Fantasia 2026.03: Anime no Bento '26, Break Free, and Unidentified Murder

Pardon if today seems a little more scattered than usual; I left the apartment without my little five-inch square notebook and so wasn't making notes through most of the day, and that's not great when the first couple films of the day are Japanese shorts and new releases; Japanese studios just do not update English-friendly movie databases and there's a lag on the crowd-sourcing as well. I eventually wound up hitting Pharmaprix to grab pen and paper for the last show, but wasn't quick-thinking enough to record or photograph the English credits of Break Free.

Anyway, late start because the early afternoon was filled with panels and such more than screenings, so we kick off at the Museum with the Anime no Bento package:

Five filmmakers for seven films from Japan is a pretty decent turnout, although the scheduling meant there wouldn't be time for a Q&A - these packages are soon after the "My First Fantasia" shows, and genre festival staff in a museum cinema might not exactly specialize in getting families with kids in and out - so there was little time to do more than introduce director Taka Yuki from "Don't Dodge Life", "20001 An Earth Odyssey" creator Taiki Sakurai, "Echo" filmmaker Asuka Dokai, "Foxing" director Takeru Shinokuza, and Eit Mitsufuchi, who did basically everything on "Dust of the Simulacrum".

It didn't quite run late enough to bump into Break Free, with producer Yusuke Suzuki (CHECK), star Akito Fujii, and writer/ director Yu Nakamoto on hand. It was a fun Q&A, even if it was one where you get the sense of how bizarre it must be to fly halfway around the world to show your movie to a huge room of people who speak two different languages from what you understand, standing in front of them while they chatter and a translator occasionally decides a question is for you. Fujii, in particular, often seems to be listening intently for something he could respond to and then giving a very amusing answer when he got the chance.

It was interesting, though, as I gather the film kind of grew from Fujii starting a TikTok where he did dances in character as a yakuza (his character's cover story in the movie), with the studio boys eventually calling Nakamoto in saying they wanted him to write and direct a movie about a dancing gangster, which sounds pretty old Hollywood for a movie built around social media! Fujii, though he's got the look of a gangster, has been dancing since he was young, and said it was a bit of a challenge to dance crappy in earlier scenes. Nakamoto, meanwhile, answered a question about directing action versus dance by noting that sometimes the work of choreography is similar, but with action you are often doing pieces at a time, often with doubles, and camera work very much plotted alongside motion, while dance is often longer shots, no doubles, and the camera reacting to something more spontaneous.

After that there was an hour and a half or so until Unidentified Murder back at the Museum, time to do a little shopping and grab a slice of pizza. I think it might be the only new Hong Kong film at the festival - Blades of the Guardians probably belongs more to the mainland and there are three archive prints/restorations - which seems kind of crazy.

Next up, another couple big gaps on Sunday with Niko, the International Science-Fiction Short Film Showcase, You Are the Film, and Attack on Paradise. Tuesday looks to be Big Break, Levitating, Hayop Ka!, Someone's Daughter, and either Los Vampires or Solo, depending what the release plans for the former look like.

(And here's a look at how the sausage gets made if you're without a notebook or a pen but know you're not going to remember who is who the next day!)

"Echo"

☆ ☆ ☆ (out of four)
Seen 18 July 2026 in Cinema du Musée (Fantasia: Anime no Bento, DCP)

One from the "cute fantastical representation" school of animated shorts, "Echo" has a pair of twin children traversing a strange landscape, having crashed there in unusual escape pods of sorts, eager to meet their mother, with one more daring and apparently boasting greater stamina than the other. The twist is that they are as yet unborn, and in the outside world, their mother is not doing well, having lost her husband not long after discovering she was pregnant.

It's a lovely movie to look at, with cute designs that walk up to the border of perhaps overly whimsical without quite crossing it. I'm kind of torn on how directly I'd like weekdays happening with the twins to represent what's going on with the mother - they feel very disconnected here, but link them closer and suddenly there are implications best not examined!


"Future Kid Takara Episode 1: The Child From the Future"

☆ ☆ ☆ (out of four)
Seen 18 July 2026 in Cinema du Musée (Fantasia: Anime no Bento, DCP)

This is very clearly built for children, which is no bad thing, but it can be kind of hard to parse as an adult as a result. It's bright and earnest and full of entertaining designs and transformations, but is it too simplistic? Tough to judge, as an adult, especially without seeing more of the series. Little kids do need introductions to the idea of climate change, though, and they might as well be plain-spoken.

This one looks pretty cute, like it will combine fun adventure with good information, and I kind of love that the girl Takara meets in the past/our present looks like she might be an over-enthusiastic chaos source. The opening has a really nice vibe that feels a bit like it's trying be a bit of a spoof of the sort of thing parents thought was fun as a kid while also trying to be that thing for a new generation.


"20001 An Earth Odyssey"

☆ ☆ ☆ ¼ (out of four)
Seen 18 July 2026 in Cinema du Musée (Fantasia: Anime no Bento, DCP)

I am here for the joke about "it must have been used for religious rituals" in any form, which is good, because it basically does three of them as a family of alien archeologists examine a playground on an earth where humans have died out. It's a very fine example of how, if a joke is solid enough and you can tweak the execution just enough, there's a lot to work with.

The style of it is admittedly a bit after my time; in American terms it looks like NickToons from the 1990s or so. I suspect that it hits a sweet spot for kids and adults younger than me, even if the main 2001 reference is kind of corny.


"Don't Dodge Life"

☆ ☆ ¾ (out of four)
Seen 18 July 2026 in Cinema du Musée (Fantasia: Anime no Bento, DCP)

This one's a visually interesting bit of animation, although it probably makes a bit more effort reaching for profundity than it can really manage. Making the abstract concept of life a character can't help but oversimplify something that the other protagonist and potentially the viewer is really struggling with, and filmmaker Taka Yuki seems to struggle with what to do with the idea to make this a story.


"Ambivalent Garden"

Seen 18 July 2026 in Cinema du Musée (Fantasia: Anime no Bento, DCP)

Two days later, I don't recall anything about this one at all, despite the description and images on the site's pages being striking! Did I nap?


"Foxing: Kitsuné-tsuki"

☆ ☆ ☆ (out of four)
Seen 18 July 2026 in Cinema du Musée (Fantasia: Anime no Bento, DCP)

Write-what-you-know shorts can be dangerous, because they often reveal just how much young artists are pouring into their art to the exclusion of everything else. That's a bit of a weight on "Foxing" for a while, as filmmaker Takeru Shinozuka's avatar Shinano mopes about her work as an animator and how she feels unworthy in a way that's both familiar and also kind of tough to swallow for animation-lovers. We've seen young artists work themselves into and out of funks before, especially with some well-placed encouragement.

Still, the execution is really nice, especially once we meet her kitsune doodle come to life, Koyami. The expected metaphor reveal doesn't have quite so much pressure on it because Shinano has already commented on how much she's like a kitsune in some ways, but I really like the way Koyami is both pure ego and merciless criticism; She's obviously going to be an aspect of Shinano when the mask comes off, but I really like how Shinozuka doesn't separate these traits out into dueling avatars, because not only are both necessary for creating art, but they are more intertwined than usually presented.


