Kind of an odd Q&A, in some ways. There were the usual interesting bits about shooting in the cold, and how cool it was to work with Ethan Embry, and a really sweet finish about working with one's dad/son, even if Dad keeps having you murdered. But father Michael Patrick really got into what he was going for right from the start, and there was a bit of a different vibe to it than Stefan MacDonald-LaBelle the previous evening. MacDonald-LaBelle had the vibe of someone who made a movie for fun geeking out about it with friends, but Jann's a pro (working mostly in TV since Drop Dead Gorgeous in 1999), and most of the time, folks in his spot are kind of cagey about what they want you to think about their movie. He didn't exactly get out diagrams or anything, but he wanted it very clear that there was no ambiguity and he meant to do that and this is what he was going for, rather than the typical bit where what's important is how you react to it as an audience.
And I get why he might do that; as I get to in the review, it's the sort of film whose ending can be very unsatisfying for certain viewers, and he's maybe trying to nudge us toward "this ending works" before we put our ratings and reviews on [festival sponsor!] Letterboxd or spreading word-of-mouth. He was probably not consciously trying to affect that rather than just reading the room, seeing people not wholly satisfied and either wanting to defend his work or make sure people understood what he was trying to say, both kind of natural impulses.
Interesting trend, though, and I wonder whether there might just be some sort of evolution, in that folks who are apt to make a case for their tiny indies rather than just casually cast them out are going to drive more and better word-of-mouth in an environment where not much else is going to surface their tiny movies.
That does kind of play into how she got the part because some other actress dropped out when her mother got a look at the script, and then she and Bruce Abbot read for the part with Jeffrey Combs, not realizing he'd already been cast and this was a chemistry read for him. She also talked about how Stuart Gordon, primarily a theater guy then, had them rehearse a lot more than was typical for any film, much less a horror flick, and was exacting, to the point where one actor said he'd probably play every character himself if it was possible. Made me wonder where his head was at 30 years later, when he maybe could have done a lot of that with animation, motion capture, and the like.
"SexySweat"
* * * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 22 March 2025 in the Brattle Theatre (Boston Underground Film Festival: Love to Love You Maybe, laser DCP)
Writer/director Luke Condzal pulls a bit of a trick here that I can't recall seeing very much before, where he starts the short with an effect you see a lot in shorts that play festivals like BUFF - roaring bass static that seems to shake the camera and blood-red lighting - to imply that Dr. Zabar is maybe primed to explode, but then having actor Len Bellezza play him as basically amiable and steady while Stephen Wattrus's Sandy Urethra (Condzal probably gave the character that name to see people write it like that in reviews, and who am I to deny him?) is playing it weird. It's like some sort of meta subversion of expected subversion when Zabar apparently knows how to keep that at bay and we don't get the "here's the real maniac" ending.
It does give a different energy to Sandy, aka "SexySweat", a disgraced gym owner, as he gets weird and twitchy and has a comically long monologue of drugs in his system turn into a sobbing breakdown. The audience is waiting for a twist that never actually comes and it pierces their cynicism even as things are darkly humorous.
"Catamaran"
* * * (out of four)
Seen 22 March 2025 in the Brattle Theatre (Boston Underground Film Festival: Love to Love You Maybe, laser DCP)
Pound for pound, the action demo reel with comedy might be the toughest sort of short to really nail. "Catamaran", for instance, is pretty decent - the action plays, and writer/director Joseph Rocco Plescia has good instincts for subverting a specific sort of action cliché (the folks who somehow miss entirely at relatively close range with automatic weapons) - but it doesn't give itself the maneuvering room or moments with a plot to actually sell any joke other than "the actors are playing to the balconies and the characters are kind of dumb". I look at the descriptions on both the festival website and IMDB, and that stuff isn't in the movie much or at all.
Which is not a big deal, unless the folks involved were looking to use it to demonstrate how well they can handle the parts of an action movie that aren't straight-up stunts and maybe winking at the audience. They do pretty well with that here - I kind of wonder how tricky shooting a lot of the film on and around a boat made choreography harder - well enough to make me interested in what they can do with a bit more in the way of resources.
