It may feel like you were just sitting down in much warmer March weather enjoying Alice Lowe's Prevenge at the Brattle, but a year has passed and the 2018 installment of the Boston Underground Film Festival is set to take over the Cambridge theater and the Harvard Film Archive for some thrills and chills.
The festival starts Wednesday (March 21) with the local premiere of Gus Krieger's My Name is Myesha, and continues on through Sunday (March 25), closing with the Brazilian werewolf film Good Manners. The line-up is pretty intense, frankly, with a few titles that saw recent festival raves (Coralie Fargeat's Revenge, which seemed to play to priase at every festival from Toronto to Sundance, and Jenn Wexler's SXSW annihilator The Ranger) and some unknown foreign gems that we're totally pumped to see (Onur Saylak's timely drama Daha, Agnieszka Holland's Spoor).
No matter how good the schedule is, as always, it's the people who make these events great, and BUFF is stocked to the gills with organizers who want you to have one hell of a good time. It's one of the most fun festivals in all of the United States, with parties each and every night and some of the greatest special events that you'll ever find at a gathering of film nerds outside of Austin's Fantastic Fest.
Need more proof? Well, where else are you going to be able to watch all your favorite old-school Saturday morning cartoons on the big screen while eating all the cereal that you can stuff down your gullet? Nowhere, that's where. Interested in short films? There's a bevy of programs, each catering to a different taste (including the typically incredible music-oriented "Sound and Vision" block).
If you need any additional suggestions for what to see, we'd highly recommend Let the Corpses Tan, screening Friday (March 23) at the Brattle, by Hélène Cattet &Bruno Forzani (The Strange Color of Your Body's Tears) which we saw at Fantastic Fest last year and absolutely loved. It's the kind of tribute cinema that takes an era of filmmaking -- in this case the Italian "giallo" of the 1970s -- and transforms it into something utterly kinetic and crazy.
We'd also recommend you get your ticket for the Secret Screening on Saturday night, which always promises to showcase something totally fascinating like last year's feature, the Rami Malek-starring Buster's Mal Heart.
But the biggest get of all may be the screening of 1982 cult classic Liquid Sky, the neon-soaked new wave sci-fi erotic psychotrip directed by Slavia Tsukerman, who will be in attendance at the Brattle when it shows on the opening night of March 21. It's a rare opportunity to see a gorgeous film -- one typically caught up in grainy VHS transfers -- projected from a pristine 35mm print, and it's one that you really shouldn't pass up.
Need more suggestions? Scan through a few select trailers below.