"Dust of the Simulacrum"

☆ ☆ ¾ (out of four)
Seen 18 July 2026 in Cinema du Musée (Fantasia: Anime no Bento, DCP)

Filmmaker Eit Mitsufuchi pitched "Dust of the Simulacrum" as, among other things, an argument for working in the 3D CGI medium when the animation industry in Japan is still very much focused on a traditional style, but kind of seems a little too meta about it at times? It's not ReBoot or anything, but it's a lost video game character trying to dodge "bugs" that are overrunning a blank landscape, and I don't know if it ever gets beyond being too on-the-nose.

Oddly enough, it's a case where the human characters look nice enough but the bugs look like they could use a little refinement (although, potentially, to look jankier rather than more realistic), and it's another one where what's going on doesn't quite carry the ambition the filmmakers are trying to project.


Odore! Yakuza (Break Free)

☆ ☆ ¾ (out of four)
Seen 18 July 2026 in Théátre Hall (Fantasia Festival, laser DCP)

Break Free opens with text about how Japan's crackdown on organized crime has more or less crippled the yakuza as a force in Japanese life, and if it goes further, one wonders what the effect will be on pop culture. There will be movies like this, chronicling the fall in ways both serious and comic, but will there eventually be nostalgia for it? As much as filmmaker Yu Nakamoto has a great deal of sympathy for his characters, that doesn't extend to bolstering the institution, which is probably a part of what makes it work.

In it, Kunio (Akito Fujii) is 38 and has been a yakuza for twenty years, but the business of organized crime is not great - he's working as a food delivery driver and longtime comrades are struggling as mascots and trying to catfish - beyond how everybody is filming everything these days and it's very easy to get caught doing violence in public. Insulted by a lack of respect by a civilian, he improvises a sort of dance thing where he doesn't quite hit the guy, and it racks up millions of views. The gang decides to monetize this - an odd scheme where Kunio will present himself online as an influencer who is just cosplaying as a gangster, though the intimidation going on in the background is real - but he'll need some better moves, which means taking classes with former background dancer Marie. She, of course, is very cute, and Kunio starts to wonder if he wants more than a life of crime, even as a less organized but more vicious gang makes a play for their territory.

There's a song and dance man inside every tough guy actor - they weren't doing film noir and kung fu in high school drama class - but I don't know that anyone since James Cagney has really had the chance to be both, no matter how much Hugh Jackman wants to. It's treated as a bit of a joke when they do, and both Break Free and the TikTok channel of star Akito Fujii which inspired the film are playing on the incongruity of a guy who looks like Fujii dancing, but the joke hits so well at its best. Fujii's muscles are not quite bulky but he's not exactly wiry, and even when Kunio cleans up, he kind of looks and sounds like a schlub, so it's genuinely entertaining to see him suddenly move with seeming abandon (though I'm not sure he ever becomes quite so competitive in the dance battles as the plot requires him to be), or have the film suddenly double back and remind you of the gangster life he's trying to hide.

Not that I'd dream of spoiling those moments, especially when the best are a couple layers of absurdity deep, but they bring forth an explosion of laughter, enough to get past how a lot of the movie around them isn't quite so brilliant, coasting a lot on how good the high concept is rather than how any of the details fit together. At their best, though, the filmmakers are great at sending up how goofy something is and then doing a quick pivot to this other very silly thing, catching someone who is just making fun of the one element off guard as the thing they like better isn't spared.

And, underneath it all, this all works because it feels true that the violence of the yakuza is a dead end, even without the steps that the government is taking so that gangsters can't participate in legitimate society. The organization is dying and success requires one to either be completely monstrous (true or not, the yakuza often tried to present themselves as a useful part of society) or otherwise make oneself miserable. Being the kind of gangster Kunio and his friends see themselves as is not manly in the way it once was. Dance isn't either, but there's joy in it if not money or glory, and that's got more value than posturing like a gangster.

The movie fizzles a bit at times, Nakamoto may show violence as ultimately ineffective and obsolete, but he can't quite create the triumphant dance moment that the film needs at or near its climax. It's great fun to watch Fujii play against apparent type, though, enough for the best moments to carry the rest.


Unidentified Murder

☆ ☆ ☆ ¼ (out of four)
Seen 18 July 2026 in Cinema du Musée (Fantasia: Anime no Bento, DCP)

There's a fun bit at the end of Unidentified Murder where a newscaster is trying to recap what has come before and seems to feel that relating this idiocy is below her dignity, and she's kind of right, but the trick of the film is that, for all we the audience knows what was going on is screwy, it's not quite something that can be dismissed until the movie has finished walking right up to the line.

25 years ago, three kids went out to play and only two came back, saying their friend had been abducted by a UFO. 25 years ago Mark (Ling Man-Lung) and Kit (Ronald Lam) are going on some internet UFO programs to talk about how their friend Ho vanished, laughing dismissively at a host (Kenny Wong) bringing up how it was rumored they killed him. Mark's girlfriend Lau Man (Renci Yeung), who does YouTube pranks on Mark regularly, decides to hire an actor, Kim Chi-Fei, (Peter Chan) to pretend to be Ho and meet them at the site of the disappearance on the 25th anniversary, but, uh, why did Mark and Kit bring shovels - were they going to dig something up?

Suffice it to say, the film has a few more chances to bounce back in time to show what was really going on, adding more layers to its deceptions as it goes. The key, though, is that while Kim is in the middle of all this an explicitly hired to fake something, he is absolutely the most open and earnest character in the group, trying to come up with motivations for his character with three lines as he invested himself completely into something that Man has apparently put about seven seconds of thought into. He's a simple character but never really dumb; Peter Chan does an exceptional job of giving this oddball the right human frustrations.

The whole cast is like that, and it's impressive how, even as the film gleefully reveals how the audience doesn't have the whole story and things aren't as they seem, nobody in the cast has to completely switch things up and say that you were lied to. These folks are, by and large, pretty simple young folks and content creators who haven't grown into something more substantial, but even Renci Yeung's shallow YouTuber makes sense as a person and garners affection beyond not deserving to be murdered.

By the time it's finished, the screenplay has piled a lot of "here's something I didn't tell you before but which changes everything!" on, with some chips investigating the scene besides, but it remains clear and surprisingly linear, dishing out the new information at just the right time to not have to do a lot of sleight-of-hand to keep things out of the audience's sight. The chases and reveals go quick enough to keep things moving without there ever being much risk of missing anything, whether joke or information.

Filmmakers Kwok Ka-Hei and Jack Lee Chun-Kit have a good handle on how to thrive at this scale; the film sort of feels knowingly small, with roughly three or four locations, and doesn't try to trick the audience into it feeling bigger. The movie seems to speak the language of both classic farce and modern media-savvy internet video well, and gets good laughs from each of its about faces.

Fantasia 2026.02: Trauma or, Monsters All; "Yucky Guy"; Dance Freak; "Cardigan"; Mum, I'm Alien Pregnant; and Blaise

I started the day by misreading the time for Trauma or, Monsters All as 1:45pm rather than 1:15pm, which means when I got there at 1:30pm, the film was just starting because it had a nice long intro. I occasionally complain about that sort of thing causing films to bump into each other, but in this case it worked out for me, so I'll try not to whine later!