"Banjo"
* * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 22 March 2025 in the Brattle Theatre (Boston Underground Film Festival: Love to Love You Maybe, laser DCP)
Foreskin and circumcision-related jokes, even more than most dick jokes, is a weird sort of implied slapstick, all about dancing around some bit of physical comedy that the filmmakers may or may not use as a punchline. It's not entirely what the film runs on - it's central character Isaac (T.J. Sullinger) having weird paranoid escalation that's one half his college buddies (Alex Poletti & Hunter Torr) bringing him to a cabin so he can lose his virginity in the same place they did in high school and the way his adding foreskin to a dick joke earlier made everyone look askance and gets him good and keyed up when girlfriend Sarah (Claire Rice) arrives.
"Banjo" is the sort of thing that hits me in a blind spot because my brain is going to try and figure out what it is about repeating the word 'foreskin" that makes it a joke; the people being weird around it done well enough that I enjoyed the performance - director Cameron Poletti and the cast play it nicely frantic and eventually fully tip into sheer absurdity versus the bits that aren't quite jokes. I laughed a fair amount, but also spent time just recognizing the buttons they were trying to push.
"The Time Capsule"
* * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 22 March 2025 in the Brattle Theatre (Boston Underground Film Festival: Love to Love You Maybe, laser DCP)
Hey! I sort of know that guy (John Gholson)! Well, we follow each other on social media and occasionally exchange words, but, like, the one time we were in the same city at the same time I didn't say anything!
Kind of one joke here: A group of friends go down memory lane as they unearth a time capsule with various things from their Generation X childhood (and, yes, I had a couple "hey, that's kind of cool" moments), only to be occasionally interrupted by the one guy whose contribution was a Wendy's Value Meal deciding to eat it, leading to everyone being grossed out. It's not a bad joke, though, and filmmaker Michael Charron does all right at sort of letting things low-key roll so the gross-out can surprise a bit.
They shift into weird-but-deadpan to get out of the loop, and it's kind of fun, although a lot of the home stretch is "are we setting up something zany or is everyone being chill the joke?", so to speak. The whole thing is kind of enjoyably shaggy, though, the sort of thing that has the energy of improv even if it really can't be, folks given characters to play off each other with.
"But He's Gay"
* * ½ (out of four)
Seen 22 March 2025 in the Brattle Theatre (Boston Underground Film Festival: Love to Love You Maybe, laser DCP)
I'm not saying if "But He's Gay" goes this route or not, but you see a movie like this at an underground film festival and you think "this is going to take a sharp turn into murder" while it might instead veer to pathos in a more straight-laced festival. That's doubly so when characters are like "red alert - who invited Maeve?", begging for things to get violent.
Neither Meagan Kimberly Smith's Maeve nor the rest of the folks at this house party are really weird enough, though. The dialog is all fairly anodyne and vague, and there's nothing terribly specific to latch onto with any of these characters, and the tension of Maeve being there is something we're told is uncomfortable more than feel. Then when things finally come to a head, it's awkward but not funny or painful enough to work as any kind of gut-punch. This just sort of happened and it's weird.
Maybe if I was more a part of these sorts of phone chains and dinner party groups, this would hit a bit more square, but the jokes seldom jump from the off-kilter but not that funny background.
"Erection and Destruction"
* * * (out of four)
Seen 22 March 2025 in the Brattle Theatre (Boston Underground Film Festival: Love to Love You Maybe, laser DCP)
Enjoyably goofy, this does a really nice job of doing "A leads to B leads to C leads to D" as things get more and more weird and frustrating before having someone pop off because, mentally, they're still back somewhere between A and B and this has all gotten out of hand. Filmmaker Eddie Mullins and his crew also do very well in terms of getting the audience to buy into this larger, kind of fantastical word even though it's clearly being made in the same three or four rooms with stuff the filmmakers have around the house.
