The opening night film, Friendship, about the awkwardness of suburban bromance, is a collaboration between cringe maestro Tim Robinson (I Think You Should Leave) and the dude who don't age, Paul Rudd (Clueless, Anchorman). It brought the house down at TIFF's Midnight Madness debut. Our own J Hurtado had this to say after he saw it at SXSW last month:
"As insane as his actions are, we all know a Craig; a man desperate to fit in, to belong to something, who take the joke one step too far and loses the crowd. Hell, many of us have been a Craig – some of us more often than we’d like to admit – and that’s what is so brilliant about Friendship and the fascinating dynamic between Robinson and Rudd. Rarely has a film had me so rapidly alternating between squirming in my seat and laughing so hard that I have to wipe the tears from my face."
Eli Craig adapts Adam Cesare's 2020 Young Adult novel, Clown In A Cornfield into this Winnipeg-shot feature. A miasma of horror tropes and familiar imagery, mined for a bit of scare, and a bit of laughs, that is executed in a similar fashion to his cult classic Tucker & Dale Vs. Evil. (Which is also playing, on its 15th Anniversary, at the festival.)
In a fading midwestern town, the former town mascot, Frendo The Clown, is resurrected, all slasher-like, to pick off the YouTube-ing, TikToking teens with the backdrop of the town's burned out corn syrup factory. Take that synopsis at face value, and it becomes clear what Craig is going for here.
Ukrainian science fiction romance, U Are The Universe is the debut feature from Pavlo Ostrikov, one that was shot and edited in Kyiv during the initial Russian bombing and missile attacks at the beginning of 2022.
It is difficult to look at the lonely, yet hopeful, story on display here without putting it in the context of the war itself, even though the director insists the script was written and locked prior to the recent invasion of his country.
With a deadpan sensibility mixed with a cocktail of despair and lonely romantic charm, we watch an abandoned astronaut, Andrei, go through various coping mechanisms play out over his months of being stranded, on his ship which has lost both its destination and purpose.
Think Duncan Jones’ Moon, or moreso, William Eubank’s eerily similar, yet sadly forgotten 2011 indie, Love. U Are The Universe is pretty much a one man show. And yet, a faint but growing love story blossoms in the cold black void, as if to prove that anything is possible, no matter how bleak the circumstances.
Reveries: The Mind Prison is a collaboration of the talent behind two of the most fun nano-budget discoveries of 2023's CUFF: Cash Cow, and Dad & Step-Dad.
Described in the CUFF catalog as, "Aki Kaurismäki meets a lo-fi Koyaanisqatsi". I am game for some pseudo-philosophical art-house comedy nonsense from these fine fellows. Why not? And no, we have not seen Part 1 or Part 2. We are going in blind.
Is there anything more so quintessentially optimistic than America's deep, I mean bone-marrow deep, nostalgia for the performative aspiration of amateur baseball? Director Carson Lund's low-stakes,1980s set slice of slow cinema, Eephus, is its own kind of vibe.
The entire film is one ball game with two amateur recreation-league teams playing the final outing on a community ball field in a small town way, way, way outside of Boston. The space is about to be demolished to make way for the town's new primary school. The fellas, with their beer guts and knee problems have one last time to shine before the end of an era.
Eephus crams more character, story, slang, minutiae, philosophy, and atmosphere into its brief, yet seemingly infinite, run time than one might think possible. Proof again that when it comes to sports on screen, baseball (like America) contains multitudes.
Vulcanizadora is most definitely not for everyone. It is a challenging, ultra-DIY, discovery for those who can hop on its existential dude-bro wavelength.
One of the best things I caught at last year's Fantasia film festival, where the director Joel Potrykus said something to the effect of: 'This is the first film I have made that I am truly happy with, and can watch without cringing.' If you know the director's work, this is both an endorsement and a warning!
Our own Olga Artemyeva reviewed it out of Tribeca, and said, "Vuncanizadora benefits from the audience being familiar with the director Joel Potrykus’ body of work, style and thematic preferences. That doesn’t mean his new film cannot be enjoyed or understood without it; narrative-wise, it’s absolutely self-sufficient. Emotionally, though, you just get more from this story when having the context of the director’s universe, filled with human beings who are profoundly lonely and outcast, all wrapped in a cover of a dark comedy bordering on existential horror.
A super-low budget production with the bursts of metal for the soundtrack, but shot in beautiful 16 mm and featuring opera excerpts, it shows the transformation of the heroes and their relationship with the world, which was bleak to begin with. The same goes for the film’s narrative; there is a definitive tonal shift at a certain point when a forming buddy movie ventures into a much darker territory."