It did mean there wasn't a whole lot of time for the post-film Q&A with DP Sharif El Neklawy, producers Tilson Allen-Merry & Gaby Leyner, actress Aitana Doyle, and writer/director/editor/producer/co-star Larry Fessenden. One thing that sort of made my eyebrows go up but wasn't followed up on was that he called it "a late film and maybe a last film", which is a bit surprising - though a lot of folks are thinking about retiring at his age, artists generally have another decade or two in them - but as a producer, I suspect he knows the reality of his viability as a director. Horror's often a young person's game, and one of the things he did was thank Doyle and the other younger cast members for pointing out when he was behind the times, which she laughed at in a "yeah, we had to do that" way (as opposed to "Larry's just being silly and self-deprecating").

It was also apparently an unusually tricky shoot, even though he lives in the town where he shot it - not only did he have to find two houses right next to each other that had the right properties, but co-star Alex Breaux was doing Stranger Things on Broadway, which means he was only available to shoot on Mondays. It also meant getting the cast of Depraved and Blackout together, and while I suspect it's not as hard as it might be if you're based in New York and have a lot of friends like Fessenden, but with that schedule it's probably some work. That's also where he mentioned that James Le Gros doesn't really like horror, but they go back.

Next up: Justine Smith with Dance Freak director/DP Alan Resnick and director/writer/actor Robby Rackleff, and I must admit, though I like Justine a lot, when she's hosting a screening, it's probably the Underground section she programs, and that's kind of an empty-slot choice for me most of the time. I've enjoyed some, but that's getting lucky.

Anyway, I didn't really like their movie, and I sort of enjoyed their Q&A mostly as a comedy act where Resnick was the pro trying to make his friend look good. Sometimes you just aren't quite sure whether folks making a movie like this and taking it to festivals did it as a lark and are enjoying the ride even if they're kind of out of their depth, sort of contemptuous in an "I can't believe you paid money for this thing we crapped out" way, or doing a bit. It's usually the first, but, man, can this sort of thing not be my sort of thing.

Next up, crossing the street and having writer/actor Hans Obma of "CARDIGAN!" ask how many of us have ever heard Welsh, and, you know, I don't know if I've ever seen a short or a feature in Welsh before. His was fun!

It played before Mum, I'm Alien Pregnant, with "THUNDERLIPS" - Jordan Windsor (holding the alien baby) & Sean Wallace, because I guess music video guys have to also be named like a band - talking about how, yeah, it is kind of odd that a couple of dudes were making a movie about pregnancy and childbirth. Windsor pointed out that, once you have a kid (even as a father), you find out that every woman has some sort of horrific pregnancy story, and they made sure that they got a lot of outside input while making their film, and they requested to get more questions from folks who weren't dudes when the first few were guys. Aside from that, they mentioned that it took a circuitous path to production - they wrote a feature script, got told that it would sell easier with a short, so they pulled ten pages out, made a short, brought that to a Melbourne film market, and then got to make the feature. Hannah Lynch stars in both, and they said they cast her in large part because her personality is fairly close to Mary.

After that, I had some time to kill before heading up to the Museum for Blaise, amused to overhear in line that Nicolas Winding Refn had been at the Ultraman documentary because he's a major fan.

Next up, an oddly late start on Saturday with some gaps as it's mostly events before the "Anime no Bento" package, then Break Free and Unidentified Murder; Sunday looks like Niko, the International Science-Fiction Short Film Showcase, You Are the Film, and Attack on Paradise, with Blades of the Guardians, Pontypool, and Redline all recommended. Just a coupleof those weird days where you've got to stay in one screen to maximize movies but I'm apparently building in meal breaks.


Trauma or, Monsters All

* * ½ (out of four)
Seen 17 July 2026 in Cinema J.A. De Sève (Fantasia Festival, laser DCP)
One gets the feeling that Larry Fessenden had the idea for doing a crossover when he realized that Blackout would mean he'd directed vampire, Frankenstein, and werewolf pictures, but didn't necessarily have a great story when he started doing the work of a producer to bring people back, and one didn't come together when the schedules lined up. That probably makes the whole thing a little more meta than intended, with everyone sort of aware that they're in a monster mashup even if they're not quite winking at the camera.

He returns us to Talbot Falls, where historian Cassandra (Laëtitia Hollard) has moved looking for some quiet as she begins a book on George Washington Carver, taking a job in the library and making friends with Agnes (Aitana Doyle). Having read about the werewolf incident that took place a couple years ago, she begins to suspect that her next-door neighbor who locks himself in the basement during the full moon is actually Charley (Alex Hurt), whom everyone presumes is dead. Reading up a little more suggests that his housemate Adam (Alex Breaux) is the Frankenstein's monster that was said to beset a neighboring town a couple years earlier (in Depraved). Wanting to write about something in the present rather than from a hundred years ago, she pitches an editorial to the local paper about how the trauma of those events is like monsters in their midst, though Charley's girlfriend Sharon (Addison Timlin) is looking to get into contact with him. Not only does that raise the hackles of a lot of people who don't like an outsider coming in and trying to analyze them, but things like that get online these days, which attracts the attention of a biotech investor (Joshua Leonard) who has been looking for Adam, but also Sam (Larry Fessenden), who became a vampire 30 years earlier and is intrigued at the idea of other monsters relatively nearby.

If Sam's presence sounds kind of odd, it is; when Fessenden mentioned that this might be his next project after Blackout played the festival three years ago, it sounded like he intended to have Meredith Snaider from Habit return as Anna, but he apparently could not track her down or interest her in participating. I'm not sure she would have been a better fit, although the tone might have been different, since the exposition and "let me expound upon some themes" moments carry a different weight coming from the very recognizable writer/director of the film playing an earthier character than Snaider's Anna. Even taking that into account, there are an awful lot of people status-dumping more than conversing or acting, after doing things that the film needs even if they don't arise naturally, jawing about where things stand in the aftermath of Blackout, with Cassandra also spending a lot of time worrying about the book she's writing in a way that doesn't always feel like it connects to the rest of the story (and boy howdy, do people comment on how she's telling uncomfortable truths while being named "Cassandra" a few times). It's a scenario in search of a plot. Fessenden is kind of onto something in terms of poking around the idea of trauma and recovery, likening the end of a horror movie to a mass shooting/casualty event that scars a place and attracts outsiders trying to use it for their often good-natured but insensitive ends, but mostly winds up restating it rather than developing it.

He's put together a nice cast, though, especially in terms of the newcomers - young leads Laëtitia Hollard and Aitana Doyle are really charming, and although it can sometimes feel a little frustrating, there's something very real and earnest about the way Hollard's Cassandra naively stumbles and repeatedly uses "I'm just connecting what's already out there" as a shield. A hangout movie with Hollard and Doyle as these characters would be quite enjoyable, and that really helps when wheels are mostly turning in the background. The returning folks do a fair job of sketching out who they are in a little time, possibly enough that the exposition and flashbacks could have been cut back a bit. Alex Breaux is a standout as Adam, playing kind of simple and brain-damaged without doing Karloff or struggling to get words out to hammer that home.

There's a fair amount to keep track of happening kind of randomly, even if there's not a whole lot of actual horror movie action and gore for most of the film, with what there is feeling a bit obligatory even if it's well-executed. Even the climax seems like something a movie has to do rather than entirely where threads were heading, although Fessenden earns the emotions his finale is aiming to stir when they finally hit.

