BOSTON UNDERGROUND FILM FESTIVAL

NOW WITH MORE GRAVITAS

By Harry Vaughn

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The Boston Underground Film Festival prides itself on digging up naughty and subversive little flicks that, at their best (or worst), look something like a Herschell Gordon Lewis/John Waters concoction mixed in with some postmodern pretension. However, this year's slate of films, while remaining faithfully campy and exploitative, takes a stab at bigger, more profound topics. In fact, five of the films that will be screened in Cambridge March 20-23 go to great lengths to utilize past styles of subversive filmmaking in order to comment on the current lack of imagination and creative force within the film and art community at large. If this sounds a bit heavy-handed, especially coming from a festival whose mascot is a fanged and bloodthirsty bunny rabbit, it is; but at least this year's entries force you to think and reflect on film history while they indulge in the more predictable issues of incest, female mutilation and kinky, blood-drenched sex.

One film, in particular, that leaps frantically between grotesque camp and intimate drama is Karim Hussain's hypnotic La Belle Bete. Placed in a modern context but set in a Gothic-style French manor in the middle of nowhere, the film follows a crazed, domineering widow straight out of Mommie Dearest along with her two lonely and developmentally challenged adult children. The interactions between the emotionally pent-up family members are vicious and often theatrical, and their burlesque flamboyance as characters often takes away from the sobriety Hussain attempts to instill into his story. Nevertheless, the cartoonish and perverse womb he has created in La Belle Bete is still entrancing and seductive. The austere French mansion shuts out any grounded sense of time, history or context and allows for an intimate, Baby Jane-like rush of melodramatic madness that ultimately makes the film come across as both dated and timeless.

Another film that similarly retreats from any recognizable trace of the real world is Joshua Brown's Altamont Now, a Gimme Shelter mockumentary surrounding a delusional group of youth rebels who try to recreate a counterculture revolution based on the commodified events of the 1960s. While they broadcast angry, threatening messages from their underground lair in California and carry around loaded guns (which they never actually fire), the MTV-hating group spends the majority of their time smoking expensive weed and drawing lame, angsty comparisons to Woodstock and Black Panther power. These entitled, self-obsessed 21st-century children are straight out of Juno, spewing one irony-laced cultural reference after the next as if to instill a false sense of generation-defining individuality within their sheltered, privileged lives. However, the greatest irony of Altamont Now, a film that seems to despise the directionless indulgence of our current youth, is that it becomes as tiresome and one-note in its parodying as the bratty little shits that it consistently pokes fun at.

The same problem mars the efforts of Who is KK Downey?, a satire that simultaneously criticizes and celebrates the atrocious behavior of its affluent, twentysomething protagonists. While the film, like Altamont Now, begins as a clever and subversive jab at pretentious art world drivel, directors Pat Kiely and Darren Curtis think too highly of their own comedic skills and eventually drown their film in frivolous, sometimes gratuitous behavior all in the name of "parody".

Nothing, however, quite reaches the monotony and irrelevance of Jeremy Kasten's pretentious remake of Gordon Lewis' 1970 shock flick, The Wizard of Gore. Though Crispin Glover makes a slimy, memorable appearance as the film's title magician, Kasten gives this misogynistic gore-fest a stale neo film noir makeover, which more times than not clashes inappropriately with the rest of the film. Gordon Lewis would certainly not approve.

This leaves Spine Tingler: The William Castle Story, a documentary of such cinematic warmth it feels out of place in a festival dedicated to perverse and alienating forms of filmmaking. However, director Jeffrey Shwartz' ode to William Castle's fascinating career as a B-movie scare-meister is thoroughly steeped in underground cinema history, and it celebrates an era (roughly between the '50s and the early '70s) when showmanship and entrepreneurialism were still alive in Hollywood, before corporate power and mainstream success wiped out the notion of starting movies from the ground up.

Spine Tingler would definitely be my main reason to embark on the film festival later this week. Its lovely, understated sense of nostalgia reminds all of us why subversive and original forms of filmmaking are still vital and necessary in an industry powered by thoughtless, cash-making machinery.

BOSTON UNDERGROUND FILM FESTIVAL

THU. 3.20-SUN. 3.23

BRATTLE THEATRE AND AMC LOEWS HARVARD SQUARE

$75/WEEKEND PASS; $8, $6 SENIORS OR STUDENTS/INDIVIDUAL TICKETS

FOR TICKETS AND SHOWTIMES VISIT BOSTONUNDERGROUND.ORG