Hokum
The opening night film, Damian McCarthy's supernatural horror, Hokum, stars the versatile Adam Scott (Severance, Party Down, and of course Hot Tub Time Machine 2) as a flippant writer being punished for his sins in a haunted hotel.
According to our own J Hurtado, Hokum puts "McCarthy into the upper echelon of contemporary horror filmmakers alongside people like Ari Aster and Oz Perkins." This is high praise indeed.
I Love Boosters
Boots Riley (Sorry To Bother You) makes colourful layers of thoughtful, irreverent chaos that is both overwhelming and endlessly entertaining. His latest film, I Love Boosters is the festival's closing night film.
With its dayglo fashion palette. a crew of professional shoplifters become celebrities when they target a bitchy fashion maven. A stacked ensemble includes Keke Palmer, Naomi Ackie, Taylour Paige, Poppy Liu, Eiza Gonzalez, LaKeith Stanfield, Will Poulter, Don Cheadle and Demi Moore. This one promises to go out with fireworks.
Little Doors
Writer-Actor Anthony Oberbeck has been a relative fixture at CUFF for the past few years, including stand-out discoveries such as Dad & Stepdad, as well as Reveries: The Mind Prison. Both films, which revel in escalating absurdity, have a deadpan sensibility with a kind of sly relatability, and got a lot of love from ScreenAnarchy.
His directorial debut,Little Doors, is set in a post-apocalyptic world, where a lonely woman discovers a small wooden door on the side of her body. The crisis is whether or not to open that door. We are curious, too.
Tracy & Martina Goin' Out West
The “Hoser-Genre” of Canadian cinema is a alive and well! Like a distant second cousin to Don Shebib’s 1970 classic Goin’ Down the Road, Michael Dowse’s Fubar, and cult TV show, The Trailer Park Boys, Tracy & Martina Goin’ Out West continues the fine tradition of skewering very specific subcultures that exist in the margins of Canadian society.
Greg Vardy and Justine Williamson have been building the characters of Martina and Tracy (respectively), with their cakes of make-up and extended local lore, for more than a decade now in podcast and social media form that has been bleeding into live shows.
The humour is built from observations around their two nearby towns and the funny characters that reside there. Their delivery, accents, and simply the intonation of each other's names is vintage maritime provincial stuff. It is all done in a loose, improvisational structure that works very well when shooting guerilla-style in public spaces. Much of the film takes place in Calgary itself, as the two hit the road in search of fame and fortune with no money and precious little planning.
Claire's Hat: The Unmaking of a Film
I remember fondly being at the premiere of Bruce McDonald's Picture Claire back in the day, and digging the film, which was a reasonably high-budget feature film (with Hollywood stars Mickey Rourke, Juliette Lewis, and Gina Gershon) that did the unthinkable: It let Toronto play itself, with very specific neighbourhoods (mainly Kensington Market) being showcased when Toronto was only a generic American city on the big screen for production tax breaks.
The unfortunate timing of that premiere was September 10, 2001. The world would change in a big way at 9am on the following day. So the film was lost, forgotten, and the few people who did see it generally disliked it.
McDonald went then went rogue, and recut the picture in a very unconventional way, a way that seemed to upset the film's money men, and he has been lowkey screening this version, Claire's Hat, on and off for years.
Bruce is in Calgary for Canada Film Day (on the eve of CUFF) to host a screening of his cult classic rock n' road picture, Hard Core Logo, and he will also be around to further discuss what exactly went off the rails with Picture Claire.
Jaripeo
Rodeo culture and queer riders, masculinity and homosexuality get juxtaposed in documentary filmmakers Efraín Mojica and Rebecca Zweig's visually heightened film, where, according to our own Rino Lu, "Swirling spotlights of different colours extend the sensuality of what is considered a traditionally antiquated and ultra-masculine sport."
Clown Song
This is just a short film, but it packs a full feature into its spry and gorgeous 7 minutes. Effectively compact, with cheeky visual grammar, lighting, and slick camera-work, Clown Song manages, quite effortlessly, several rug-pulls around emotional catharsis, generational trauma, and more than one dose of naughty sex. In musical form.
A FUNNY THING HAPPENED ON THE WAY TO THE CINEMA is one of three short film blocks at CUFF, and features Clown Song as the opening number. The other two blocks are FRIDAY IN THE PARK WITH GORE, and HOW TO SUCCEED IN LOVE WITHOUT REALLY TRYING.
Buffet Infinity
In the spirit of 'exploded meta-media horror' along the lines of Too Many Cooks (which exists only in the opening credit sequences of 1980s sitcoms) and the short film Great Taste (which is the story of a confused woman trapped inside a Red Lobster commercial) comes the ultra-low-fi Buffet Infinity.
It is a feature-length narrative built completely out of VHS-style local TV commercials: A couple of competing restaurants that share the space in the same strip mall in Westridge, Alberta. A whiskey-drinking injury lawyer. A used car lot with a super-hero fetish. A cult mentalist turned singer-songwriter. A pawnshop whose owners have a penchant for bad rhymes and deadpan dance moves. And an insurance company that creates fear and anxiety from the most niche of household scenarios.
The seeds of a plot are planted as the film begins to escalate out of its core concept and into something stranger. It never lets its satirical knife out of its target (consumerism, conformity, and competitive pettiness), though, with a keen eye for detail. Beware the sinkhole.
The film has been confounding audiences on the festival circuit, from Fantasia to Sitges to Brooklyn Horror.