Would a little more time ruminating on the script have made Trauma a more fitting climax to 30 years of Fessenden putting his spin on classic monsters, or was the idea always more enticing than what could be pulled together from the previous three movies?


"Yucky Guy"
* * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 17 July 2026 in Cinema J.A. De Sève (Fantasia Underground, laser DCP)

What can I say, this is a sort of absurdity that doesn't really connect with me at all; I keep waiting for it go somewhere but it's really "'people sleeping through chaos in their grand but featureless mansion', 'dogs wearing diapers', and "tresspasser pees to mark territory' are funny" and not a whole lot else. I mean, sure, they are funny, but once the concept has presented itself, I just want a bit more than this movie does.

It's also 13 minutes long, and it kind of makes me think about how a lot of people don't necessarily need something to be funny to laugh, but it's sort of their default way of breaking tension, and a lot of this sort of comedy seems to confuse effect with cause.


Dance Freak

* * (out of four)
Seen 17 July 2026 in Cinema J.A. De Sève (Fantasia Underground, laser DCP)

A thing about a lot of "Underground" movies is that they're not just acquired tastes that may not match one's sense of humor or kink, but they are often actively unpleasant to watch under a lot of circumstances, such as sitting close to the front of the auditorium for Dance Freak. It's a grainy black-and-white film with frequent strobing made by viral-video specialists and probably meant to be viewed on a tablet or maybe a television, a contained rectangle rather than the entirety of what one can see. It's harsh to look at and the filmmakers don't really give an audience a lot of reasons to do that.

It introduces us to Obie (Robby Rackleff), a sort of sad sack whose girlfriend Dorty (Megan Koester) is running for office and starting to explicitly leave him behind rather than just by implication, and who is apparently mainly employed because everyone else at the office has forgotten how to access systems. He's trying to take up birdhouse building as a hobby, but it's not going that well. That's about the time when the Dance Freak starts showing up, somehow hypnotizing folks and deflating them while they are in their trance. A scientist at the lab where it was created, Dr. Dilly Gorgul (Sheila Mears) tells Obie it "looks just like you but is a separate entity" and then runs for the wasteland, mostly leaving Obie and Dorty to handle the situation.

Filmmakers Robby Rackleff & Alan Resnick give Obie the sort of surreal micro-budget film world where things are sort of empty and eccentric where we can see it though there are hints that it gets truly bizarre just out of sight, and that's good for a few good gags at worst and a fairly constant stream of chuckles if your mileage varies in that direction. The trick is often finding something that sounds not quite right in a particular way, such as names like "Obie" and "Dorty" and "Gorgul", and saying them with a straight face. It's easy to milk jokes like that too far; a street gang called "the Salad Boys" earns a chuckle when the name is tossed out but fizzles quickly when they try to play the gag much longer. A lot of the movie is deadpan where the silence after a joke without a punchline is held too long or they keep going, sure there's a bit that will convince someone that this is funny.

If the jokes in this sort of movie don't land, it can still work if there's something interesting to grab onto, but that's seldom the case here. Obie and Dorty are not particularly personable either individually or as a pair, and the idea of the Dance Freak doesn't quite coalesce, either as an awkward expression of Obie trying to feel joy or him draining/feeling drained by the world. It's like a whole movie based on the snidest reading of Peter Parker dancing like a dork in Spider-Man 3, and by the end, the storytelling is muddled - it's Obie's story, but he's out of action, and the chemistry between Obie and Dorty isn't enough to let her work as the lead later on.

There are a couple of bright spots - Sheila Mears actually gets to make Gorgul a character, giving a bit of a "knows what danger looks like" edge to her ivory-tower dorkiness - but I seldom found it funny enough to be worth looking at.


"Cardigan"

* * * ½ (out of four)
Seen 17 July 2026 in Théátre Hall (Fantasia Festival, laser DCP)

I don't want to belabor how much I enjoyed "Cardigan"; it's a five-minute short that doesn't quite have one joke but leans on its main gag enough that parsing it in a review can deflate it. But, as such things go, it's executed very well: Writer Hans Obma and Lois Meleri Jones hit the right notes as a couple that the audience can identify with when faced with something unfair but also just privileged enough that we feel like they may have something coming; Iwan John and Bethany Williams-Potter are an enjoyable odd couple as the police officers the run afoul of. The main joke of just how much this town identifies with its namesake clothing is goofily absurd and pivots to something that delivers a wry grin at the end.

It's a five-minute comedy sketch, but it's a good one.


Mum, I'm Alien Pregnant

* * * ½ (out of four)
Seen 17 July 2026 in Théátre Hall (Fantasia Festival, laser DCP)

Where the short that preceded Mum, I'm Alien Pregnant is adroit with its gag, the feature uses a sledgehammer, but it's got a target that can use a good sledging and seemingly never forgets something that a lot of absurd comedies forget, including one I saw earlier in the day: Make everything as weird as you want, because people and situations are weird, but do it by pushing something very familiar to an extreme that one can still recognize.

So we meet Mary (Hannah Lynch), nearly 30 and still living with her mother Cynthia (Yvette Parsons), who simultaneously harangues her for being a layabout but also doesn't give her any space whatsoever. Mary's got an odd kink in that she really enjoys tentacle hentai, which brings us to the neighbors, whom we meet as Ann (Jackie van Beek) tries to get her son Boo (Arlo Green) to do something other than masturbate in his room, seeing as that causes the power to flicker. When Mary and Boo bump into each other in the laundry room, she discovers that Boo was conceived when his mother was abducted by aliens, and he has the glorious tentacled genitalia of her dreams. They only agree to masterbate, but, well, his jizz is powerful, spraying across the room and dissolving her pants - and, apparently, alien fetuses grow faster than Mary can convince people she wants no part of being a mother.

Writer Jordan Mark Windsor and his co-director Sean Wallace don't mess around, letting the audience see what Boo's got between his legs in the first ten or fifteen minutes rather than playing coy, and it's kind of a brave decision, because it's going to be a while before they can really escalate from that sort of prosthetic weirdness. They don't retreat from it - among all the other fluids, Mary's morning sickness is a colorful, gooey mess - but it's not quite the movie where they're going to try to top the last crazy thing you saw every ten minutes, although when the climax comes, it's great, just as weirdly practical and weirdly organic as one might hope after setting the bar high at the beginning.

Part of the point may be to get a big early laugh that hooks the audience - this movie is weird and gross enough that its theatrical run might be limited, so you've got to give the folks streaming it something to whet their appetites at the start - but I suspect that part of it is how frankness is the engine driving the movie, and spending the next hour and a half letting the audience see all the ways pregnancy can wreak havoc on a woman's turned up to 11 isn't really compatible with getting cute about just what put Mary in this position. Windsor & Wallace are careful never to be scolding; Mary wears her kink on her sweatshirt even if she doesn't want her mother, Boo, or anything else all up in her business, and folks being matter-of-fact about things is seldom played as foolish. There's not really a villain here - all these people are trying to do their best by Mary and Boo even as they're confused and trying to act normal in the face of it, despite the situation being pretty darn abnormal.

