Sean Parker
Well, that’s a wrap on the 25th annual Boston Underground Film Festival. This year was packed with weird, wild, and wonderful shorts and a diverse offering spanning genres and decades. From the Cage-rage Australian coasts to battles across time, the programmers of BUFF 25 packed a punch with this year’s festival. Thematically on point and delivering genre films with a social impetus, BUFF 25 was just a fantastic experience all around. Here is a roundup of the rest of the movies I was able to see as part of this year’s lineup.
Alma & the Wolf
Ethan Embry gives a genre-defining performance in Michael Patrick Jann’s unnerving new thriller Alma & the Wolf. The director, who is more widely known for his comedy stylings (Reno 911!, The State, Drop Dead Gorgeous), recently stepped onto the horror stage with 2023’s Organ Trail, a “good for her” western survival, vengeance thriller set against a brutal Oregon winter. The film received mixed reviews, including mine, feeling the movie was bland and lacked atmosphere. However, Alma & the Wolf doesn’t have that problem. It’s a huge step in the right horror direction for the director, whose horror evolution is going in the right direction.
At the onset of the film, Embry’s Deputy, Ren Accord, stands in a field holding a red balloon as if he’s “set adrift on memory bliss,” to quote a PM Dawn single. We quickly learn that’s true as we find his life a bit of a mess, and Ren is nostalgic for better days. He’s drinking himself to death, his ex-wife is moving on, and his projections for his son to escape the zip code that Ren couldn’t has added tension in their relationship. Ren’s personal anxieties are placed on the back burner when his graduating class’ high school beauty queen, Alma (Sinners’ Li Jun Li), is found wandering the highway covered in blood after a wolf attack. Promising Alma that he’ll kill the wolf, Ren begins to unravel when his son goes missing, and he winds up at the center of the investigation.
Psychology and storytelling collide as Jann’s latest thriller hits all the right nerve-wracking buttons. The film won Best Feature at the Boston Underground Film Festival for good reason. Alma & the Wolf is funny, gory, and exciting, offering a twist on police procedurals while playing on Scream-styled meta references. With nods to Night of the Living Dead and Die Hard, the film is consistent and intriguing, begging the audience to untangle its mystery and decipher its clues. Steeped in regret and dripping with dread, to compare it to anything could risk giving away the ending, and I think this is one worth waiting for when it releases later this year.
Re-Animator (4K Restoration)
The sold-out premiere of the 4K restoration of Re-Animator was nothing short of jubilant elation. There was a fantastic mixture of people who love the film and newcomers undertaking Stuart Gordon’s cult classic for the first time in attendance. Seeing Re-Animator on the big screen with this energetic audience would have been enough for me, but the fact that Barbara Crampton was in attendance made it much better.
If you’ve never seen Re-Animator, do yourself a favor and see it on the big screen as it travels across the country for film festivals. The movie has everything you could want from a horror film, incorporating ’80s practical effects into a gory Lovecraft yarn with a twisted Frankenstein plotline. When Dr. Herbert West (Jeffrey Combs) moves in with resident student Dan (Bruce Abbott) and his girlfriend Megan (Crampton), they discover West’s extracurricular experiments to raise the dead in his makeshift basement laboratory. West becomes the ire of an established doctor (David Gale) at the hospital, who loses his head when he discovers West’s reagent serum, blackmailing him in order to get what he wants.
Considering Re-Animator’s VHS cover art used to freak me out as I passed by it in the video stores, the fact that I grew up to love the movie is astounding. It’s fast and funny, all while building tension in some scenes that are straight-up nuts! And, in 4K, it looks impressive. The film still has some white balance saturation, but much of that washed-out look has been removed. It looks so sharp that forty years later, it could pass as a much younger film.
Hey Folks! It’s the Intermission Time Mixtape
American Genre Film Archive (AGFA) have collected a vast array of clips from theater and drive-in intermissions spanning retail advertisements, public service announcements, and, of course, going to the lobby. Once a staple of going to the movies, the theater intermission animations get their fifteen minutes of fame here, and duly so. These forgotten clips are a nostalgic throwback for older adults and a time capsule for younger generations to moviegoing’s heyday. You may catch some familiar faces, too; John Wayne, Jack Lemmon, Elizabeth Montgomery, and the cast of Married… with Children are just some of the stars who appear in the collection.
Without a cohesive narrative, it’s laborious to watch the entirety of the seventy-minute presentation. I enjoy seeing the various lobby options on display that have never been available to my generation. Pickles, fried fish sandwiches, and other smelly food that likely made the theater experience a little more pungent. Also, my hats off to whoever makes it all the way through and doesn’t immediately go out for a cheeseburger. That seems impossible. It’s fun for a bit, but it becomes background noise after a while.
Best Wishes to All
Perhaps the most unsettling and all-around f*cked up experience I’ve had at the movies so far this year, Best Wishes to All, rattles your nerves. Actress Kotone Furukawa plays a young nurse who travels to her grandparents’ countryside home only to find that the secret to their longevity is far more sinister than she expected. The film draws on the spirit of supernatural J-horror classics like Audition and Ju-On to help deliver its shocks, slowly rolling into a spectacular climax.
Yûta Shimotsu boldly muses on consumerist societies and their participants by offering an alternative reality where prosperity only exists via the willingness to make others suffer. Best Wishes to All tries to find hope in a world controlled by unethical and immoral choices, presenting a scathing satire of the inconvenience and eventual fatigue that comes from denying instant gratification. In a world of billionaires and cheap goods, Shimotsu considers the two-sided argument of providing for your family when it comes at a cost to someone else’s basic rights. The nuance of Best Wishes to All shines horrifically in Shimotsu’s bleak fantasy, suggesting the difficulties in attempting to insulate ourselves from ethical dilemmas when most prevailing companies have sorted pasts. It’s a soul-eroding philosophical drama with lovely cinematography, ghastly practical effects, and some supreme weirdness mixed in.
Escape from the 21st Century
East Asia has been hurling some discernably great time travel films in our direction in the last few years. Last year’s Japanese import, A Samurai in Time, was one of my favorite cinematic experiences of 2024, while South Korea’s Alienoid sequel managed to delight and surprise in a blockbuster sense. Now you can add China’s Escape from the 21st Century to the growing list of time travel imports that are well worth the price of admission. Each of these glorious adventures provides exceptionally different experiences from one another, and yet all are equally fantastic in their own right.
What specifically makes Escape from the 21st Century great is director Li Yang’s uncanny knowledge of manga mechanics and an excellent centralized theme of adult nostalgia against the childlike desire to grow up. The film concerns three boys who spend their young days in the year 1999 fighting schoolyard bullies and dreaming of what life will be like after school. The boys get their wish after being exposed to toxic chemicals that make them tunnel their consciousness through time twenty years in the future, but finding out who their grown-up selves are only complicates things further as all three are hiding various secrets that could destroy their youthful friendships. If that weren’t bad enough, when an evil corporate doctor gets wind of what the three boys are doing, she attempts to impose time travel on the world, siphoning consciousnesses from the past and threatening to kill millions in the process.
Fans of Scott Pilgrim and Stephen Chow films will enjoy the explosive mix of comedy and action, that propels the unique vision of Yang’s film. While the film is unrelenting fun, Escape from the 21st Century occasionally gets stuck in its own melodrama and has difficulty moving between acts. The film sometimes feels like sequential episodes of a television show or manga with all the exposition brimming in each act, Yang manages to offset this with visually striking scenery that’s so vivid it will sear themselves into your brain, making Escape from the 21st Century a memorable filmgoing experience.
Designed by Bryan McKay