That's not a bad thing, by the way; the way Mullis rotates through not just the same locations but camera placements to get the audience feeling like Chip (Joshua Burge) is cycling through similar problems even as things around him evolve, which is a neat way to keep the whole thing grounded in the depression that initiates the whole situation. In the middle of the absurdity and a connection to how this springs from something real, and how treating the biochemical part of depression doesn't actually make their situation better so much as giving them a higher ceiling, which I suspect must be a tremendous source of frustration even if the treatment doesn't have harsh side-effects. It's deadpan goofiness that connects directly to something in the viewers' brains.
"Handball"
* * * (out of four)
Seen 22 March 2025 in the Brattle Theatre (Boston Underground Film Festival: Love to Love You Maybe, laser DCP)
There's a fun sort of vibe to shorts like "Handball", in that a whole lot of the movie is very scripted indie-filmmaker talk, and it's not bad, really but you can feel how a lot of these films are calling cards: Writer/director Eli Beutel wants you to see how he's come up with an interesting situation and written entertaining dialogue about it; stars Ben Groh and Cassidy Rose Gyetvan want you to see how they handle it, getting their fingers on the pulses of these characters, playing off each other well, letting you see them in full and that they're sort of young and inexperienced and can't see how their desires to be happy are hurting their partner. They're all good, and it's a decent little film.
And then it turns out that they've taken their discussion to a neighborhood handball court where this older neighborhood guy Luigi is playing, kind of wiping the floor with some guy younger than him but maybe old enough to be Charley or Hazel's dad, eventually getting Charley to pay. And the thing about Luigi (who isn't listed on the IMDB page) is that if he's not some guy Beutel bumped into and decided to put in the movie and let him just be himself, then the actor is sure capturing that sort of guy. He wheezes and rambles in a way that feels unscripted, goes off on tangents, and his advice doesn't really have much to do with what Hazel and Charley were worried about, but there's something about him just wanting to play handball at this point in his eventful life that maybe says the kids should find what they want and commit to it or not worry so hard. He collapses the careful, methodical work that the filmmakers have been doing to that point.
Which is kind of the point, and neat because it both upends this sort of carefully-constructed conversation film while also very much being that sort of short film.
"There Will Be Womanly Wiles"
* * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 22 March 2025 in the Brattle Theatre (Boston Underground Film Festival: Love to Love You Maybe, laser DCP)
Sometimes these shorts will have a good oddball hook that they don't exactly fail, but doesn't necessarily hook the viewer Filmmaker Nicole Higgins and her co-star Will Madden seem to have some interesting takes on online sex-work, kink, virtual reality, and how weird it is for the real-life partner even though he tries to be good with it, but transgressive as it aims to be, this one vanishes from one's head just as soon is it's done and we're on to the next one.
"Make Me a Pizza"
* * * ½ (out of four)
Seen 22 March 2025 in the Brattle Theatre (Boston Underground Film Festival: Love to Love You Maybe, laser DCP)
I wonder how often actual porn actually involved paying off the pizza delivery man with sex, or if it's just one of those things that's so easily mocked that the parody establishes the cliché. That's kind of where this one starts, but it continually finds ways to pull it in odd and surreal directions, with a ton of pure visual innuendo in between. Although it's not exactly PG-rated innuendo, much of the time; it gets earnestly sexy just as it gets weird.
But there's a sort of weird method to this film's madness. Woody Coyote (who also co-wrote) comes in looking goofy in his mullet and cut-off shorts, but his dopiness isn't really stupidity, and the puppy-dog earnestness works for him. It's also amusingly class-conscious without making it a thing and winking at the audience, just a rich woman trying to get her pizza for free even though she lives in a large mansion and maybe becoming a bit more aware because of the working-class guy who is showing solidarity with every person who contributes to the pie.
It gets much weirder - my notes say something about a "bizarre pizza god" - but the oddity of it plays.
"The Streetlight"
* * * ½ (out of four)
Seen 22 March 2025 in the Brattle Theatre (Boston Underground Film Festival: Love to Love You Maybe, laser DCP)
Surrealism doesn't usually veer into sweetness as opposed to comedy like it does in "The Streetlight", and that's a shame, because there's something genuinely delightful about moving through the oddity of the world that we seemingly take for granted and coming out in a better place. Writer/director doesn't ask star James Milord to either take the strange events for granted or do a double take when a streetlight starts communicating in subtitled hums, including pointing out a chainsaw that just happens to be sitting nearby. She just lets him play it straight and gives the audience time to laugh in somewhat befuddled fashion.