The cast sells that great, especially Hannah Lynch, whose Mary is annoyed and sarcastic and winds up snapping at a lot of people but seldom comes off as mean; she's probably funny if weird under better circumstances. She bounces off Yvette Parsons's Cynthia well, the latter always seeming to take up extra space with a working class accent that you can see as a constant embarrassment to Mary. Cynthia herself is a contrast to Ann, all reserve and fear that puts a quiver in her voice when she tries to protect authority. Arlo Green gives a really nifty performance, exaggeratedly reserved and tentative at the start, but in a way audiences will quickly buy into, but doing a nice job of coming out of his shell as having an actual friend and a sense of responsibility displace shame.

The secret sauce might be the small army of folks playing doctors, nurses, pharmacists and the like who all deliver the right blend of disbelief, surprise, curiosity, and ultimately professionalism in the face of this bizarre pregnancy. As much fun as the gnarly practical effects are, a lot of what makes the movie work minute to minute is the mix of how health care can be an impossible bureaucracy to navigate despite being filled with individuals who mostly want to make things better on the one hand and how this crisis clarifies who these four people are, especially to themselves.

And it's impressively gross.


Blaise

* * * ½ (out of four)
Seen 17 July 2026 in Cinema du Musée (Fantasia Animation Plus, DCP)
Buy the original book en français at Amazon

Blaise is kind of a weird-looking movie, not quite the CGI equivalent of animating mouth movement onto photographs, but residing in a very particular spot in the uncanny valley where a still looks like it might be live action but looks more and more unreal and off-putting as you stare or watch it in motion, and that's the movie in a nutshell: Seemingly-relatable cringe comedy that gets very weird, very quickly, but still has the chops to get some big laughs.

Blaise Sauvage (voice of Timéo) is 16 and friendless at high school because he's more than a bit weird, but comes by it honestly - father Jacques (voice of Jacques Gamblin) is a ball of neurosis and mother Carole (voice of Léa Drucker) has a real knack for saying the wrong thing and being absolutely unable to explain her error and recover. They try to get him to reconnect with the daughter of Carole's friend Marisa, which leads to him getting dragged along to a party and protest where he meets Joséphine (voice of Nina Blanc-Francard), who crushes on him immediately but both make things needlessly complicated by pretending to be something they're not.

The film is co-written and co-directed by Dimitri Planchon, who created the original bandes dessinée, and it feels very much like a certain style of comics: It's made of a lot of little vignettes, as likely to end with a sort of unnerving ambiguity as a punchline, which helps the movie bounce around a bit, rather than get mired in the boringly serious moments that connect one funny bit to the next, very helpful for this sort of dry, French comedy where what's functional could dilute what's deadpan or transgressive without the viewer quite realizing why it's not as funny throughout as it could be.

That deadpan style puts a fair amount of responsibility on the voice cast, since the animation isn't going to help out with wild takes very often, so there's got to be a fair amount of nuance. Jacques Gamblin is maybe the standout, giving Jacques a sort of soft-spoken nervousness that adds to the slightly shaggy image on the screen, while Léa Drucker makes sure Carole seems (over) confident at home and then brings a hint of panic to her voice that doesn't quite contradict the professional mien at work. Timéo's performance as Blaise is kind of flatter, an introverted teenage drone, while Nina Blanc-Francard does a good poor little rich girl, sympathetic even as she's often kind of awful.

That all makes the film sound kind of small, offering a chuckle or two at most, but Planchon, co-writer Clémence Lebatteux, and co-director Jean-Paul Guigue both make sure that the film has outstanding timing and a satirical punch, often positioning the Sauvage's petty concerns against angry protesters in a way that makes the family look petty and thus more absurd even as a lot of the radicals are plenty ridiculous in their own way. There's not a misconception that they can't escalate into a disaster, with the path out of it both clear to see and impossible to take, and when all else fails, there's Chekhov's hand grenade threatening to take what is an irritation and make it literally explode.

It's a very, very funny movie, bouncing expertly between the squirms of recognition and belly-laughs of disbelief, and only enhanced by how it so often looks almost normal.

Independent Film Festival Boston 2026.01: I Love Boosters

Let's kind of not mess around here, because the festival wasn't.

Boots Riley, on hand and talking with Brian Tamm about opening night film I Love Boosters. Interestingly, it was just the two of them for the most part - no Jon Bernhardt on the theremin as we waited for showtime, nor last year's Keytar Bear, and while the post-film discussion for some of these higher-profile movies would often be led from someone from WBUR or other local media, it was mostly Brian & Boots fielding the questions directly.

Which isn't bad; what we got was probably more interesting than a semi-scripted chat, especially because there were a couple times you could see Brian about to select another question before the director remembered something else. It worked out in large part because he had interesting answers to some of the more groan-worthy questions. For instance, "I'm a film student, what lenses did you use?", which often gets a bit of a groan because most folks in the audience aren't that technical, and unless the director has been a cinematographer (which Riley has not), he maybe doesn't have that much insight into the choices. He pointed that out while also saying "Technicolor 2" and one other, but also mentioning that those particular lenses can be difficult to get hold of, but the folks at Technicolor are big fans of cinematographer Natasha Braier, and not only rented her those, but also some custom lenses that they were saving for the right project. In addition, Braier did a custom attachment that Riley apparently couldn't describe too completely because she's patenting it that created some interesting effects when shooting the scenes with LaKeith Stanfield besotting Keke Palmer's Corvette, which replaced some things they were planning to do in color timing. It locked them into a certain look early, which they seemed cool with.

Interestingly, it tied into another regular question, the infamous "what are your influences?" He didn't give the exact answer I'd always be tempted to ("every movie I've ever seen"), but that was the gist, with him pointing out that everything had two or three contradictory impulses in them, to the point where you couldn't really separate what the original ingredients to the stew in his head were. The most direct influences were less inspirational than technical; there were apparently a number of scenes where they only built the back wall for budget reasons, and they showed the studios other movies where they did this to show it was viable.

The last question someone asked was about how he's a self-described communist but both of his movies have been these big productions for corporations, and how he felt about it. The answer kind of tied back to how, earlier, he talked about how the activist community he grew in treated the arts as something distracting from the real work of revolution, and how early in his career he actually stepped away from music because it didn't feel like something an adult did, getting back to it when he realized that a lot more people were getting his message through the music than specifically activist work. Sorry to Bother You started as a more conventional sort of radical/independent cinema, but like his music, it got weird as he kept writing, and eventually it just wasn't going to be made as a small independent collective, and if you're going to make something that requires people to work on it for four months, there's got be someone paying them. He'd like to do something small someday, but that's just not how his creativity fires right now.

Anyway, a lot of fun, even before he started directing the staff and audience to get a very specific audience selfie. Movie opens wide on 22 May, and as he pointed out, the 2,000 screen opening means you've got to find your large audience right away, where there wasn't so much pressure on Sorry to Bother You's platform.


I Love Boosters

* * * ½ (out of four)
Seen 22 April 2026 in Somerville Theatre #1 (Independent Film Festival Boston 2026, 4K laser DCP)
Where to stream it (when available), or Riley's original album at Amazon

The fun thing about Boots Riley's movies, at least for some of us, is that they start out as broad 2000AD-style satire of something fairly specific, and then launch into much weirder orbit as they go on. Sometimes, it can seem like he's got more ideas than he has time to make movies, but at other times, you wonder if it's the point: That this awful, ridiculous thing is intertwined with a number of things that are even more terrible and insane, and you can't tell the story you started from without exaggerating everything else the same way. The result is often so maximalist as to make a viewer's head spin, but also a good time.

