In its 25th year, Boston Underground Film Festival still pushes the limits

The sights of psychotic surfers, vampire brides, severed noses and M-80s in mouths mean it must be time again for the Boston Underground Film Festival. The self-described “sensory bacchanalia from beyond the mainstream” takes over the Brattle Theatre for five days of movie mayhem running Wednesday, March 19 through Sunday, March 23. Now in its 25th incarnation, this year’s BUFF lineup offers another smorgasbord of outré delights, stomach-churning horrors, celebrity guests and celebrations of bad taste. As always, the festival prides itself on pushing the limits of propriety with panache.

“Our audience is like: ‘More! We want to hurt more!’ And we’re like, ‘Okay?’” cackles Nicole McControversy, BUFF’s director of programming. She estimates that they screened more than 1,200 films in assembling this year’s roster of 14 features and six shorts programs for a total of 60 titles.

“Everything here has been hand-picked for very specific reasons,” she says. “When people ask me for the highlights, I say, ‘These are the highlights!'”

Nicolas Cage in “The Surfer.” (Courtesy of Roadside Attractions)

The festival kicks off on Wednesday night with a double whammy described by Artistic Director Kevin Monahan as “a beach party at the threshold of hell.” First up is “The Surfer,” starring the patron saint of weirdo cinema Nicolas Cage as a hotshot banker trying to buy a mansion in his boyhood home of Australia, only to find his favorite beach overrun with brawny surf gangs who aren’t too welcoming to strangers. It’s followed by a new restoration of 1991’s fascinatingly unhinged Mexican melodrama “Muerte en la Playa,” about a sexually confused rich kid violently lashing out at the hunky macho men in Speedos who fuel his tormented desires.

It’s an inspired pairing that says a lot about modern masculinity. Slated for general release early this summer, “The Surfer” takes a few pages from John Cheever’s “The Swimmer” while slyly subverting elements from ferocious Aussie classics like “Wake in Fright” and the original “Mad Max.” Cleverly updated for 2025, the toughs menacing Cage’s tacky outsider are idle trust fundies fighting to keep their gated community exclusive while hopped up on Jordan Peterson-esque, men’s rights nonsense. Cage gives it his usual thousand percent, with an anguished howl of “Eat the rat!” that’s bound to become one of the actor’s most memed battle cries.

A still from director Stuart Gordon’s 1985 film “Re-Animator.” (Courtesy of Ignite Films and Eagle Rock Pictures)

Horror icon Barbara Crampton will be returning to the apocryphal “Arkham, Massachusetts” and gracing the Brattle stage with her presence to celebrate the 40th anniversary of director Stuart Gordon’s splattery classic “Re-Animator” (Saturday, March 22). It’s the world premiere of a new 4K UHD restoration, so we children of the VHS era will finally be able to see these severed heads and limbs ripped out of their sockets in the highest definition imaginable. Fangoria magazine’s Michael Gingold is moderating a Q&A with Crampton after the screening. (Guys, we all know which scene you want to ask her about. Remember to mind your manners.)

For more movie history, documentarian and genre film scholar Alexandre O. Philippe’s latest feature-length dissertation  “Chain Reactions” (Thursday, March 20) is a deep-dive into the legacy and lasting influence of Tobe Hooper’s “The Texas Chain Saw Massacre.” McControversy praises Philippe’s academic approach to a film often unfairly dismissed because of its admittedly awesome title. “People misunderstand the movie. You’ve got to look past the chainsaw. Moreso than a lot of other horror films: This is America.”

Monahan is high on “Vulcanizadora” (Thursday, March 20), a film he describes as “so f—ing bleak” while smiling widely. Michigan-based writer-director Joel Potrykus’ semi-sequel to his 2014 cult fave “Buzzard” follows two middle-aged childhood friends on a miserable trek through the woods. The men regress into sad versions of their preteen selves — setting off firecrackers, blasting heavy metal and looking at nudie magazines — en route to fulfill a pact best not described here. It’s a grim examination of arrested deployment and the weight of guilt in a world that’s no longer interested in accountability. Yeah, pretty f—ing bleak.

