By Nicole Veneto

This time around, I decided to go all in and totally movie-pill myself by seeing all 12 films in the feature lineup at the expense of my own sanity. Just kidding …

Boston Underground Film Festival, through March 24.

It’s finally March. The sun is out (sort of), the temperature outside no longer requires me to wear two layers of pants, and the Boston Underground Film Festival has returned once more to the Brattle Theatre for another year of curated genre films, indie gems, and gonzo cinema. This time around, I decided to go all in and totally movie-pill myself by seeing all 12 films in the feature line-up at the expense of my own sanity. Just kidding; I’ve come to love getting to spend a weekend basically living at the Brattle, like the little owl statue they’ve got stashed in the mezzanine. (Does he — or she! — have a name? Someone from Brattle please sound off in the comments, if so.) Plus the popcorn is good and I can buy wine from concessions, so it’s really a win-win situation despite having to take the Red Line into Cambridge every day.

Kicking off the festival was the most high profile selection in the lineup, Michael Mohan’s (The Voyeurs) Catholic horror film Immaculate, starring and co-produced by Sydney Sweeney, a woman whom many people are being incredibly normal about online (to paraphrase BUFF artistic director Kevin Monahan’s introduction). Given that one of my favorite movies ever made is The Devils, my standards for blasphemous horror movies about Catholicism’s innate barbarity are rather high. I had tempered my expectations for something marginally less incendiary, but Mohan is definitely no Ken Russell. In addition, at no point did I ever buy Sweeney as a nun, though that might be because I conflate her so much with Euphoria’s Cassie Howard (kinda like how it took a while for people to stop seeing Amanda Seyfried as Karen from Mean Girls).

Immaculate isn’t nearly as gnarly as it would like to be, yet when the reveal concerning the nature of Sister Cecilia’s miraculous pregnancy unfurls, I couldn’t help appreciating the hilarious stupidity of it all. It’s something straight out of an ’80s B-movie that takes a second to process before you burst out laughing. For her part, Sweeney shows a lot of potential as a Scream Queen. Immaculate mostly delivers on the public’s demand that she take on that kind of role ever since Cassie got trapped in that bathroom while hooking up with Nate Jacobs. I can’t say Immaculate earns Nicole’s Sicko Seal of Approval; but it deserves some credit for going the entertainingly trashy road instead of the metaphorically heavy-handed elevated horror route.

Sydney Sweeney is venerated in Immaculate. Photo: NEON

The new 4K remaster of Andrew Kam’s balls-to-the-walls Hong Kong action film Fatal Termination also premiered opening night to cheers, shrieks, and perhaps some ethical complaints (more on that in a sec). A contemporary of Tsui Hark and John Woo, Kam’s a director whose filmography has largely been unavailable in the West, which makes Error 4444’s brand new restoration a grand introduction to his particular brand of batshit crazy. The film stars Moon Lee and Ray Lui as married police officers who find themselves roped into illegal arms dealings — between gangster Ko Mok Fu (Philip Ko) and corrupt customs officer Wai Loong (Robin Shou) — after Loong pins the blame for an export of missing weaponry on Lee’s brother, Miu Chun-Fan (Kiu-Wai Miu). The first 40 or so minutes are pretty standard kick-punch-kick action fare, but then something truly insane happens: Fu has a bunch of goons abduct Lee and Lui’s young daughter Yan Yan from ballet practice by literally grabbing her by the hair and dangling her out the window of a speeding car. The scene is somewhat infamous due to the clear child endangerment involved in its making (if there was a disclosure in the credits that “no children were harmed in the making of this picture” then I couldn’t read it). But, at the risk of sounding like I support using children as pliable action dummies, I was howling with delight the entire time. And so was much of the audience for that matter.

The notorious chase scene from the Hong Kong action film Fatal Termination.

From the Democratic Republic of Congo comes Omen, the latest contribution to the recent swell of visually striking cinema from Africa. Like 2021’s Neptune Frost and last year’s Mami Wata, Congolese rapper Baloji employs magical realism to reckon with legacies of Western colonialism, focusing on their harmful impact on cultural tradition. It’s a film that pulls you along through a tapestry of images into an incredibly human story. On Easter weekend, interracial couple Koffi (Marc Zinga) and his pregnant fiancée Alice (Lucie Debay) visit the Congo so he can pay his father a dowry ahead of the birth of their twins. Their visit stokes anxieties from Koffi’s superstitious family — particularly his mother Mujila (Yves-Marina Gnahoua) — convinced that he’s brought the mark of the devil upon them. One of the biggest takeaways from Omen is that Marc Zinga is someone to watch. An actor who’s mostly been in nameless bit parts in films like Spectre and Mr. Nobody, Omen supplies Zinga with the sort of role that clearly befits his talents. Koffi is a man caught between two worlds; Zinga effortlessly communicates the character’s struggles with a mere glance and clench of his jaw. Hopefully Omen will put him on the map for meatier parts rather than “Pimp” or “Gay Man 1” (all actual roles he’s played).