It centers around Corvette (Keke Palmer), a would-be fashion designer who instead runs a booster ring with friends Sade (Naomi Ackie) and Mariah (Taylour Paige), shoplifting designer clothing in bulk and selling it at affordable prices in open-air pop-us. She's a huge fan of designer Christi Smith (Demi Moore), but takes a job in one of her Metro Design stores to case it, on the rumor of $100,000 suits, and plans something bigger when she realizes Christi has stolen one of her weird designs she posted online. That's before a worker from Christi's Chinese factory, Jiansu (Poppy Liu), shows up with even bigger ambitions, and not taking into consideration the peculiar staff at the shop (Will Pouler, Eiza González, Najah Bradley), a dizzingly handsome catalog model (LaKeith Stanfield), or a motivational speaker (Don Cheadle) recruiting for a pyramid scheme.

Boosters seems kind of overstuffed, but perhaps by less than one might think. Its bright colors and crazy costumes which get switched up repeatedly during montages increase the intensity of what the audience is seeing but it's not actually more than they can take in, and almost every crazy new element and twist Riley adds has a clear place; with even the headier science-fiction elements (which he does in fact slow down a little bit to explain) pretty directly talking about blurring the line between homage and appropriation and synthesis & deconstruction in art. It's loud and bizarre and one can maybe lose track of what the goals are by the end of the film because Poppy's story is clearly bigger than Corvette's even though the latter is obviously the main character, but it never gets truly out of hand.

It's hilarious from front to back, though, with Keke Palmer trying to get out of Christi's bizarrely canted apartment some of the best slapstick since Ryan Gosling stumbling around a bathroom stall in The Nice Guys as an example. The jokes and general strangeness come at a rapid pace, with recurring bits not quite in the background and an ability to do deadpan without necessarily slowing down and pausing. Riley has come up with a lot of gags that fit the setting and fits them into the script without necessarily twisting the story but letting them be weird enough that the audience can appreciate them individually. Similarly, there's a lot in the movie that is more tactile than it might be in others - the credits reference both miniature and stop-motion units - but without necessarily making a point of how practical effects are inherently better than digital ones; Riley has a good handle on how to have the medium enhance the material without itself taking the focus.

He's also assembled a cast that can work at his breakneck comedic pace but also give us some emotion under the frantic nature of it: Keke Palmer makes Corvette cool despite a lot of insecurity, and Demi Moore understands the assignment by making Christi the reverse, kind of a nervous dork under her brash entitlement (between this and The Substance, it's kind of odd seeing Moore committing to weird parts because she always seemed such a carefully mainstream movie star in her 1980s/1990s heyday). Eiza González and Poppy Liu are both firehoses of exposition and activity, while LaKeith Stanfield is almost soothing as he calmly delivers some of the movie's most bizarre material. Nobody here is being subtle, but they all feel human and kind of well-rounded in Riley's weird world.

Boston Underground Film Festival 2025.05: "Ragdoll Dance", Best Wishes to All, Fucktoys, and Escape from the 21st Century

Shorts People!

Honestly, there could have been two groups like this, but even when I don't do the Saturday midnight, I usually look at that Sunday noon slot and wonder if I'm going to be up for rolling out of the bed without an alarm, doing some crosswords, having a big ol' bagel or donut, and making it to the Brattle by the start. I don't pre-order in case there are folks who really want to see this particular "existential" shorts package, and I don't think I've made the first shorts package on time since the festival started having this scheduling template. Certainly not since the pandemic.

I did not take good notes for this, and IMDB lists a lot of producers for Fucktoys (hey, I think this is the first blog post with cussing in the title that might wind up in my teenage nieces' social media feeds!), so I apologize for saying this is a guy I don't know, writer/director/star Annapurna Sriram, someone else I don't know, co-star Sadie Scott, and festival programmer Chris Hallock.

It was a fun conversation, because this was obviously a very low-budget movie and there was therefore a lot of talk about just how much of it was thrifted in and around New Orleans, or shot without permits and the like. The film hit various pandemic and hurricane-related delays, but, one has to admit, there are times when you can't imagine it taking place anywhere else.

Sriram also spent a lot of time talking about how the heart of the film is how, when you're young, especially a young woman, you can sort of know danger but kind of blithely go ahead anyway, and this was about when a person's luck runs out, and how you recognize that and react.

And with that, BUFF is finally wrapped up, and I've blown right past IFFBoston. Here's hoping that is finished before it's Fantasia time!


"Lilly Visits the Hospital"

* * ½ (out of four)
Seen 23 March 2025 in the Brattle Theatre (Boston Underground Film Festival: Ragdoll Dance, laser DCP)

"The Bum Family" shorts are kind of BUFF tradition by now - I feel like we've seen them at every festival going back to before the pandemic - and, honestly, they've never been my favorite things in the package, very much "I'm glad you guys had fun making this but I'd never seek this out on my own". As usual, it's got some fun gags and some that feel inside. I kind of feel like this one has the characters feeling a little more self-aware of their weirdness than previous shorts have - not entirely planning to be an agent of chaos instead of just being one while trying to be normal, but with more of that than usual.


"Les Bêtes"

* * * * (out of four)
Seen 23 March 2025 in the Brattle Theatre (Boston Underground Film Festival: Ragdoll Dance, laser DCP)


I loved the heck out of this at Fantasia last summer, and seeing it a second time months later maybe shaves a little of the novelty off but sharpens the satire a bit - one goes from laughing at the darkly comic awful ways that the aristocrats treat the macabre but lively little animated performers that are brought into the castle to feeling the callousness, especially in the performative cruelty of the little impressario who thinks it will bring him closer to his human masters. No, guy, you're one of the creatures to them.

It makes for a delightful little short, though, as filmmaker Michael Granberry and his crew make a bunch of Weird Little Guys and have them perform, do nifty character animation on the aristocrats, and use the petty bourgeois envy of the folks in between as a catalyst to something more destructive that constantly moves between horrifically destructive and satisfying bits of small-scale revenge. There is something especially powerful about a stop-motion film that ends in flames; for all that one knows that there were probably multiple copies of each little figure made, there's a special horror to the destruction and sense of the miraculous in what survives.


"Peeping"

* * * (out of four)
Seen 23 March 2025 in the Brattle Theatre (Boston Underground Film Festival: Ragdoll Dance, laser DCP)

Four minutes of odd that kind of looks like either the hardware or software used for rendering could use an upgrade in a way that may be deliberate, to give it a bigger underground/raising a fist to the man feeling. The premise is pretty straightforward and not going to be misread - folks just trying to have fun and do picking themselves apart to please a censorious authority - but some of the designs are neat and it's not trying to do too much.


"Pocket Princess"

* * * (out of four)
Seen 23 March 2025 in the Brattle Theatre (Boston Underground Film Festival: Ragdoll Dance, laser DCP)

This one's a neat stop-motion tale that feels like it's adapting a lesser-known fairy tale, one which makes it pretty clear that the cruel priest uncle isn't just an unsympathetic taskmaster but almost certainly molesting his niece, which makes its Grimm-ish finale something between a horrible nightmare and an escape. I suppose that's what makes a lot of those original-recipe stories work sometimes - looking at the world's horrors and admitting that sometimes the only escape you can construct is mental.