The History of Concrete
After his multi-year HBO show (How To With John Wilson) comes to an end, it leaves him in an in-between state of finding his next project, and making it to the end of each day. After a flooding in the basement of his apartment, and a maintenance worker criticizing his shoddy DIY concrete repair, Wilson falls down the mother of all rabbit holes: The science and the philosophy of concrete.
The resulting documentary, about a substance that is everywhere, yet ignored by everyone, is highly reminiscent of Matt Barats's profoundly under-seen Cash Cow (which played CUFF in 2023).
It is a distracted meditation on urban planning and unsexy infrastructure, by way of an existential crisis about art and purpose and death. It is also a brilliant observational comedy.
The thing is, Fisher is a master at spotting the weirdest detail in a shot, a scene, or an idea, and refocusing on it. The detail is often something so absurdly strange and out of place, that it leads his curiosity to his next point of focus. The daisy-chained structure of The History of Concrete is low-key genius in the sublime way all the details do eventually recombine to make a solid point about the impermanence of something so damn permanent.
My Bloody Valentine
Undisputed Canadian slasher classic, My Bloody Valentine, released in the USA with an X rating in 1981, is getting a repertory screening with director George Mihalka in attendance. This is not an experience to be skipped!
The Fox
The debut feature film from Dario Russo (Danger 5), features a high profile cast, including Olivia Colman, Sam Neill, Emily Browning, and Jai Courtney, in a weird adult fairy tale with puppet foxes, Monkey's Paws, and infidelity, that would likely make a great double feature with Curry Barker's Obsession.
Obsession
As much a horror-comedy as it is a stress-induced anxiety attack, Obsession is a Twilight Zone inversion of Romeo & Juliet.
The debut film from Curry Barker, who is definitely going places, is an "Unromantic Comedy" for the GenZ set and a cringeworthy look at asymmetrical relationships. How that desperate kind of puppy love manifests itself in awkward abasement, and self-destruction.
It is also about how unrestrained neediness generates disgust in the other party, and triggers a flight reflex that the modern social contract denies any kind of grace or relief.
Not a date movie. You have been warned.
Imposters
After their baby disappears, a desperate mother follows an unusual path to get her child returned. What comes back is not what it seems. Caleb J. Phillips' feature debut plays with mystery, science fiction and twist-driven thrillers in Imposters.
Josh Hurtado, who caught this out of SXSW, earlier splashed high praise on the narrative: "Every time you think you know exactly where Imposters is going, it defiantly defies expectation, zigging where you think it’s going to zag, keeping the audience on the edge of its seat, hoping against hope for a happy ending that seems almost impossible."
Bagworm
Cheekily skewering the Manosphere and doomscrolling rage, Oliver Bernsen's grainy 16mm body horror is a provocation. After a sexually frustrated hammer salesman steps on a rusty nail, he must determine whether the world’s sudden and violent turn against him is real or the result of an infection consuming his body and mind.
Marama
Our own Shelagh Rowan-Legg caught this lush anti-folkloric tale of a Maori governess by way of Brontë Sisters, at the Toronto International Film Festival and had this to say:
"Rich in its visual composition and lead performance, Mārama works the gothic tropes effectively enough to tell its story of colonial violence and that violence’s revenging angel, meeting it with the equal violence it has earned."
Mockbuster
If you are of a certain age, the very tail end of the video store era, you may remember the company that used to make a near parallel blockbuster with zero budget in the hopes that someone would confuse the tape at Blockbuster Video with the real thing. Eventually they started making hybrid hodgepodge stuff like Sharknado, which brought them a different kind of awareness with a younger audience. That company was called The Asylum, and they developed a cult following in and of themselves, as much for their lack of production value, as the speed at which they could churn stuff out.
Mockbuster is a documentary about The Asylum, only through the lens of a talented director, Anthony Frith, chasing the dream through the hustle of genre filmmaking in one of its most banal niches.
Saturday Morning Cartoon Party
A staple and ritual of CUFF. Three hours of retro cartoons, PSAs, vintage commercials, and a bar of unlimited sugar cereal, which spans both screens, a lot of kids, and most of the festival staff in mascot costumes.
This started out as the brainchild of programmer, writer, and filmmaker Kier-La Janisse, who, a number of years ago, passed the baton to musician and pop-culture curator, David Bertrand.
Much of the audience shows up PJs, brings a large-sized bowl and spoon, to watch some GI Joe, Gem and the Holograms, and The Smurfs, with odder, nearly forgotten deep-cut cartoons in between.
Every Heavy Thing
In a little over a decade, Mickey Reece has directed over two dozen features, many of which have never seen the light of day outside of his Oklahoma City base, save for a few die-hard fanatics. The man is prolific, to say the least. His latest is a neon-tinged 80s-infused cyber thriller, Every Heavy Thing.
A little bit Hitchcock, the film often feels like a grown-up version of something like War Games or Virtuosity, crossed with Blow Out, featuring the kind of flourishes that permeated DePalma’s 70s and 80s work.
Hangashore
Justin Oakey, a writer/director from Newfoundland, lives with his wife, children, and droves of animals in a traditional lifestyle full of hunting, fishing, growing, and storytelling. His latest film, Hangashore, has an artist chases the ghost of her father from Iceland to Newfoundland.
This Canadian haunted-romance, marinated in the salty sea air of remote coastal villages, has played the country from coast-to-coast-to-coast, scooping up a variety of awards. CUFF has decided to bring it inland, and we are here for it.
