By Nicole Veneto

Even if the closing film was a complete and utter bust, I had a blast seeing some really great movies with fantastic crowds. See you next year, and as always, stay weird Boston.

Boston Underground Film Festival (closed). Dispatch #1

Welcome back to my coverage of the 24th annual Boston Underground Film Festival, Boston’s premiere movie-marathon for people who cheer at child endangerment and spiders eating cops.

Sara Montpetit raids the fridge in Humanist Vampire Seeking Consenting Suicidal Person. Photo: Drafthouse Films

Ariane Louis-Seize’s Humanist Vampire Seeking Consenting Suicidal Person scratched an itch for supernatural romcoms I’ve had since Lisa Frankenstein. Meet Sasha (Sara Montpetit, Falcon Lake): she’s a teenage (68 years young) vampire with an empathetic streak that makes it impossible for her to harm humans. Meet Paul (Félix-Antoine Bénard): he’s a suicidal high schooler who works at a shitty job at a local bowling alley and deals with bullies who put nacho cheese in his shoes. The two cross paths at a depression and suicide anonymous group and strike up an arrangement; Paul will willingly give his life to satiate Sasha’s hunger after her parents cut off her blood supply. But first, Paul has some last wishes he’d like Sasha to help him fulfill before dawn. Humanist Vampire is nothing short of delightful; left me grinning the whole way through. It’s Let the Right One In (another one of my favorite films) by way of Submarine, a deadpan comedy about two lonely people finding just what they need in each other. Hardly a moment passed without the theater audience roaring with laughter. Montpetit and Bénard are excellent as the leads — both possess the wide-eyed stare of two spooked owls. For a movie dedicated to the loneliness of vampires, Louis-Seize’s quirky debut is a warm-blooded affair, so charming and funny it’ll thaw the coldest of hearts.

Nathan Stewart-Jarrett in Femme. Photo: Agile Films

There’s always a film in BUFF’s lineup that someone recommends to me with full-throated enthusiasm. This time around it was Sam H. Freeman and Ng Choon Ping’s thorny erotic thriller Femme. Months after drag performer Jules (Nathan Stewart-Jarrett, Candyman) is attacked by a group of homo/transphobic lads after a show, he encounters one of his assailants — the heavily-tattooed Preston (George MacKay, 1917) — at a gay bathhouse. Still struggling to put his life back together after the attack, Jules concocts a plan for revenge by seducing Preston and leaking their sex tape online. But that’s easier said than done once feelings begin to develop. Though marketed as a piping-hot queer revenge tale, Femme turns out to be an antithesis to the liberatory prospects offered in the equally excellent Love Lies Bleeding. Femme does something incredibly challenging that I’ve never seen any movie about queer lives ever attempt: it asks you to hold pity towards someone who’s committed a hate crime.

The film is ultimately a tragedy of human connection — for all their chemistry, Jules and Preston’s relationship is doomed from the start. Perhaps in another life without any of the patriarchal or societal factors that led the deeply closested Preston to channel that repression into hatred, things could have been different. But in order to love somebody you must love yourself, and Preston doesn’t. Stewart-Jarrett and MacKay give masterful performances, and by the time the power dynamic between them does a 180° I was on the edge of my seat. Femme is a difficult film that will prove too painful for some, but it immediately became one of my favorites of the year.

Jon Oswald, Scott Turner Schofield, and Ashley Smith conduct a seance in Off Ramp. Photo: The Coven

After being bowled over by Moon Garden last year, I’ve come to expect at least one “little movie that could” at BUFF.  This year my excited discovery is Nathan Tape’s Juggalo road trip movie Off Ramp. Fresh off a stint in jail for defending his adoptive brother Silas (Scott Turner Schofield with Coolio hair), Trey (Jon Oswald) is itching to return to the yearly Gathering of the Juggalos without risking any more run-ins with the law. But their sojourn from Mississippi to Ohio to perform their rap demo for a live audience takes them to unexpected places, namely a trailer park run by a paraplegic, breast-milk drinking ex-Juggalo (Jared Bankens) in cahoots with a couple of psychotic county sheriffs (Reed Diamond and Miles Doleac). The result is a film that’s deranged, crass, overly-violent, and sweet to its core. There’s a clown-painted heart of gold on Off Ramp’s chest that holds absolutely no disdain for a subculture so drastically misunderstood that the FBI classified them as a gang back in 2011. For as wacky and demented as Off Ramp gets, it’s always operating from a place of love and understanding for its misfit subjects.

There’s one aspect of Off Ramp that I’d like to comment on, and it’s that Silas is revealed to be transgender just before an intimate encounter with Bankens’ entrapped younger sister Eden (Ashley Smith). When Schofield shows off his actual top surgery scars to her, I let out a little “Oh my god” under my breath — it was the last thing I could have foreseen and it’s handled so deftly. According to Tape, the decision to make the Silas character a trans man came relatively late in the script’s development with Schofield’s casting, and it makes the film’s thematic emphasis on found family all the more potent. Off Ramp is one of those movies I’m incredibly proud to be able to get the word out on as a film critic. It’s truly a gem.

