The Boston Underground Film Festival is mere days away, and Horror Fuel has our collective eyes on many of the fest’s fine fear-fare offerings. Following are official press announcements, with thoughts from Film Festival Editor Joseph Perry in italics.
23nd annual Boston Underground Film Festival returns to Harvard Square’s arthouse hub The Brattle Theatre with five days of vanguard cinemania from March 22nd through the 26th. This year’s lineup is stacked with fearsome folk horror, mendacious miscreants, harrowing horrors and hero/es/ines, godless god-complexes, eco-thrillers and chillers, sensational sci-fi, and all manner of midnight madness.
BUFF is beyond honored to host the World Premiere of Jeffrey A. Brown’s haunting, Massachusetts-based horror thriller The Unheard for a homecoming heroes’ welcome on Opening Night. Starring Lachlan Watson (Chucky, Chilling Adventures of Sabrina), The Unheard follows a deaf young woman ensconced in a signal-to-noise mystery of dueling senses, realities, truths, identities, and possibly worlds. Brown (2019’s The Beach House) and local screenwriting legends Michael and Shawn Rassmussen (2019’s Crawl) will be in attendance for a post-screening conversation.
The Beach House was one of my festival favorites in 2019, and Crawl was one heck of a nailbiter that year, also. With Brown and the Rassmussen brothers teaming up, The Unheard sounds like can’t-miss spooky cinema.
On the heels of its SXSW debut, writer/director Bomani J. Story’s The Angry Black Girl and Her Monster lands at BUFF for its East Coast Premiere. Teen science genius Vicaria (The Equalizer’s Laya DeLeon Hayes) plays god when she embarks on a quest to find the cure for death, a disease, she theorizes, versus an inevitability, whose destructive path of substance abuse, brutality, and violence has rended itself through her family and community. Breathing new life into Frankenstein’s monster, Story’s electric feature debut challenges conceptions of mortality and monstrosity through a Black lens.
The terrific film birth/rebirth from earlier this year was one wild riff on the Frankenstein mythos, and The Angry Black Girl and Her Monster sounds like it is up to the challenge of being another intriguing modern take on that classic story, too.
BUFF is proud to present a double-dose of international folk horror starting with the East Coast Premiere of Tereza Nvotová’s nightmarish Nightsiren, which examines the chokehold grip of toxic patriarchal structures on a remote Slovakian village, where the pervasive fingers of superstition point to witches when two women dare to defy and disrupt the unnatural order. Then we’ll host the New England Premiere of sumptuous cinematic stunner Enys Men, which follows the sole inhabitant of a craggy Cornish island’s descent into madness. Set in the early 70s, British auteur Mark Jenkin returns to his coastal stomping grounds following The Volunteer (Mary Woodvine), a meticulous cataloger studying the growth cycles of rare wildflowers, whose increasingly terrifying experiences lead her to suspect that her surroundings are both sentient and sinister.
I’m a huge aficionado of folk horror. I have seen Enys Men and can highly recommend it (my review embargo hasn’t been lifted yet, so that’s all I can say at this point, but trust me, it’s well worth the time for those who love offbeat horror), and Nightsiren sounds right up my alley.
Never lacking in pure absurdity, BUFF is delighted to present the New England Premiere of Quentin Dupieux’s French dark comedy/quasi-horror anthology/superhero sendup Smoking Causes Coughing, where candy-colored, lo-fi heroes (ala Power Rangers, but called the Tobacco Force) battle giant diabolical turtles and regale one another with lakeside scary stories on a bizarre team-building retreat. Next, we’ll be screening the New England Premiere of Kristoffer Borgli’s Scandinavian unromantic comedy Sick of Myself, which takes toxic relationships to the next level when narcissistic Signe attempts to derail her equally self-absorbed partner’s art career by way of Munchausenian extremes that are as cringe as they are unadmittedly relatable.
I’m under embargo for Smoking Causes Coughing, too, but I had a great time with this tokusatsu take-off. Sick of Myself has been on my radar for a few months, and I can’t wait to check it out.
Delving into the real-life horrors of a uniquely toxic individual, Kiwi journalist David Farrier sets his lens on multi-hyphenate scammer Michael Organ, an extortionary, mercenary antique shop parking lot enforcer with a wild history of false identities and insane lawsuits at the center of stranger-than-fiction doc Mister Organ.
Mister Organ has been killing it on the film festival circuit this year, and I am primed to finally get a chance to check out this daffy documentary.
A limited number of festival badges are available for purchase on the Brattle Theatre’s site.
Tickets are on sale at www.brattlefilm.org and www.bostonunderground.org
