By Nicole Veneto

Considering the current political climate and its accompanying cultural backlashes, BUFF’s (continued) commitment to diversity in film feels especially pointed in its 25th incarnation.

As a much more famous Nicole asserts in an empty and uncharacteristically clean AMC theater, “We come to this place for magic.” The same can be said of the Boston Underground Film Festival, where for five nights in March I sit ready in the Brattle mezzanine to laugh, to cry, and to care about independent and genre-filmmaking from weirdos the world over. This year’s line-up comes stacked with a diverse array of narrative, documentary, and repertory features, many directed by or about women, queer folks, and people of color. Considering the current political climate and its accompanying cultural backlashes, BUFF’s (continued) commitment to diversity in film feels especially pointed in its 25th incarnation. To amend Nicole Kidman’s viral monologue, we also come to this place (BUFF) as a much needed respite from the constant pain and dehumanization that existing in 2025 entails. It’s a privilege to be back — god knows I needed it.

Nicolas Cage is The Surfer. Photo: Roadside Attractions

This year’s inaugural film was Lorcan Finnegan’s (Vivarium) sun-soaked Ozsploitation-riff The Surfer, starring Nicolas Cage as a divorced businessman bullied into destitution by an aggressively territorial bunch of Aussie locals when he returns to his childhood surf spot to purchase a beach house. Perhaps deliberately mismarketed as a revenge thriller, The Surfer is more of a prolonged anxiety attack (in the vein of Beau is Afraid) than Cage on a vengeful tear a’la Panos Cosmatos’ Mandy. With its tongue firmly in its cheek, the film comes off as a bit of a self-parody, focusing on the build-up to an inevitable Nic Cage Freakout triggered by biting criticism of so-called toxic masculinity. It’s more of a midlife crisis black comedy, loosely disguised as a psychological descent into heat-stricken madness, punctuated by crash zooms on Cage’s despairing face as toothy, spray-tanned beach goers point and laugh as he trades his valuables away for a long lost idyllic past. Finnegan’s film provides a showcase for Cage to swing for the fences out of pure pathetic desperation: he walks barefoot across broken glass and drinks spilled beer from puddles. While I think a more straight-forward approach to the material without all the bells-and-whistles (or chimes, the score loves ringing those chimes) would make for a leaner film, I’m as happy as anyone else to watch the Cagemaster force feed an alpha chud a dead rat in a packed theater.

Poster design by Bryan McKay

Second-billed as part of Wednesday night’s beach party double feature was a repertory screening of the newly restored Death on the Beach (Muerte en la Playa). This little seen queer curio from underground Mexican filmmaker Enrique Gómez Vadillo presents us with the son of a wealthy businesswoman channeling his homosexuality into a murder spree after he returns home from boarding school, where he killed a teacher who sexually abused him. With its understated horror elements, Death on the Beach reminded me a bit of George Romero’s Martin, another character study in how male sexual repression manifests in death. The metaphor Vadillo offers is obvious considering the film’s release in 1991. Coming off the height of the AIDS epidemic, gay men were intricately linked to mass death in the cultural consciousness, stigmatizing homosexuality as something that needed to be contained for public safety. This isn’t to say Death on the Beach is a dour affair whatsoever. It’s incredibly campy, styled like an early-’90s telenovela, it displays the male form in all its sweaty, homoerotic glory. Vadillo’s work remains obscure in America, but with a recent Vinegar Syndrome release containing several of his films, here’s hoping his filmography finds a new audience with internationally-minded queer cinephiles.

Thursday evening began with the newest documentary by Alexandre O. Philippe on an American masterpiece that just so happens to be one of the greatest horror films ever made, The Texas Chain Saw Massacre. In conversation with five creatives — comedian Patton Oswalt, directors Takeshi Miike and Karyn Kusama, Australian film critic Alexandra Heller-Nicholas, and some old guy named Stephen King — Chain Reactions probes the enduring influence of Tobe Hooper’s 1974 classic through these distinct (but occasionally overlapping) perspectives. With its talking-heads format, Chain Reactions’ intimately staged interviews make for a stronger effort than Lynch/Oz (which relegated its participants to video essay-style voice over). It’s one thing to hear people passionately talk about a film; it’s another to see that passion embodied in thoughtful looks and gestures recalling treasured sense memories. Texas Chain Saw is not simply a movie you watch, it’s something that sears itself into your brain for years on end, a visceral experience recalled through colors, textures, and mental associations. I’m in the business of writing about films because I want to share my enthusiasm and, to paraphrase Miike, articulate for people the value in something they may not initially have seen for themselves. Even the most jaded or pretentious cinephile would dare argue against Texas Chain Saw’s greatness, but Chain Reactions proves that a film’s potency relies on the breadth of interpretation it generates, as opposed to any fixed or objective meaning.