CUFFs annual panel for 2025 is headed by Screen Anarchy's founder and editor, Todd Brown (whose 'Adult-ing Job' is as head of international acquisitions for XYZ films), and hosted by Fantasia programmer, Justin Langlois. THE SHAPE OF GENRE FILMS TO COME covers, "the future of of genre cinema, how to stay edgy and relevant in a growingly mainstream industry, how to gain attention from distributors on micro-budget films and how to be subversive in growingly strange times."
Panelists include Jim Brunzell, Director of Festivals and Theatrical for Dark Star Pictures, and Festival Director of Sound Unseen; Richelle Charkot, Distribution Manager for Game Theory Films, and Film Critic for Rue Morgue Magazine, Ryan Oestreich; President of Music Box Films, and Katie Rife - Shorts Programmer at Overlook Film Festival, and freelance writer.
Canadian editor turned director Rob Grant (Harpoon, Alive) is back at CUFF with a coming of age story set in 1987, which appears to steer away from his usual horror, or comedy, or horror-comedy, shorts and features.
When a girl from school implies that she'd like to see him in Ottawa, Simon steals his father's Mormon church money and convinces his best friends to ditch their camping plans, and take a trip from Syracuse, NY to Canada's capital city.
The opening film of London's Frightfest, writer-director Joanne Mitchell's feature debut Broken Bird is an sumptuous expansion of her 2018 short Sybil. With its gothic titular character, a lonely, introverted young woman who works at a funeral parlour and is into taxidermy and poetry, falling in love to strange results and obsession. At first glance, the film recalls Lucky McKee's May and Lynne Stopkewich's Kissed, with a psychological focus on how we process both death and love.
"An ambitious amateur physicist makes some big promises to a desperate cancer patient. A body horror film disguised as a black comedy, The A-Frame is definitely Calvin Lee Reeder’s most accessible feature film," said our own J Hurtado when he caught this at Tribeca in the Midnight programme, "and those familiar with his short films will definitely see an evolution of his unique visual and narrative style here."
Well known for his lo-fi avant garde nightmare features The Oregonian and The Rambler, Reeder steps into a more linear storytelling style here, delivering a pitch-black science fiction comedy with heart. And blood.
Vampire Zombies...From Space! is clearly inspired by Plan 9 From Outer Space! era Ed Wood, and is having some old timey fun with modern filmmaking tools and more than a touch of self-awareness.
A grizzled detective, a skeptical rookie cop, a chain-smoking greaser, and a determined young woman must band together to save the world from Dracula and his scheme to turn the residents of the small town of Marlow into his personal army of vampire zombies. Be on the look out for cameos from Night of the Living Dead's Judith O’Dea, and Troma's Lloyd Kaufman.
We are big fans around here of the screenwriters Alex Forman's & Jakob Skrzypa's delightfully obsessive short film, Your Money's No Good Here, in which a man stews over the meaning of the titular English phrase to the point of no return.
Like a small festival inside a bigger one, Joe Pickett (The Onion) and Nick Prueher (Late Show) have been taking their oddities found on thrift-store VHS tapes roadshow to CUFF on the regular for quite some time, and The Globe crowd is a fun environment to discover their specific taste of odd ephemera, and the rhythms of how they present them.
"To celebrate two decades of this VHS nonsense, they will serve up their all-time greatest finds, including the dumbest exercise videos, the craziest public access shows and updates with the most wonderful weirdos they’ve met along the way."
Our own Andrew Mack, who like many of us who have been bouncing around the festival circuit for decades, has had many an encounter with filmmaker Richard Stanley. He caught Shadowland at Beyondfest. He had this to say about this cinematographically beautiful, but subject-disturbing whiplash of a documentary, with a very controversial Stanley at the centre:
"In 2021 Finnish filmmaker and documentarian Otso Tiainen, together with their co-writer Kalle Kinnunen, set out to Montségur, France, a commune nestled in the French Pyrenees mountains and a homestead for practitioners of the occult. Initially filming started out as a documentary about filmmaker and occultist Richard Stanley and their life in what they call 'The Zone.'
"Part way through the project a shocking allegation of past domestic abuse was made against Stanley. Not only did the documentarians need to rethink what they do with this revelation but so did other residents of Montségur who had come to know Stanley as one of the commune’s key spiritual leaders.
"When we’ve come across creatives in the past who’ve done irreconcilable things, some have adopted the terminology that their works have been ‘stained’ by their actions. Does the same hold for places?"
Part fan-festival, with quietly subversive programming, and a gateway to oddness and offbeat cinema for Canada’s mid-west, the Calgary Underground Film Festival (CUFF) showcases a sampler of the highlights of indie, documentary and genre cinema from the festival circuit that would not otherwise grace screens in Calgary or Edmonton, as well as the work of local talent. Our favourite, however, is the idiosyncratic curation of things less seen.
