Boston Underground 2025

Lorcan Finnegan’s The Surfer, starring Nicolas Cage, kicks off BUFF 2025. “Here is a gloriously demented B-movie thriller about a middle-aged man who wants to ride a big wave and the grinning local bullies who regard the beach as home soil,” wrote the Guardian’s Xan Brooks when The Surfer premiered as a Midnight Screening in Cannes last year. “Crisply scripted by Thomas Martin and directed by Finnegan with a pleasing, no-frills intensity, The Surfer feels resolutely old-school. It’s a low-budget, hard-hitting comic bruiser of a picture: a midlife-crisis movie dressed up as a 1970s exploitation flick.”

As a Spotlight Screening, BUFF will present the world premiere of a new restoration of Stuart Gordon’s Re-Animator (1985), a freewheeling adaptation of a 1922 story by H. P. Lovecraft. Barbara Crampton, who plays a doctor killed by a reanimated corpse and then brought back to life in a zombielike state, will be on hand. “Crampton plays her with a confident, unvarnished purity that’s reminiscent of Nancy Allen’s performance in Blow Out,” wrote Chuck Bowen for Slant in 2012. Re-Animator is “justifiably remembered quite fondly as a rowdy and gory detonation of taboos, but it’s the quieter touches that give it a less readily resolvable texture. Let’s put it this way: Re-Animator is the splatter-comedy ode to egocentrically dashed American dreams.”

Annapurna Sriram’s first feature, Fucktoys, will arrive fresh from its premiere at SXSW, where it won a Special Jury Award. Sriram herself plays a sex worker seeking to reverse a curse placed on her, and at RogerEbert.com, Matt Zoller Seitz finds that Fucktoys is “farce, psychodrama, theological inquiry, softcore, satire, and tragedy, all at the same time. And in an era when nearly everyone has gone digital, it’s been shot on 16 mm color film by Cory Fraiman-Lott, cropped to CinemaScope dimensions, then seemingly pushed in developing so the colors seem to explode. For viewers tired of the metallic beige-ness of streaming series, this movie will hit like dopamine.” Fucktoys is “also, in an increasingly neutered cinema landscape, proudly and often graphically sexual, to the point where it could be described as ‘sticky.’”

Joel Potrykus’s Vulcanizadora “feels like a natural progression of his slime-slacker milieu,” writes Jacob Oller at the A.V. Club. “At the movie’s heart, there’s still a ridiculous and upsetting idea, thrust upon desperate members of the lower-middle class, seen through to its tragicomic conclusion. And yet, it’s far more subtle in its images and emotions than the allegorical stuckness of Relaxer or the monstrous swindler of Buzzard, both of which also star Joshua Burge in various states of unravelment.”

Other highlights include Emilie Blichfeldt’s The Ugly Stepsister, an audience favorite at Sundance and Berlin, and Alexandre O. Philippe’s Chain Reactions, in which Patton Oswalt, Takashi Miike, Alexandra Heller-Nicholas, Stephen King, and Karyn Kusama talk about the lasting impact of Tobe Hooper’s The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, fifty years on.