The 2025 Boston Underground Film Festival ran from Wednesday, 3/19 through Sunday, 3/23 at the Brattle Theatre in Cambridge, and the Hassle’s intrepid writers Oscar Goff, Alexis den Boggende, and Kyle Amato were on the scene. Click here and here to catch up with the Hassle’s previous dispatches from BUFF!
FUCKTOYS (2025) dir. Annapurna Sriram
While the programming of the Boston Underground Film Festival is reliably diverse, anyone who has attended more than a couple of screenings will recognize a particular “BUFF aesthetic”: transgressive but good-humored, frequently low-budget, but never lacking in punk-rock spirit. Fucktoys, the rambunctiously horny feature debut from writer-director-starr Annapurna Sriram, may just be the BUFFest movie ever made. Sriram stars as AP, a free-spirited sex worker who is informed in no uncertain terms by a psychic (Big Freedia, perched imperiously on a raft floating in the everglades) that she is the subject of a curse; it can be lifted, but the ceremony requires a baby lamb, the “twin flame” of a past life, and $1000 in cash. Accompanied by her friend Danni (Sadie Scott) AP sets off from her home in Trash Town (portrayed by post-hurricane footage of New Orleans) to drum up the funds and get her life back on track.
Shot on eye-popping 16mm film with a found-object aesthetic (I’m not sure which of the film’s various punk houses and love hotels were created for the film and which were discovered in the wild, and I’m equally unsure which would be the more impressive achievement), Fucktoys recalls the early work of John Waters even before AP and her friends begin cataloguing on film various sexual perversions. But Sriram’s loopy, sex-positive sensibility is her own, and as fresh as any new filmmaker you’re likely to see this year. The $1000 MacGuffin is more or less a framework on which to hang AP and Danni’s episodic adventures with increasingly eccentric characters: an awkward, older john who AP adopts as a reluctant father figure, a too-nice-to-be-true playboy with a dark secret, an artistically inclined celebrity who certainly bears only the most coincidental resemblance to any James Francos living or dead. But there’s a soul to the film as well, a melancholy desire for meaning which one senses Sriram shares with her onscreen avatar. As one might glean from its title, Fucktoys will not be to all tastes; some might lose patience with its shaggy-dog pacing, and it should go without saying that prudes and those wearing monocles should stay far, far away. But I can see Fucktoys becoming an instant favorite amongst cult movie weirdos (like, say, the average BUFF audience), and Sriram has proven herself a major underground talent to watch. (OG)
HEAD LIKE A HOLE (2024) dir. Stefan MacDonald-Labelle
Head Like A Hole opens into what looks like a nightmare. A shaky handheld camera guides us into the basement of an ordinary home, where a chair is positioned to look at a blank, scuffed-up white wall. The camera is set down, and we see a sharply dressed man come into the shot, brandishing a large hammer. He tests it on the concrete flooring, deems it good enough, and nails himself in the skull with it until he passes out.
Suddenly—with each frame drenched in black and white—we’re pivoted to Asher, a down-on-his-luck everyman struggling to make ends meet. Desperate, he hustles to a job interview run by a creepy, Burgess Meredith-looking employer at a suburban residence. The employer tells him his one and only job is to watch and measure the hole in the middle of the wall of the basement—the same basement from our intro. As the hole grows, so do Asher’s suspicions on what nefarious things may come from it.
MacDonald-Labelle’s feature is an eerie slow-burn with a heavy atmosphere, shocking reveal, and effective ending—an unnerving entry to this year’s BUFF lineup.
Also, that’s one hell of an appropriate movie title. (ADB)
BEST WISHES TO ALL (2023) dir. Yûta Shimotsu
As Kurosawan as a film could be (Kiyoshi, not Akira), the exciting debut feature by Yûta Shimotsu brings us into an unsettling home filled with secrets. I wouldn’t dare spoil the twists and turns, but let’s just say things only build from where you’d think they’d stop. A bold second act turn pushes this quesy thriller into unknown territory. Hope you’re hungry for miso! (KA)
ESCAPE FROM THE 21ST CENTURY (2024) dir. Yang Li
I’m not entirely sure how to go about reviewing Escape from the 21st Century, not because it is thematically complex (though it may be that), but because it is so fast-paced, and because there is so much stuff packed into its lean 98 minutes, that pausing even a moment for analysis means being left in the dust. The story, in a nutshell: three teenagers in the summer of 1999 are exposed to a strange chemicals which causes them to Quantum Leap into their 38-year-old bodies in a dystopian 2019 every time they sneeze. One discovers himself living the life of a super-cool hitman; another is a journalist struggling to blow the whistle on corruption; the third, the token pudgy comic relief, finds himself with a rippling set of abs. As they jump back and forth between timelines, the boys try to negotiate their relationships with the girl of their dreams, and also stop a mad oligarch from snapping the entire world into a time-slipped stupor.
Or something like that. I’ll be honest and admit that I’m sure I did not follow at least 60% of the plot of Escape from the 21st Century, but that hardly matters in a film like this. The key word here is excess, with more edits in any given five-minute stretch than in Jim Jarmusch’s entire filmography. Director Li Yang applies a hyperactive comic touch clearly indebted to Stephen Chow, Edgar Wright, and the Daniels. The action takes place on “Planet K,” apparently a sort of alternate-timeline Earth (people get high on the extract of a multi-colored space-frog, but also Street Fighter II exists), as a waiver to allow Li to toss in any and all comic book conceits which strike his fancy, and disregard any pesky laws of physics which threaten to stand in the way of a good time. There is an undercurrent of sadness at the loss of youth (“Let’s stay in 1999 forever,” a character sighs at one point, and any millennial in the crowd will likely know the feeling), but you may be too busy jumping up and down and pumping your fist in the air to notice. This is high-octane sugar rush action filmmaking, and I suspect a lot of people are going to become deeply obsessed with it. (OG)
