As longtime Hassle readers know, we’re big fans here of the Boston Underground Film Festival (BUFF if you’re nasty), the area’s premiere festival for the cult, the outre, and the unclassifiable. This year’s BUFF— the 26th edition, for those keeping score— marks a bit of a turning point for the festival; longtime programmers Kevin Monahan and Nicole McControversy have stepped down, handing the reins to former BUFF technical directors Adam Van Voorhis and Phil Healy, along with a murderer’s row of notables of the local film scene. Any doubts to BUFF’s future, however, can be quashed by looking at this year’s schedule, which is just as wild and raunchy as any in the festival’s history. From now through the end of the fest (which runs through Sunday), I, along with my esteemed Hassle cohort Kyle Amato, will have boots on the ground at BUFF, reporting back to you periodically with mini-reviews straight from the trenches. In the meantime, grab some tickets for yourself— and praise Bacchus.
BUFFET INFINITY
One of the great pleasures of BUFF is the guarantee that, no matter how obsessive a cult movie aficionado you are, you will see something that you have not seen before. This is most definitely true of Buffet Infinity, the new sketch comedy/found-footage horror whatzit from Canadian filmmaker/comedian/caricaturist Simon Glassman. At first glance, the film takes the form of a TV Carnage/Everything Is Terrible-style media collage. A fog of VHS tracking lines give way to hokey (staged) commercials for local businesses: a vaguely shady lawyer, a pair of feuding all-you-can-eat buffets (which eventually devolve into campaign-style attack ads questioning each other’s ethics and ethnicity), a meekly rapping pawn shop owner, and more. Slowly, however, we come to sense that not all is right in the sleepy town of Westridge (which is apparently a real suburb of Edmonton, Alberta). A mysterious sinkhole opens in the parking lot of Buffet Infinity, prompting its ads to cheerfully but insistently intone, “Park around the front!” A deafening thrum begins to seep into the soundtrack, which can clearly be heard by some of the on-camera pitchmen. A series of strange ads, which may or may not have something to do with a local L. Ron Hubbard-ish sci-fi author/spiritual leader, consists of nothing but cryptic instructions over a blinking black dot. Eventually, the center ceases to hold, and the ads bleed into each other in increasingly concerning ways.
With its faux-VHS visuals and intentionally cringey performances, the most obvious point of comparison to Buffet Infinity’s sensibility is the nightmare-dada of Tim & Eric Awesome Show, Great Job! A more apt Adult Swim comparison, however, would be the strange one-off experiments of “Too Many Cooks” or “Unedited Footage of a Bear,” which cut their absurdist humor with an undeniable layer of dread. The goofiness of the first act is so infectious that you barely notice the tonal shift until it’s morphed into a full-on existentialist freakout. The magic lies in how the cosmic horror rams up against Vaudevillian silly-name comedy, frequently within the same 30-second spot. Buffet Infinity would perhaps benefit from a bit more discipline and attention to detail in recreating the look and feel of the ads it parodies (the infamous tape-trader totem “Big Bill Hell’s,” crafted by actual advertisers blowing off steam, remains the gold standard in this regard), but it feels silly to ding something this wild and original for lack of verisimilitude. It’s the sort of film which, when a coworker asks you what you saw last night, you won’t have the faintest clue what to tell them. In other words, it’s BUFF in a nutshell.
THE HEDONIST
The deader-than-deadpan humor of Nick Funess’s The Hedonist begins with its title. 27-year-old Reed, played by Funess, is not sexually inactive per se, but he’s no one’s idea of a lothario; socially awkward and living with his aging parents following a nervous breakdown, Reed doesn’t seem like he could commit to any life at all, much less one of pure pleasure (imagine if Tim Robinson was an office shooter and you’ll be in the right ballpark). At loose ends, Reed propositions sex worker Tess (Izzi Rojas) outside a 7-11 with an unusual request: for $3000, she will simply spend a week with him and, in his words, “take care of him” (“$4000,” Tess responds after the briefest of hesitations). There’s sex involved (including a painfully awkward attempt at autoerotic asphyxiation), but it seems Reed is more in need of companionship and stability. The unlikely pair get ice cream together, and Reed even invites Tess to dinner with his parents as his “girlfriend” (complete with a wildly unconvincing story of how they met-cute at a flea market). Gradually, we begin to get a sense of the shape of Reed’s neuroses, and the two develop something of an understanding.
