Longtime readers of the Hassle know that the Boston Underground Film Festival (BUFF to its fans) holds a special place in our hearts. The five-day festival, which touches down at the Brattle Theatre every March, is a bacchanalia of features and shorts too funky, transgressive, and flat-out weird for the more “reputable” film festivals of the world. This year, three of the Hassle’s most intrepid writers– Oscar Goff, Kyle Amato, and Alexis den Boggende– opted to divide and conquer, taking in between them all of this year’s features, plus a goodly amount of shorts. Watch this space in the coming days for the team’s ongoing coverage, and keep your eyes on the underground!
THE SURFER
Nicolas Cage, at this point in his career, seems to make two types of movies: wry, soulful films which use his familiar screen presence in strange and exciting ways, and cheap, over-the-top exploitation films which capitalize on his status as a living meme. The Surfer, the new film from Lorcan Finnegan (Vivarium) which opened this year’s BUFF, presents as the latter, but has a surprising amount of the former coursing through its sunbaked veins. Cage here plays another one of his harried yuppie characters, returning to the Australian beach of his youth in an attempt to both reclaim his childhood home and impress his teenage surfer son. Both efforts, however, are thwarted by the Bay Boys, a tribe of antagonistic locals who terrorize and humiliate any outsider who dares try to surf their waves. Cage’s situation goes from bad to worse as he desperately tries to hold his ground, while the Bay Boys mount a campaign of psychological torture so effective that he begins to question not only his sanity, but reality itself.
The Surfer is, at its core, a film about Nicolas Cage having a very bad time in a parking lot. Your tolerance for it will likely depend on whether or not that sounds enticing to you (though if you’re the sort of person who would attend a BUFF screening I have a pretty good idea of the answer). This is a deliberately abrasive and confounding film, the eye-popping cinematography of Radek Ladczuk and the swooning score from François Tétaz placing the viewer inside its protagonist’s fractured headspace. But there is a surprising amount of nuance here, too– consider the hints, in phone conversations with colleagues and loved ones, that Cage’s mental breakdown began well before he rolled up to the dunes (the title’s similarity to John Cheever’s The Swimmer may not be a coincidence). Then there’s Julian McMahon, who plays head tough Scally as a maniacal manifestation of toxic masculinity, a “manosphere” influencer who takes his alpha-dog rhetoric to outrageous extremes. The Surfer may not be the most coherent critique of our unfortunate current social conditions, but it’s a primal scream which feels apt for the moment. It also features Nicolas Cage repeatedly battering a rat against the side of a car and hurling it into the jungle, and that ain’t nothing. (OG)
MUERTE EN LA PLAYA dir. Enrique Gómez Vadillo
With a restoration that looks almost TOO good for its subject matter, this homoerotic Mexican thriller provides a lot of laughs, intentional or not. The subtitles feel rushed off and lacking, sometimes entirely mistranslating dialogue, and the murder-twink action is perhaps too few and far between to make up for long stretches of reaction shots. A fun diversion with some goofy deaths and a doting mother with a huge rack, but not much else. 75 minutes makes it a worthwhile look, even if it adds up to very little. (KA)
CHAIN REACTIONS dir. Alexandre O. Philippe
Chain Reactions doesn’t feel like a documentary. It’s more a gathering of your funny, horror-fanatic friends around a campfire one late summer night, reminiscing about the first time they saw The Texas Chain Saw Massacre and how it impacted their life. Fifty years after the film’s landmark release, director Alexandre O. Philippe dives deep into the heart and viscera of what makes Tobe Hooper’s 1974 classic so iconic and influential—and, above all, disturbing. Texas Chain Saw was a low-budget flick that Hooper (and Leatherface himself, Gunnar Hansen) didn’t expect to take off—and yet, here I sit in 2025, writing about how influential and distinguished it is. Chain Reactions celebrates this, the continuation of the film’s legacy, and how we connect to grisly films like Texas Chain Saw.
The documentary is shown in chapters, each one featuring a beloved horror expert offering their input. These heavy hitters include Stephen King, Patton Oswalt, Takashi Miike, Karyn Kusama, and Alexandra Heller-Nicholas. These artists discuss their memories of their first viewings of Texas Chain Saw, how it influenced them, and what it means to them. Each telling is highly informative while keeping the energy of the documentary playful, amiable, and engaging for horror aficionados. I certainly wasn’t expecting Takashi Miike to sheepishly admit the first time he saw Hooper’s flick was by accident, and he had initially wanted to see Charlie Chaplin’s City Lights instead. Or, to hear Patton Oswalt’s theory that everyone in the world is going insane in Texas Chain Saw, with the sweaty, blaring sun to blame.
While Chain Reactions offers a well-produced documentary brimming with captivating conversations and cinematic nostalgia, be forewarned, casual horror fans: interspliced with these interviews include long sequences of films far more graphic than Texas Chain Saw, from Miike’s controversial Masters of Horror episode Imprint to Stan Brakhage’s The Act of Seeing with One’s Own Eyes, which contains footage of real autopsies. Though the commentary provided with this content was engrossing, the imagery, and how prolonged it was, became jarring and distracting from the anecdotes and analyses being said. For those that primarily love the classics as their source of horror intake—like Texas Chain Saw, Friday the 13th, Halloween, The Exorcist, and the like, this may get a little too gritty. (ADB)
FRÉWAKA
A solid Irish-language faerie horror for those who want a bit more mysticism with their old person frights. The lead character is afflicted with dum-dum disorder, making the wrong decision at absolutely every turn, but can she be blamed? There’s faeries abound! And she seems to have upset them! If you can get past that, there’s a lot of creepy visuals and nerve-wracking movements of masked figures. Plus, how often do you get to hear someone say “faggot” in Irish? (KA)
VULCANIZADORA
For most of its first half, Vulcanizadora, the latest film from mumblecore maestro Joel Potrykus, might be described as The Real Pain Witch Project. We join middle-aged slacker buddies Derek and Marty (Potrykus and Joshua Burge, reprising their roles from Potrykus’ 2014 festival hit Buzzard) as they set off into the woods. The sullenness of Burge’s Marty is offset by the ever-chipper Derek, who seems to be propelled by his own stream-of-consciousness monologue. The more Marty sulks and shrugs, the more animated Derek becomes, acting out one-man skits and attempting a singalong to Godsmack’s “Voodoo” (via a skipping Discman and a pair of circa-2000s computer speakers). The tone is that of an off-kilter buddy comedy, the sort a pair of real-life pals might improvise over the course of a long weekend.
Then something happens, which I will not reveal here, but which elicited more than one full-throated scream from the BUFF audience. From this point on– for the entire second half of the film– the vibe shifts, and the first half is entirely recontextualized. It’s not that the film stops being funny after this point, but the humor becomes magnitudes darker, bone-dry and deeply despairing. Vulcanizadora is a tough hang, but it is saved from utter bleakness by Potrykus’ sympathy for his characters and the deader-than-deadpan wit with which he observes their predicaments– think “dirtbag Kaurismȁki” and you’ll be in the right ballpark. I’m not sure when I’ll work up the stomach to watch Vulcanizadora again, but when the dust has settled I think there will be a good case to be made for it as the best of this year’s BUFF. (OG)
Watch this space for the Hassle team’s continuing coverage of BUFF XXV!
