By Nicole Veneto

We return to my coverage of the 25th annual Boston Underground Film Festival, our own little local celebration of oddballs, freaks, and celluloid weirdos of all sorts.

Beauty is pain for Lea Myren in The Ugly Stepsister. Photo: Shudder

In the wake of The Substance’s runaway success (spearheaded by Julia Ducournau’s Palme-winning Titane), the door is open for a new batch of female-focused body horror films, and I personally couldn’t be happier. Fresh off Berlin is Emilie Blichfeldt’s truly nasty reimagining of Cinderella in The Ugly Stepsister, another grotesque send-up of beauty standards that generated some gagging and runs to the bathroom to vomit. Dead set on winning the prince’s heart and saving her family from financial ruin, sweet but naive Elvira (Lea Myren, displaying some remarkable physicality) subjects herself to a painful array of surgical procedures (and one tapeworm egg, don’t even get me started) at her mother’s (Ane Dahl Torp) behest. The idea is to pit her against natural beauty Agnes (Thea Sofie Loch Næss) in a desperate but narratively futile effort.

Like a maggot-infested Catherine Breillat fairy tale, or Three Wishes for Cinderella left to rot in the backrooms, Blichfeldt’s debut takes the bones of a well known story and breaks them down into an angry, morbidly hilarious satire. The Ugly Stepsister‘s smartest revision is in re-contextualizing Cinderella; it is all about women’s financial stability rather than true love. Elvira’s horrific makeover is a monetary investment aimed at securing her family’s future with marriage. That it’s all for a shoe that won’t fit — even with considerable mutilation — is as devastating as it is grimly hysterical. The Ugly Stepsister takes “beauty is pain” to its logical extreme.

Assuming the mantle of this year’s “little movie that could” is Head Like a Hole, the first feature from director Stefan MacDonald-Labelle. Down on his luck Asher (Steve Kasan) responds to a Help Wanted flyer for a high-salaried research job where he must measure a 15 millimeter hole in the wall every hour on the hour for reasons his exacting new boss Emerson (Jeff McDonald) insists are confidential. The hole (or, as Emerson is quick to correct, the “anomaly”) suddenly starts growing after months of unrewarding, monotonous observation: either Asher has become unhinged from workplace alienation or there’s something Lovecraftian afoot. Head Like a Hole is a low-budget DIY movie in every sense — shot in seven days on location, MacDonald-Labelle took up numerous production positions, including stepping into VFX work at the literal last minute. With faint but noticeable traces of Shinya Tsukamoto and an unexpected queer angle, Head Like a Hole came as a nice surprise. It’s true to BUFF’s ethos, a handmade, weird little genre film that pools its resources to tell a tale about just how capitalism deeply depresses the mind and body. It’s on us to support little movies that can — and do — like Head Like a Hole. Ball’s in your court now distributors. Get on it.

Radhika Apte develops some unconventional tastes in Sister Midnight. Photo: Magnet Releasing

While introducing Sister Midnight, BUFF’s programming director Nicole McControversy said Radhika Apte was bound for stardom. This was something of an understatement in hindsight. Apte isn’t just a star, she’s a force of nature, a worthy contender for Best Actress who’ll inevitably be snubbed for more conventional fare than Karan Kandhari’s howl against marital domesticity. Sharp-tongued Uma (Apte) arrives in Mumbai with her new husband Gopal (Ashok Pathak) to a one-room shack with no desire to perform any kind of wifely duties — not that she knows how to anyways. To escape the madness of domestic drudgery, Uma walks the streets at night, takes up a janitorial job on the other end of the train line, and forges some friendships with women around the neighborhood. None of this seems to have much meaningful effect though, especially after a sudden change in appetite results in an animalistic transformation. In a line-up full of remarkable debut features, Sister Midnight probably stands the best chance in awards conversations with its playfully witty script and Apte’s deadpan performance. Kandhari’s music video background serves him well visually (stop-motion goats!) and where it concerns music selections, with choice needle drops of The Band, The Stooges, and Motörhead. If you also found Nightbitch to be nothing more than sloganeering tote bag feminism with all the bite of a pussyhat, then you can’t do better than Sister Midnight.

BUFF broke its good streak with the world premiere of Michael Patrick Jann’s (Drop Dead Gorgeous) Alma & the Wolf, a movie that’s very obviously going straight to Paramount Plus. Ethan Embry plays Ren, the divorced deputy sheriff of an overcast Oregon town who reconnects with former classmate and local wino Alma (Li Jun Li) under less than ideal circumstances. Believing a wolf is stalking the area, Alma tasks Ren with hunting the creature down — pets and eventually people are starting to go missing, including Ren’s teenage boy (Jann’s own son Lukas). But all is not what it seems, because there’s a really hackneyed revelation towards the end that makes the entire film the kind of time-waster fit for streaming content.

Between its muddy cinematography (a dead giveaway of its streaming bona fides) and a werewolf costume seemingly recycled from a Goosebumps episode I watched when I was 7, Alma & the Wolf comes off as an unremarkable horror flick until it deploys a twist Jann insisted “stuck the landing.” It did not. The attempt to re-contextualize the story as a grand statement on guilt doesn’t turn familiar genre conventions on its head, as Jann claimed Alma does. If there’s a saving grace, it’s to be found in Embry’s performance. Hope he has some Aleve on hand. His back probably hurts from carrying this thing.