And then, somehow, it gets to a point where you can see Milford's petty crook has maybe become a better guy and that the talking streetlight has had a glimpse of the wider world, reminding us of how most of us don't see far behind our horizon. It's an oddly positive and heartfelt ending for something that could be very screwy.
Sister Midnight
* * * (out of four)
Seen 22 March 2025 in the Brattle Theatre (Boston Underground Film Festival, laser DCP)
Where to stream it (when available
Stop-motion reanimation - is that a thing?
Being able to ask this question is a sign of just how fun the fun parts of the movie are, which carries through well enough that it doesn't really matter that there's not really a story here, but a chance to riff on various ideas. Sometimes that's good enough.
It starts off introducing the audience to Uma (Radhika Apte) and Gopal (Ashok Pathak), a couple settling into Gopal's studio apartment in Delhi (though "studio" makes it sound much fancier than it is). It's no love match - neighbors say they married the village idiot to the village weirdo, and neither of them are particularly ready for married life: Uma has to get curmudgeonly neighbor Sheetal (Chhaya Radam) to teach her how to cook, while Gopal seems terrified of touching his wife. Both wind up working long hours as much as to avoid the awkwardness of being together as needing the money, but becoming a creature of the night may just wind up making Uma a different sort of creature of the night.
The best part is probably lead actress Radhika Apte, whose Uma is delightfully cranky from the start, veering from curious to frustrated and back as she discovers her weird nature and explores it. She's funny and abrasive but has the knack for bringing that across without making Uma truly cruel. The movie takes a bunch of different directions, but she always seems to be on the right wavelength. There's a fun vibe where writer/director Karan Kandhari initially lets the audience assume Uma is smart because she is rebellious and unsatisfied, but average and abrasive women can feel that way too, and Apte turns out to be in over her head much of the time, but in a way that connects with the audience even if they're running ahead of her.
The supernatural material emerges roughly midway through and it's kind of enjoyably screwy, like filmmaker Karan Kandhari found a fun twist on vampires but didn't really find a vampire story to tell. Which is okay; Uma being a vampire of sorts means she never fits in and is never going to fit in but still wants to live some sort of life and there's something very relatable about how she might not figure out what being different means rather than being swept up into some community that is different in the same way. Story-wise things sort of go around in circles for a while toward the end; it's all neat takes, fortunately, but you can sort of see Kandhari kind of trying to figure out what she's going to do with these ideas without arriving at a final destination.
It looks nice, though, or at least the look is effective: The design crew finds ways for these tight places to work as spaces, and accentuate how drab some situations are without sinking into a bland brown. The soundtrack will often take a surprising turn into something bluesy or otherwise incongruous with the setting in a way that helps smooth things along. And the animation that shows up is kind of terrific, unusual and dynamic but not really showy - these creatures are a nuisance to Uma, so Kandhari and company make sure that they look neat but don't get big beauty shots.
Sister Midnight is kind of all over the place, but there's no denying the vibe is good, and when Kandhari gives Apte something interesting to do, it doesn't really matter how well the scene connects to the rest of the movie.
Alma and the Wolf
* ¾ (out of four)
Seen 22 March 2025 in the Brattle Theatre (Boston Underground Film Festival, laser DCP)
Note: There's really no way to say anything worth saying about Alma and the Wolf without getting into stuff about the ending, so consider this a SPOILER WARNING and keeps scrolling down to Re-Animator if that's a deal breaker.
Anyway… There are movies with unreliable narrators, and there are movies with so much "here's what really happens" as to make most of the movie feel like a waste of time. I'm not saying this movie is firmly in the second category, but it sure tilts that way, and in the most obnoxious way possible. There aren't many details that remain unmolested by the end, and I'm not sure how well I would think this was handled if the director hasn't been unusually forthcoming on what he was going for at the end rather than saying "obviously, every viewer will have their own interpretation."