Or at least as much understanding as can exist in the strange, hermetic world of this film. The pacing and cadence of each scene is so mannered and stilted that it could easily read as amateurish and crude. Funess clearly has a gameplan, however; there is a deceptive level of artistry to his framing and pacing, and it’s tougher than it looks to get performances this uniform out of mostly non-actors (ironically, the most natural and engaging performances come from Funess’s real-life parents, who provide a lively and wry counterpoint to their son’s terminal weirdness). This deliberately alienating tone will undoubtedly stop some viewers at the gate, but those who gel with it will be delighted. Personally, I found myself somewhere in between; I frequently wanted to shake some sense into these characters, but also found myself laughing out loud on several occasions (including a scene in which Tess’s recollection of seeing a well-known movie as a child receives a truly unexpected postscript). One thing I can’t accuse Funess of is taking the easy way out— of turning Tess into a warm, motherly figure, say, or throwing a cheap swing at pathos in the third act. This is bone-dry cringe comedy for those who find Joel Potrykus or Aki Kaurismäki too obvious or broad. It won’t be for everyone, but to those it is for, it will be loved intensely.
SUGAR ROT
If there is such a thing as a “BUFF movie,” Becca Kozak’s gleefully transgressive Sugar Rot is the dictionary definition. Chloë MacLeod plays Candy, your typical twentysomething punk-rock stripper/ice cream vendor. One day while receiving a delivery Candy is assaulted in the walk-in freezer by a slavering ice cream man, leaving her pregnant with… something. Far from usual morning sickness, Candy finds herself oozing goopy, multi-colored ice cream from every orifice. She wants an abortion, but the only doctor in town, the lascivious plastic surgeon Dr. Herschell Gordon (a clear nod to cinema’s “godfather of gore” Herschell Gordon Lewis) is an evangelical Christian— and, like seemingly everyone else Candy meets, is driven into a frenzy by proximity to her sugary oozings.
Sugar Rot is a crude film in every sense of the word. For one thing, it’s gross; Kozak’s inspired decision to replace the blood and entrails traditional to the body horror genre with ice cream and candy is no less viscerally upsetting than the “real” thing, and should not be read as a go-ahead for those with weaker constitutions to roll the dice on this one. It’s also raggedly assembled on a shoestring budget, replete with occasionally wooden line readings and flimsy sets (in her Q&A, Kozak revealed that many scenes, such as those in Dr. Gordon’s office, were actually shot in the themed suites of a local Vancouver BDSM dungeon). But in a film like Sugar Rot, these visible seams are as much features as they are bugs. This is a punk film through and through; the soundtrack is filled with raucous tunes from Dayglo Abortions and Pet Blessings, and Candy’s room is filled with blacklight paintings of punk icons from Richard Hell and GG Allin to Vyvyan from The Young Ones. This cheerful snottiness extends from the outrageous sight gags and over-the-top performances to the throwaway dialogue (“I love throwing up,” a fellow stripper chipperly remarks exiting a bathroom stall, “It’s so much easier than not eating!”). There’s a message here about bodily autonomy, but it’s part and parcel with the agreeable, Troma-ish tastelessness. Obviously, I’m in the film’s target audience; my only regret is that it ended too late to grab a cone at J.P. Licks afterwards.
The Boston Underground Film Festival continues through Sunday, 3/22 @ Brattle Theatre and Coolidge Corner Theatre