It's also kind of nifty-looking, really knowing how to make its various characters have the right balance of innocence and malice, and also making the fantasy world that Anna retreats into both fraught and tight, even when it might seem relatively bigger.


"Pippy and the Typist"

* * * (out of four)
Seen 23 March 2025 in the Brattle Theatre (Boston Underground Film Festival: Ragdoll Dance, laser DCP)

Look, it's got a moment where the main character dropkicks the person controlling the world's actions from the magic typewriter, and that's quality physical comedy. I'm not sure its meta hijinks ever get quite that funny again, but it puts in the effort, very much dedicated to chaos and the idea that just because you're a cartoon character, you may not actually know the best way to deal with cartoon characters, especially if you're already vindictive about your prior bad situation.

"The House of Weird"

* * (out of four)
Seen 23 March 2025 in the Brattle Theatre (Boston Underground Film Festival: Ragdoll Dance, laser DCP)

It's not a hard-and-fast rule, but generally speaking, what you get when folks self-describe themselves as "weird" ever since the original Weird Tales ceased publication isn't great (yes, there's nuance to be had here, but this is a review of a 4-minute short), even if you can see folks having fun and want to applaud that. That's more or less what "The House of Weird" is - filmmaker Mark Reyes and friends screwing around with various tools to create series of funky looking rooms in a house that doesn't exactly open geometric law, and maybe trying to say something about how today's world is incomprehensible and like an escape room you can't exit, but mostly coming off as lightweight oddity for the same of oddity. But, hey, it's a first film, and maybe a learning experience.


"Poppa"

* * * (out of four)
Seen 22 March 2025 in the Brattle Theatre (Boston Underground Film Festival: Ragdoll Dance, laser DCP)

Hmm.

Yep, weird, but it builds up to the one joke you can fit into its two-minute runtime, and there's something really pleasant about its 1990s TV animation style that makes the gross bits work a little better.


"The Garden Sees Fire"

* * ½ (out of four)
Seen 23 March 2025 in the Brattle Theatre (Boston Underground Film Festival: Ragdoll Dance, laser DCP)

Another bunch of weird little guys, but drawn out trying to create a sense of importance. Mostly well done, I suppose, but 15 minutes is a lot of abstract weirdness.


"Red Thumb"

* * * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 23 March 2025 in the Brattle Theatre (Boston Underground Film Festival: Ragdoll Dance, laser DCP)

An impressive dark fantasy that does nice work combining story, allegory, and world-building into a tight space.


"Demons in the Closet"

* * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 23 March 2025 in the Brattle Theatre (Boston Underground Film Festival: Ragdoll Dance, laser DCP)

One-minute stop-motion horror story, riffing a bit on Army of Darkness, perhaps. Might have taken months to do, but works out pretty darn nice.


"A Walk in the Park"

* * * ½ (out of four)
Seen 23 March 2025 in the Brattle Theatre (Boston Underground Film Festival: Ragdoll Dance, laser DCP)

I can't seem to find the particular Jay Marks who made this one on IMDB but I hope folks in Hollywood are noticing this short because he certainly seems like a guy where you try and recruit him for something bigger, whether in animation or live-action. He's got a really good knack for building eerie atmosphere into blockbuster action, makes a twist into a deeper horror work, and inserts comedic bits in that don't undermine the sort of story he's telling.

It turns out to be the sort of big, slick banger that tends to be the grand finale for one of these blocks, except…


"Howl if You Love Me"

* * * ½ (out of four) Seen 23 March 2025 in the Brattle Theatre (Boston Underground Film Festival: Ragdoll Dance, laser DCP)

This is also a great one, a zippy little cartoon where a couple manages to work around the lady's lycanthropy until the werewolf hunters come and make everything worse. It's upbeat and adventurous with a fine score and plenty of comic relief from their little dog, and despite the lack of dialogue and the cartoon character designs, there's a moment or two that really captures the best bit of werewolf stories, where someone is absolutely terrified of what their conditions will do to their loved ones. It's also built up in such a way that we can really enjoy the final rampage.

Genuinely fun note to end the package on.


Mina ni sachi are (Best Wishes to All)

* * * (out of four)
Seen 23 March 2025 in the Brattle Theatre (Boston Underground Film Festival, laser DCP)

Where to stream it (when available)

Best Wishes to All is quality Japanese "the world is somewhat askew from what you think" stuff, although very much the sort where I kind of want an argument to be raised with its premise at some point, even if it ultimately fails. This lady wants to push back on nihilism, but doesn't really get a chance to try.

The young woman in question (Kotone Furukawa) is visiting her grandparents for the first time in years while on break from college, with her parents and brother expected to join them soon. Something seems off, though, compared to when she visited as a child; there are strange noises, and a mysterious locked door at the end of the upstairs hallway. Eventually, what she finds shocks her, and the reaction of everyone around her but one childhood friend shocks her even more.

What she discovers doesn't really make sense, but that's exactly the point of this sort of Twilight Zone-ish story: Director Yuta Shimotsu and co-writer have a broad idea here, that the price of one person's happiness is another's suffering, and will generally always err on the side of the mechanism being vague and the feeling being authentic than trying to construct a perfect, detailed set of parallels. The discovery is a quality slow burn, though; the filmmakers have a nice way of raising flags right away so that the audience gets a feel for what they're in for but not the how, so the audience is kind of poking around the corners trying to see what's coming. When things get definitively weird, it gets more ominous.

It's also got quite the nice lead performance from Kotone Furukawa; she quickly sells the audience as a likable, down-to-earth student and recoils in horror well, but she's good at the middle part, too, where the heroine is between the horrible discovery about her world and anything she can possibly do about it, processing without looking blank. There are plenty of complementary folks to make it work, too: The too-friendly grandparents, the friend who knows what she doesn't and suffers more for it, the recluse who had the same reaction she did and had it drive her mad. The performances as a group sell the idea of a world that is (probably) different from ours in one very important way but can seem like it isn't twisted into unrecognizability, at least on the surface level.

It does kind of get scattered toward the end, sort of tossing in every sort of symbolic idea for how this works semi-randomly rather than building something that feels like it could actually be the case or has interlocking bits of meaning, which would be nice. It's effective for most of its hour and a half, though, and doesn't stretch out past that enough to undo it.


Fucktoys

* * * (out of four)
Seen 23 March 2025 in the Brattle Theatre (Boston Underground Film Festival, laser DCP)
Where to stream it (when available)

Fucktoys is probably the most cheery example of this sort of proudly disreputable movie - the type where you can imagine the folks involved taking each gasping patron who flees the theater out of shocked propriety as a sort of victory - that I can recall seeing. It's all sex workers on the margins of a place that is pointedly already marginal, but is never really looking to make the audience feel like they're slumming it, even when it eventually gets to the point when the candy coating starts to wear off.

