It’s spring, and for hopelessly obsessed cinephiles, that means one thing: film festival season! But where to go? Cannes is too corporate, Sundance is too Redford-y – plus, you know, you don’t feel like traveling thousands of miles and spending ungodly amounts of money to watch a bunch of milquetoast studio wannabes in a room full of desperate, sweaty industry types. Ah, but this is Boston. And if you’ve been haunting the beantown weirdo cinema scene for any length of time, you already know that all those other festivals are irrelevant. Because we have BUFF.

Currently in its eighteenth year, the Boston Underground Film Festival offers a dependably electric assortment of local talent and international lunacy, world premieres and cult exhumations, and, quite frequently, things that are simply impossible to describe. Highlights of this year’s roster include the Polish vampire-mermaid film The Lure; a Tuareg-language Prince homage entitled Rain the Color Blue with a Little Red In It (there is no Tuareg word for “Purple”); Ross Sutherland’s VHS-infused multimedia live performance Stand By for Tape Back-Up; the recently rediscovered 1977 Japanese animated mindfuck Belladonna of Sadness; Blood of the Tribades, the new lesbian vampire homage by local darlings Sophia Cacciola and Michael J. Epstein; live appearances by genre legends Frank Henenlotter (debuting his new feature Chasing Banksy) and Larry Fessenden (presenting a 15th anniversary screening of his own The Wendigo); and several programs of mind-bending short subjects.

All of this is to say: you really need to get your ass over to the Brattle and the HFA to check some of this out. And keep an eye on this spot for daily reviews from the Hassle’s intrepid team of Film Flam correspondents. Robert Redford is all well and good, after all, but he’s no drunken, Satanic bunny rabbit.

Click here for tickets, showtimes, and additional info