As the film starts, Deputy Sheriff Ren Accord (Ethan Embry) is annoyed that a call to deal with Alma (Li Jun Li), an alcoholic young woman he knew in high school who claims that some sort of giant wolf killed her dog and then attacked her, might delay him seeing his son (Lukas Jann) pitch in the big game. It doesn't, quite, but a couple days later, when he's scheduled to have his son at home, he instead schedules a date with Alma. The teenager has a little dog too, and whatever attacked Alma soon makes off with the kid, leaving Ren and partner Murph (Jeremie Harris) to track them down, but things get very weird in the woods.
Is Alma and the Wolf good enough in the moment to survive what comes later? Maybe. It's got a number of good bits and as a result the movie it's pretending to be is entertaining while it lasts. Director Michael Patrick Jann and his crew capture the vibe of a small town that's starting to decay but is hard to escape, capturing good details without being too fussy. The practical effects are pretty darn decent, as is the screwy, jerry-rigged mythology of it, as far as that goes. He's good at changing up genres with half a wink.
At least, until it's time to start getting serious and into what the film is really about, and eventually revealing that most of what the audience saw before was distorted at best and outright lies in other points, and while I know that, in real life, people will sometimes construct elaborate narratives where they're the hero that don't have any basis in fact, something about Abby Miller's script or how the rest if the team stages it doesn't make the audience sit up in interest when the truth is revealed: There's effort put into building the fantasy but the reality is expected to be compelling just because it's more realistic, and characters have traits exchanged too wholesale to feel there's a thread connecting them. There are moments of the sort that make one wonder if somebody imagining an alternate history is really going to come up with neat supporting characters and banter in retrospect, which doesn't feel right when you get a good look at the truth of how it's being made up. The revelations have one great scene amid a bunch that are pretty mediocre.
It probably doesn't help that I don't spend enough time around drunks that I can't really react to Ethan Embry's performance (someone has to give an award-caliber performance as an alcoholic for me to really have it resonate as great). His character really only seems lived-in rather than broad a couple times for me, and most of the rest of the cast is just fine. Jeremie Harris might be a bit too good, making Murph into a character who feels consistent even when he probably should be discordant.
Alma and the Wolf wouldn't be a great movie if the twist wasn't so extreme as to break it into pieces - it's low-budget capable more than truly solid - but I suspect that I'm not the only viewer who really needs a movie to justify lying to me better than this manages.
Re-Animator
* * * (out of four)
Seen 22 March 2025 in the Brattle Theatre (Boston Underground Film Festival, 4K laser DCP)
Where to stream it, or buy the disc at Amazon (though an updated edition is likely coming soon)
I don't really know enough about 1980s horror to know that Re-Animator is actually a cut above its contemporaries or just feels like it, but you can certainly see why it's getting a fancy 40th anniversary release with guests when you watch it now. It's gross and occasionally goofy, but also just really solid craft beyond how everything from a few decades ago looked nice because it was shot on film and lit well.
It's nothing fancy, in a lot of ways, really; it's the sort of movie where you can see the filmmakers holding back a bit until it's time to get to the good stuff, but all the jumps and nasty stuff is quite well-staged when it actually happens. Jeffrey Coombs (looking impossibly young) nails this sort of mad scientist just starting out, where the amorality and theatricality doesn't really have experience behind it yet, a hungry Frankenstein shorn of the noble veneer. It's a star-making role if you don't mind being this sort of B-movie star.
The practical work has a certain simplicity but the filmmakers know just what to hide and what to keep in shadow even as it gets weirder, and it unnerves in proper Lovecraft fashion even when it's doing spook-a-blast stuff. Gordon and his co-writers have an exceptionally keen idea of what their audience wants, and there's seldom a bit of their gooey, entertaining violence that doesn't also have a cruel edge to it. Relatedly, I weirdly appreciate how much the movie seems to loathe the pervy older man David Gale plays, in that his nasty attitude is going to keep you from leering along with him at the pretty naked girl, which is not something these movies always manage.
Stuart Gordon knew what he was doing here.
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