Hamza Haq and Anna Maguire sharing a dance in With Love and a Major Organ. Photo: Circle

Kim Albright’s debut With Love and a Major Organ is on the lighter side of this year’s feature selections (read: no serial killers, no bug infestations, and no Juggalos). We are in an alternate reality where people’s hearts are inanimate objects and love is something to be managed by tracking apps and insurance agencies. Anabel (Anna Maguire, Violation) is a quirky, colorful artist whose emotional excesses stand out in a gray, overly managerial world. A chance meeting with the emotionally closed-off George (Hamza Haq, Viking) on a park bench blossoms into unrequited love, leading Anabel to literally rip her own heart out and send it to George in a beach cooler to escape the burdensome pain anyone whose emotions run deep knows. It turns out that George really enjoys experiencing the world with Anabel’s heart in his chest, leading his overly protective mother (Veena Sood) to seek Anabel out before her now vacant chest can cave in.

I watched my screener copy a few hours before heading out to see a showing of The End of Evangelion (a profoundly painful and personal film to experience) and found these two drastically different movies share many of the same astute observations about human connection and the fragility of human hearts. Though With Love doesn’t lean as dramatically into surrealistic whimsy as I’d have liked it to, it’s nonetheless a sweet little film that’ll connect with bleeding hearts everywhere.

A trio of upset people dealing with a mutant spider infestation in Infested. Photo: Shudder

Set in a dilapidated French apartment complex, Sébastien Vaniček’s Infested (Vermines) follows a group of underprivileged residents who must fight for survival when amateur entomologist Kaleb’s (Théo Christine) latest acquisition leads to a nasty outbreak of rapidly evolving spiders in the sealed off building. The pitch here is obvious — Arachnophobia crossed with Attack the Block — yet Infested never becomes as disgustingly gross as a French movie about a mutant spider infestation should be. I was expecting something more in the vicious vein of New French Extremity but the film is surprisingly restrained in terms of gore and body-horror. That’s odd, considering the director is currently attached to do an Evil Dead spin-off, although there’s some decent Raimi-esque camerawork to be seen whenever the picture isn’t underlit with that overly-dark Netflix color grading you hate to see. As a point of comparison, BUFF screened a restoration of The Nest a few years back, which features a lovely scene wherein a man’s cockroach-picked skeleton walks out of his own skin. Infested does its job as a creature feature though, and there are several engaging set pieces scattered throughout that show Vaniček has potential to helm a major Hollywood horror franchise. I’m sure if somebody showed noted giant-spider enthusiast Jon Peters this movie he’d gladly sign on to produce whatever else Vaniček’s got in the works.

And then there’s Strange Kindness from first time filmmaker and music video director Joseph Mault, which had its world premiere on Thursday night. Shot on location in Cape Cod, it centers on an injured nameless gunman (Michal Vondel, Tramps) who stumbles into the home of cancer patient Chris (Deirdre Madigan) while on the run from a town-wide manhunt following a mass shooting. Meanwhile, Chris’s caretaker Rose (Leanne McLaughlin) must reconcile with the sudden reappearance of her brother James (Kristofor Giordano) in her life.

Look, it’s a big responsibility to be one of the first people to establish a critical consensus for a brand new film that people clearly put a lot of effort into making but, god, this movie was so boring. First, the good: Madigan is great, carrying herself like an established actress with dozens of movies to her name rather than a dozen TV credits. As for everything else, it’s all just incredibly dull. Nothing takes place that feels as if it’s happening; there’s no tension whatsoever during the film’s 90-minute runtime. The proceedings wash right through you while you wait for something — anything — to happen, and it never does. It got to the point where I was getting more entertainment out of debating what kind of ramen I was going to get after the movie was over. Perhaps an interpersonal drama film like Strange Kindness just isn’t the right kind of movie for what audiences have come to expect from BUFF, especially considering the next six films I’ll be covering in the lineup.

So ends part one of my 2024 BUFF sojourn on a rather anticlimactic note. But rest assured, there’s more exciting stuff to get to and more Brattle popcorn to be consumed.

Nicole Veneto graduated from Brandeis University with an MA in Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies, concentrating on feminist media studies. Her writing has been featured in MAI Feminism & Visual Culture, Film Matters Magazine, and Boston University’s Hoochie Reader. She’s the co-host of the podcast Marvelous! Or, the Death of Cinema. You can follow her on Letterboxd and her podcast on Twitter @MarvelousDeath.