2022 Boston Underground Film Festival Roundup

The 22nd annual Boston Underground Film Festival (BUFF, if you’re nasty) kicked off the spring  March 23rd-27th with their first in-person festival since 2019. In addition to a slew of New England premieres and a pantsload of shorts, they hosted a brand new restoration of the 1987 cockroach creature feature The Nest, as well as a special 40th anniversary screening of The Secret of NIHM. Here are a few of the highlights Bloody Good Horror caught.

Freakscene: The Story of Dinosaur Jr.

Look, some band documentaries are filled with sex and drugs and debauchery and others are filled with mumbly guys who make great music together, but maybe aren’t the best at actually communicating with each other. Then sometimes those guys get older and more mature and realize they don’t have a good reason to be mad at each other so they get back together and record five+ more fantastic albums.

Hatching

Twelve-year-old Tinja has a secret: the bird-like monstrosity in her room that she hatched from an egg which she has lavished with all the motherly love that her overbearing influencer mom has witheld from her. Hatching follows a lot of familiar beats and the metaphor at its center gets a little muddled at the end, but it has some delightfully disgusting creature effects and manages to stay fun and engrossing throughout.

The Innocents

Kids can be real monsters. When a group of children begin to exhibit weird powers when they are together, it starts out as fun and games as they fling objects through the air with their minds and play telepathic guessing games. Things take a dark turn when one of the kids with a bad homelife begins to use his powers in a more malevolent way. The Innocents is a stunning movie carried by some remarkable performances by a cast of children who aren’t the typical cinematic precocious tykes, but instead are capable of switching from sweetness to cruelty with little warning or control over their emotions. This one might be one of the first great horror movies of 2022.

Medusa

Medusa is an angry primal scream of a movie about women dealing with control, both over themselves as they attempt to mold themselves into the shape of perfect fundamentalist Christian housewives and over other women, by stalking them late at night outside of nightclubs and brutally attacking them until they repent from their sinful ways. Visually lush with a killer soundtrack, Medusa has clear echoes of Suspiria but recontextualizes the themes of the movie along with the myth of Medusa to create something unique, surreal, and often funny.

Hypochondriac

As the opening card says, Hypochondriac is based on a real mental breakdown experienced by first time director Addison Heimann. It’s a well made and clearly very personal look at mental illness and inherited trauma that gets a lot of value out of its small budget, but would have been a bit stronger if its imagery didn’t borrow so directly from Donnie Darko.