A scene from Fréwaka. Photo: Lime Tree Feature

The obligatory folk-horror entry in this year’s line-up went to Aislinn Clarke’s Irish-language Fréwaka, a film with plenty of dramatic pathos. Unfortunately, it lacks the kind of ambient terror folk horror thrives on. In the wake of her estranged mother’s suicide, caregiver Shoo (Clare Monnelly) is sent on assignment to a pastoral village to look after Peig (Bríd Ní Neachtain), a superstitious elderly recluse who believes she was abducted by fairies on her wedding night fifty years before. Fréwaka is at its best when it’s focused on the relationship between Shoo and Peig (whom Monnelly and Neachtain perform admirably), two seemingly different women whose bond is forged through shared experiences of abuse and mental illness (albeit I called the twist pretty early on). This emotional connection makes up most of the film and, while I relate to these themes on a personal level, the horror aspect is too restrained to really dig under your skin. To the film’s benefit, Clarke never sinks to using cheap jump scares for tension, so this turns out to be a perfectly fine movie that offers more as a drama with supernatural elements than it does as a horror film about inherited trauma. That said, I recommended it to my mom as one of the better (soon to be) streaming movies — superior to whatever Netflix time-waster she was watching when I visited last weekend. She’s also Irish and likes fairies. Not the evil ones that take your baby though. Hopefully Fréwaka doesn’t change her mind on those funny little creatures.

Joshua Burge in Joel Potrykus’ Vulcanizadora. Photo: Oscilloscope Laboratories

Not sure why beaches are a recurring setting this year (someone on the programming team really wants a vacation?), but the first forty minutes of writer-director Joel Potrykus’ Vulcanizadora are like if Beavis and Butt-head had a beach episode that took an uncharacteristically melancholic turn. Reprising their roles from Buzzard, pals Derek (Potrykus, whose vocabulary consists mostly of “dude”) and Marty (a sad-eyed Joshua Burge) hike through the woods to Lake Michigan’s shore armed only with junk food, firecrackers, and some head gear that looks like prototypes for a Saw trap. This is no boys camping trip or casual sojourn to the beach, but the culmination of a pact that makes their lack of supplies and the purpose of those Jigsaw devices shockingly clear. (Without giving too much away, Vulcanizadora earned my first scream of the festival.) I went in assuming Potrykus’ film would be a violent, heavy-metal shocker based purely on the poster, which resembles the cover art of the infamous mondo Faces of Death. That isn’t what Vulcanizadora is at all. Rather, it’s an existentialist dramedy about how developmentally stunted men will do literally anything else rather than accepting therapy. But it’s never unsympathetic towards its characters; Potrykus takes time to explore their pain and uncertainty as well as their boyish little moments, playing with sticks and riffling through porno mags. Vulcanizadora is unexpectedly funny, dark, awkward, and beautiful in its off-kilter own way.

Courtesy of American Genre Film Archive and Something Weird, Saturday’s late-night offering (which I watched from the comfort of my bedroom ahead of time) comes in the form of Hey Folks! It’s the Intermission Time Mixtape!, a compilation of pre-show and intermission programming from the ’50s, ’60s, and ’70s. Curating some of the strangest vintage advertisements rescued from long shuttered-theaters across America, the mixtape (hosted by Maria Menounos) highlights the kind of mid-century kitsch we’ve swapped for brand-sponsored content. It’s an extended fugue state of locally sourced edutainment (like My Milkman, Joe, a Denver Dairy Council-produced short featuring Half-Pint, the ventriloquist dummy), business commercials (the unfortunately named Cox Motors in Tulsa), and promos urging theater-goers to hit up the concessions stand for shitty pizza and overpriced hot dogs. It’s not like today’s theaters aren’t modestly subsidized by the Coca-Cola Company and PepsiCo, but Hey Folks! harkens back to a better time, when that kinda stuff was animated like the plague sequence from Belladonna of Sadness.

There’s seven more movies in the feature line-up waiting for me this weekend, including the world premiere of Michael Patrick Jann’s (Drop Dead Gorgeous) new film Alma & the Wolf and a repertory screening of Re-Animator’s 4K restoration with special guest (and woman I deeply look up to) Barbara Crampton in attendance. Stay tuned!

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.