A scene from Jason Yu’s Sleep, featuring Sun-kyun and Jung Yu-mi. Photo: Magnet

With Friday night came Jason Yu’s film Sleep, featuring the last performance by actor Lee Sun-kyun (Parasite) before his death in December 2023. Parents-to-be Hyun-su (Sun-kyun) and Soo-jin (Jung Yu-mi, Train to Busan) are an otherwise happy couple until Hyun-su begins to develop a disturbing sleep disorder. What starts as mere sleep talking along with uncontrollable scratching becomes progressively more violent — and it is unable to be controlled by regimented medical treatments. Anxious for the safety of her newborn, a sleep-deprived Soo-jin turns to a paranormal explanation for Hyun-su’s sleep disorder, suspecting he’s possessed by their building’s recently deceased manager. A Bong Joon-ho disciple who served as assistant director on Okja, Yu keeps the tension at a steady boil. Like Joon-ho, he proves able to switch between dark humor and chilling reveals at a moment’s notice. Once the film chooses to go the supernatural route though, it feels like it’s dispensing with a much more interesting story had things remained ambiguous. Nonetheless Sleep’s a formidable debut in a line-up of many strong first films.

Zafreen Zairizal unleashes the beast in Tiger Stripes. Photo: Films Boutique

Winner of the Critics’ Week Grand Prize at Cannes, Amanda Nell Eu’s Tiger Stripes was jokingly referred to by BUFF staff as Preteen Wolf. Actually, it’s better understood as the latest offspring from the enduringly influential Ginger Snaps. With the onset of her first period, Zaffran (fantastic newcomer Zafreen Zairizal) finds her body changing in troublingly inhuman ways. Given the continued stigmatization of menstruation in rural Malaysian culture, Zaffran becomes increasingly isolated during her metamorphosis, treated like a pariah by her friends and consistently shamed by her mother. When a wave of hysteria hits her girls’ school, she becomes the unwanted center of attention for a deeply patriarchal community on edge. With its DIY attitude and painstaking attention to pubescent woes, this movie possesses a truly feminist ethos of filmmaking from a country whose films aren’t often seen in the West. Tiger Stripes intuitively understands the thoughts, feelings, and behaviors of preteen girls, capturing their moments of joy and angst in ways both liberating and heartbreaking to see. Eu’s film recently ran afoul of the notoriously conservative Malaysian film censors, to which she penned an open letter denouncing the cut that’s currently showing in native theaters. At BUFF though, I welcomed Tiger Stripes with open arms, and I suspect it’ll find an audience of young women who’ll take to Zaffran’s story like it’s their own.

2009 BUFF champion (Modern Love is Automatic) Zach Clark returned to the festival with his new film The Becomers, a sci-fi love story about two body-swapping alien entities who find themselves possessing a pair of Q-Anon-style conspiracy theorists. This was what I’d like to call BUFF’s official “did this air on Adult Swim at 4 a.m.?” selection, an awkward and offbeat film that wouldn’t be out of place playing after an episode of Tim and Eric. I honestly wanted to like The Becomers a lot more than I did, but found the end results to be rather disjointed. Clark admitted in the Q&A that the film was something of a rushed production (a three-month turnaround) born from the pandemic, which explains why it doesn’t totally cohere together. Still, The Becomers was an amusing watch that delivered on one thing none of the other features did: full frontal male nudity.

Johnny the undead killer surveying his bloody work in In a Violent Nature. Photo: Shudder)

The most formally interesting movie this year is easily Chris Nash’s In a Violent Nature, a slow-cinema slasher deconstruction about a Jason-like monster stalking and brutally killing a cadre of young people at a remote cabin in the woods. There’s been word of mouth on Nash’s debut ever since its Sundance premiere, where it was described as Friday the 13th meets Gus van Sant’s Elephant. That, however, doesn’t encompass just how grotesquely funny the whole thing is. Nash confirms what slasher fans have claimed for years in the face of Satanic Panics and pearl-clutching parents — watching a giant, hulking monster rip the gore-covered spines out of stupid, unsuspecting victims is hilarious. Nash’s VFX work on films like Psycho Goreman serves him well in constructing some truly gnarly kills, one of which is so disgustingly mean and absurd my jaw dropped. An entirely other cliche slasher movie can be glimpsed within the confines of In a Violent Nature, one composed of scenes that would occur in the periphery of a Friday the 13th sequel. In the Q&A that followed, Nash joked “You can just take any genre of film and make it boring, and then it will play Sundance.” But In a Violent Nature is anything but boring, especially when it contains my pick for Kill of the Year.

And finally, Moritz Mohr’s Boy Kills World, the film chosen to close out the festival on a wet fart. I had a bad feeling about this one ever since the trailer, and now I can confidently reiterate that Deadpool is one of the worst things to happen to the action genre if this is the rotten fruit it bears. There’s not an original bone in the corpse that is Boy Kills World; it’s a cadaver of stolen parts from Deadpool, The Hunger Games, Kill Bill, John Wick, etc. The decision to have noted voice actor H. Jon Benjamin narrate the thoughts of the deaf-mute Boy (Bill Skarsgård) with constant, epic bacon soy-banter is a kiss of death to a movie that actually doesn’t need it. All the blood and gunfire is in subpar CGI, the action sequences are over edited and shot with nauseating shaky cam, and not a second goes by without either the narration or a character calling you or someone else a “fuck puppet” like you’re in an argument on Reddit. Worse, Zionist loudmouth and all around unwanted presence Brett Gelman plays a significant role in the film, so I had to look at him for extended periods of time. Of the many crimes against humanity to come out of South Africa, at least Boy Kills World isn’t as evil as apartheid. Unless I see something truly morally and ethically offensive in the next nine months, Boy Kills World will be hard to beat as the worst thing I’ve seen all year.

So ends another year at the Boston Underground Film Festival. Even if the closing film was a complete and utter bust, I had a blast seeing some really great movies with fantastic crowds. See you next year, and as always, stay weird Boston.

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.