AP (Annapurna Sriram) is one of them, a sort of flighty young woman who has been able to earn all she needs to get by selling sex she kind of wasn't opposed to having anyway when she feels like it. The thing about trusting fate in that way is that a girl can wind up in a panic about what fortune tellers say, specifically that her recent run of bad luck is due to a curse, and that she needs to earn some money quickly in order to hire someone to get it off her. So, with the help of friend and lover Danni (Sadie Scott), who just got out of jail, she hops on her scooter and starts looking around Trashtown for ways to earn some quick bucks, though her scatterbrained nature means she often finds herself at the same place she started, if not further behind.

That the movie generally seems to be going somewhere is a neat trick, because it's a story that requires a lot of episodic bouncing and things sort of sinking to a slightly lower low that would kind of die if it stopped being fun despite the trajectory. Writer/director/star Annapurna Sriram does impressive work in all three areas keeping the energy up, playing AP as the right sort of dim but scrappy-sweet girl who can keep forward momentum for 100 minutes without slowing down for the audience to question anything and keeping things upbeat despite the absurdity. Sadie Sweet is a good foil for her, harder-edged but on the same wavelength, and there are a few other one-off types who match the vibe, notably Danian Young as a politician too genuinely nice for his own good and François Arnaud as a high-roller who might be able to solve AP's money problems himself.

The film is often stripped-down to an extent that approaches surreal, never more so than when hanging out in AP's "bedroom" in the middle of a field - is this literal, the way AP perceives homelessness that includes freedom, or something else again? The film is full of stripped-down locations and characters that could fit some version of them. Sriram lets them move blithely along, suggesting that the inconveniences of living hand to mouth more than make up for being smothered under patriarchal, moralistic expectations. Even a square like me can understand where AP is coming from.

The film is, however, ready for the conclusion it winds up reaching, which delivers the right emotion for every moment after the twist that sets out on a new course. Sriram shows a really steady hand here to make a point without the topical moralizing, and the poetic license taken at that point feels earned even as it lets her not go into what could have been a lot of details about how things would play out that the audience neither need nor wants. The big twist is jaw-dropping for all that it's maybe been in plain sight despite how the vibe is very much anti-twist, and she shows as much skill turning a screw as she had deliberately not doing so.

Some folks are still probably going to opt out pretty quickly; Sriram is certainly not making any effort to include a big, mainstream audience here. It's good work, though, whether she intends to ever make movies for the more easily-upset or not.


Cong 21 Shi Ji an Quan Che Li (Escape from the 21st Century)

* * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 23 March 2025 in the Brattle Theatre (Boston Underground Film Festival, laser DCP)
Where to stream it (when available) (Prime pre-order link)

Even folks who like and watch a lot of imported movies often tend to forget about the foreign film filter - that they often look better or classier because, with only so much demand for them outside their native territory, only the best or most mainstream cross borders in any meaningful way. China produces a ton of movies, though, both for theaters and its big streaming services, to entertain its population of 1.4 billion, but it's a rare thing for something as decidedly odd as Escape from the 21st Century to push its way into North America in even the tiny way it's managing.

It opens in the summer of 1999 on "Planet K" (which is basically Earth but pointedly not so, which I imagine gets you a little more leeway with the censors), introducing the audience to fat kid Paopao (Kang Qixuan), his dumb friend Wang Zha (Chen Yichen) with a "Hong Kong" wig for hair, and their buddy Wang Chengyong (Li Zhuozhao), who is super-popular, dating the gorgeous and equally popular Yang Yi (Ma Fanding), and will fight anybody who tries to get between them. That's how they wind up exposed to a weird chemical that allows them to take the places of with their future selves while their teenage bodies are unconscious - but in 2019, Paopao is now not only a hunk (Leon Lee Chenhao), but he's the one dating Yang Yi (Zhu Yanmanzi); Chengyong (Song Yang) is gangster working for a mysterious Boss (Wen Zhengrong); and Wang Zha (Zhang Ruoyun) is a photographer partnered with reporter Liu Lianzhi (Elane Zong Chuxi). Worse, they find out that this dystopian world where they're at odds with each other may be their fault, and they may even be putting their past lives at stake!

Story-wise, this movie is wobbly as heck; there's a good sort of time-travel farce set up in the idea that Paopao and Wang Zha are determine to keep the extremely jealous Chengyong from finding out Paopao and Yang Yi wound up together in both the present and future, but it doesn't really work, both because Yang Yi never really becomes enough of a distinct character of her own to make the answer interesting (as is wont to happen to girlfriends in movies about three or more male buddies) and because that piece is mostly a way to get these kids to stumble around and get into bigger trouble, which could have dire consequences for planet K, although it's the sort of "paradoxes just sort of make things blow up for reasons" sort of time travel trouble as much as anything really clever.

Still, that all leads up to an absolutely crazy, apocalyptic climax, with Bonnie Tyler singing "Holding Out for a Hero", missiles flying, characters sneezing themselves between 1999 and 2019 to try and keep a henchman from becoming too good at Street Fighter, and even more ridiculous things. Writer/director Li Yang throws the whole kitchen sink at the audience at hyperspeed with visual effects that do their level best to pull off every gonzo thing in his head, and he mostly does it without the audience getting lost. That doesn't mean one necessarily knows what's happening, but you can keep track of what the various characters are doing and what their individual stakes are, with nobody getting left behind.

Of course, the whole movie is cranked up to eleven even before this The present and the past have different aspect ratios, the film will become animated when live action is simply not sufficiently trippy for what's going on, and why settle for larger-than-life when one can be absurdly larger-than-life? It's exhausting at times and often both over-complicated and without room for nuance, but it's seldom boring, and it really helps that the teenage and adult actors do an excellent job of staying in sync rather than letting the two time periods get away from each other.

It's weird, maximalist filmmaking that was probably lucky to hit the festival circuit and gather up people to tell their friends they won't believe how nutty it is rather than try to cram that into a high-pressure worldwide release.

Boston Underground Film Festival 2025.04: "Love to Love You, Maybe", Sister Midnight, Alma & the Wolf, and Re-Animator

Shorts People!

I often talk about how BUFF is scheduled tight, and that means there's not really any Q&A after shorts programs any more, and barely have time for introductions, so I didn't get names. I think the two folks at the right did "Banjo", but, otherwise we just zipped through this. I don't even recall seeing a YouTube Q&A this year like in previous years (although my YouTube feeds and the social media that might point them to them aren't great at the moment).

Didn't get the name of the emcee, but that's Alma & the Wolf Michael Patrick Jann on the right and his son Lukas Jann, who acted in the film, in the center.

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.

Hey, it's Barbara Crampton and Michael Gingold, having a post-film talk about Re-Animator, which looks great and is going to have a super-nice 4K disc in a month or two. I'm not necessarily sure that there's a whole lot to say about Re-Animator that a lot of the folks not seeing it for the first time haven't heard - it's 40 years old, various labels have released anniversary editions with special features and associated anniversary articles showing up in print and online every five years since 1995 or so, with many of the folks involved participating over that time. Crampton has embraced the role of horror's cool aunt since coming back from taking some time off from acting about fifteen years ago, so she's probably talked about it and other things she's a lot: She said "don't ask about Chopping Mall", but someone asked about Chopping Mall, and there was a kind of groan when some guy asked about shooting the big finale where she's lying naked on a on a gurney while there's chaos all around her. I kind of wonder if it might have landed better from a woman, although maybe there's less "what's that like, I can't imagine" coming from that direction.

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.