says "... now matter how hardened you are