Saturday night’s sold out showing of Re-Animator’s 4K restoration was notable for a couple of things. One, you can now see a piece of spinach lodged in Jeffrey Combs’ teeth. Two, I occupied the same space as the legendary Barbara Crampton. To buck my own little format here (because what hasn’t been said about Re-Animator already?), I’ll use this as my opportunity to sing Crampton’s praises to the heavens. You wouldn’t know this from watching the movie, but Re-Animator was Crampton’s first major role — she stepped in for the actress originally cast as Megan Halsey when she got cold feet over the script, by which I can only assume meant the scene so infamous that Kevin Spacey references it in American Beauty. (When inevitably asked about this moment during the Q&A, Crampton reassured, “It didn’t feel as horrible as it looked.”) Crampton’s fearless performance marked the start of a multi-film collaboration with director Stuart Gordon, whose legacy she continued by producing Joe Lynch’s Suitable Flesh. In Re-Animator, she transcends the role of girlfriend-turned-damsel in distress with remarkable gusto and a real pair of lungs. Though Crampton’s a certified B-movie legend, I feel she hasn’t gotten enough physical or metaphorical flowers for her work. At the Brattle, however, Crampton was given a royal welcome befitting of a Scream Queen.

Writer, director, and star Annapurna Sriram is your new obsession in Fucktoys. Photo: Trashtown Pictures

My (and soon to be your) new obsession is here in the form of Annapurna Sriram’s revelatory Fucktoys, a fantastically filthy sex odyssey built from the scraps of decaying Americana. Follow sex worker AP (Sriram) as she hustles and grinds through Trashtown for the $1,000 and sacrificial lamb required to lift a curse that’s making her teeth (and hair) fall out. Accompanied by her lawless old friend Danni (Sadie Scott), AP’s fool’s journey brings her into contact with an assortment of freaks and weirdos, including fortune tellers, a closeted family man (Damian Young), and a wealthy john, known as The Mechanic, with a sadistic gynecological kink. Sriram’s debut is major, a lusciously realized 16 mm vision of queer, anti-capitalist debauchery that’s equal parts early John Waters, peak Gregg Araki, and Ken Russell at his horniest.

The resourcefulness in production design on display is so stunning — particularly an outdoor bedroom set right out of Valerie and Her Week of Wonders — that I jumped from my seat during the Q&A to ask Sriram how she did it. (Simple: “Trash is free!”) Fucktoys isn’t just an aesthetic delight, it’s sharply incisive about the absurd relationship between sex and late-stage capitalism, an interlocking system that renders us all exploited fucktoys one way or another. If you love trash (or were also heartbroken to hear Waters’ Liarmouth might not happen), you’re gonna love Annapurna Sriram and Fucktoys. BUFF certainly did, with Sriram taking home the Best First Feature prize in a lineup full of strong debuts. Instant favorite of the festival and possibly of the entire year.

Based on Yûta Shimotsu’s short film of the same name, J-horror Best Wishes to All offers plenty of atmosphere and chills, but the narrative is too erratic to land where it needs to. When a student nurse (Kotone Furukawa, Wheel of Fortune and Fantasy) returns home to visit her grandparents, all is not what it seems. Behind a locked door upstairs in a storage room resides something her family — and the entire community — has been keeping from her. It poses an ethical affront that she wants no part of that. Nonetheless, she had to deal with it if she’s to be a responsible adult. Produced by Ju-On director Takashi Shimizu, Best Wishes to All has a lot on its mind thematically, taking the Japanese family structure and the country’s aging population as raw material to probe how our own personal happiness comes at others’ expense. The problem is that Best Wishes piles up too many elements it doesn’t quite know what to do with or fully incorporate. What’s happening (and its metaphorical significance) are easily apparent, but a litany of other odd, creepy things come off as extraneous, such as a detour into simulation theory seemingly plucked from another movie. Shimizu’s film pulls a lot from Takeshi Miike and M. Night Shyamalan’s bag of tricks, yet its inability to reign in all its ideas ultimately undermines its effectiveness.

Leon Lee, Yang Song, and Ruoyun Zhang are our time traveling heroes in Escape from the 21st Century. Photo: Cineverse

BUFF closed out on a good note with Li Yang’s Escape from the 21st Century, the closest thing to a live action Masaaki Yuasa anime this side of China. We are on Planet K at the end of the twentieth century and three highs school friends develop the ability to travel twenty years into a dystopian future (i.e. our current reality) by sneezing. Typical time hopping hijinks ensue, including a love triangle, and run-ins with black market organ traffickers — and that’s all before our unconventional heroes are charged with saving the world. With its Street Fighter-inspired fight choreography, changing aspect ratios, and flourishes of animation, Escape feels plucked from an alternate universe, where comic book movies hadn’t been subjugated to Kevin Feige’s industrial processor. It moves at such a fast clip that some of the required emotional beats aren’t given enough time to register. Still, even though I found myself winded from the breakneck pace, it was a clear crowd pleaser and a marked improvement over last year’s closing film (the less said about that one the better). Note: Warning to those who are hostile Everything Everywhere All at Once or find Scott Pilgrim vs. the World’s brand of millennial maximalism obnoxious.  Escape may strike you as all ADHD style and no substance.

So ends the Boston Underground Film Festival’s own Silver Jubilee, a gala of baby goats, bad days at the beach, and family reunions gone horribly wrong. This has been BUFF’s strongest line-up yet in my three years of attending, including several films in desperate need of good, old-fashioned (i.e. more than two weeks) theatrical distribution. (Here’s my last minute appeal for Fucktoys. On the off chance any distributors are reading this, you need to unleash Annapurna Sriram on the world and in as many venues as possible.) Here’s to another 25 years of being weird.

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.