A still from director Emilie Blichfeldt’s “The Ugly Stepsister.” (Courtesy of Shudder)

Maybe the most notorious movie in the lineup, Emilie Blichfeldt’s “The Ugly Stepsister” (Friday, March 21) is an amputation-happy, freaky-deeky Norwegian fairy tale that McControversy says “drags Cinderella through the mud and blood… We’re talking cut toes, fingers, noses. It was at Sundance. I believe somebody threw up during it there, because there’s always one,” she rolls her eyes. Monahan hasn’t seen the film yet himself, but assures us, “I’ve heard from people that I trust that it almost made them puke.” Probably something to keep in mind when hitting the concession stand beforehand.

They’ve both got a lot of love for director Karan Kandhari’s debut “Sister Midnight” (Saturday, March 22), which McControversy insists “is not like anything you’ve ever seen from Indian cinema. Very funny and sardonic. It’s about an arranged marriage where this woman is taken from her village and dumped into a life with this man she doesn’t know. Turns out she’s also a vampire.” BUFF also has the New England premiere of what’s being touted as the first-ever Irish-language horror film. Writer-director Aislinn Clarke’s “Fréwaka” (Thursday, March 20) is a slow-burner about an agoraphobe who believes she was once kidnapped by faeries from Celtic myth.

A still from director Aislinn Clarke’s film “Fréwaka.” (Courtesy of Shudder)

The festival’s most fun title to say out loud, though presumably a nightmare for marketers and theaters with visible marquees, has got to be “F—toys” (Sunday, March 23). Writer-director-star  Annapurna Sriram reimagines the Fool’s Journey from the Tarot as a surreal, contemporary comedy about a sex worker on a road trip to rid herself of an ancient curse. Shot on 16mm and harkening back to the early sexploitation films of Doris Wishman and Radley Metzger, it’s “approachable, not gory,” McControversy promises. “It’s visually stunning, totally meandering and exactly the kind of thing we want to celebrate here.” (Siriam and co-star Sadie Scott will be in attendance at the screening.)

As per tradition, the most alarming and transgressive of the BUFF shorts are bundled in a midnight presentation with the self-explanatory title “Trigger Warning” (Friday, March 21) because, as Monahan says, “There needs to be a place where these kinds of films can go.” But this critic’s first stop in the screener pile is always “The Dunwich Horrors” (Friday, March 21), programmer Chris Hallock’s annual survey of scary short films shot in New England.

Seth Chatfield’s amusingly literal-minded “Good Looking Out” takes an idiom to its bloody, logical conclusion, while local film worker Miriam Olken follows up her frightfully funny 2023 short “Petunia” with “Followers,” a horror movie about what happens when a teen girl shows a little shoulder on Instagram. (It’s a handy, three-minute summary of pretty much everything awful about being female online.) I was also quite taken with director Coco Roy’s “Sogno Rosso,” a hypnotic trance film layering Super 8 images of witches in the woods.

A still from Yang Li’s film “Escape from the 21st Century”. (Courtesy of Cineverse)

The festival closes out on Sunday night with “Escape from the 21st Century,” a title that sounds awfully appealing right now, given the state of things. The madcap Chinese sci-fi comedy is about three teenagers whose sneezes can send them back and forth through time. “They discover that their adult selves suck and they need to change that via sneeze-powered time travel,” McControversy explains, describing the uncharacteristically hopeful and upbeat selection as “‘Everything Everywhere All at Once’ cranked up to 11. After a lot of dark, gnarly films, it’s a fun way to send everybody off.” Gesundheit.

Boston Underground Film Festival runs from Wednesday, March 19 through Sunday, March 23 at the Brattle Theatre.

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