Category Archives: Sydney Underground Film Festival

Underground Horrors: Geisha War

09 Wednesday Sep 2026

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There are filmmakers who make films, and then there are filmmakers who seem to have wandered into a film laboratory, knocked over several shelves of chemicals and decided to see what happened.

Yoshihiro Nishimura was very much the latter.

With Geisha War, the Japanese cult filmmaker delivers one final eruption of blood, absurdity, political provocation and gloriously impractical visual effects. It is a film that frequently appears less interested in whether its story makes sense than in whether the next image can possibly be more outrageous than the last.

The answer, more often than not, is yes.

Set in the historic pleasure district of Yoshiwara, Geisha War pits an American gangster and his associates against the local community, led by Kiki, a ramen vendor who finds herself caught up in the struggle to protect the district from outside control. The basic premise provides Nishimura with an excuse to stage a collision between American gangster mythology, Japanese popular culture and his own particular brand of cinematic insanity.

And insanity is certainly the operative word.

Nishimura’s cinema has never been particularly interested in restraint. From Tokyo Gore Police to Helldriver, his films transform bodies into weapons, flesh into sculpture and practical effects into a kind of gleeful visual assault. Geisha War carries that tradition forward with an arsenal of bizarre weaponry, outrageous transformations and fountains of artificial blood. FilmInk describes the film’s visual approach as a combination of solid practical gore and cartoonish digital effects, with everything from chainsaw weaponry to giant scissors entering the fray.

It is less a film than a fever dream with a production budget.

Yet beneath the carnage is something considerably more pointed.

The conflict between Carmine and the residents of Yoshiwara is essentially a battle over cultural ownership. The American gangster sees the district as something to acquire, exploit and reshape for his own purposes. Nishimura responds by turning that clash into an exaggerated piece of exploitation spectacle, where cultural imperialism is answered with severed limbs, weaponised geisha and enough blood to repaint the streets.

Subtle it isn’t.

But subtlety was never particularly high on Nishimura’s list of priorities.

The film’s greatest strength is its willingness to embrace the ridiculous. A conventional action film might introduce a weapon and expect us to accept it as part of the world. Nishimura introduces something completely absurd and then seems determined to make it even more absurd. The result is a cinematic universe in which rickshaws become vehicles of lunacy, weapons emerge from unexpected places and characters can transform into things that would be difficult to describe without sounding like the result of a particularly feverish drinking session.

This is Gallows Horror stripped of the gallows and given a flamethrower.

There is also something strangely poignant about watching Geisha War as Nishimura’s final film. The director died in May 2026, making this an unintentional farewell from one of Japanese genre cinema’s great visual anarchists.

It is certainly an appropriate final statement.

Nishimura never seemed particularly interested in behaving himself. His cinema was messy, confrontational, juvenile, political, horny, grotesque and frequently hilarious. He understood that practical effects could be more than technical achievements: they could be jokes, provocations and punctuation marks. A severed limb wasn’t merely a piece of gore. It was a punchline.

Geisha War occasionally struggles beneath the weight of its own excess. The narrative is skeletal, characterisation is largely functional and the film’s relentless barrage of ideas can become exhausting. For all the visual invention, there are moments when it feels as though Nishimura has several films fighting for space inside the same one.

But perhaps that is part of its charm.

This isn’t polished underground cinema. It isn’t attempting to disguise its seams or convince us that its world is realistic. It is handmade, excessive and proudly artificial. The practical effects have weight; the digital effects deliberately flirt with cartoonishness; the action seems designed around the question of what could possibly make an audience yell what the hell was that?

And then, just when the film seems incapable of slowing down, it finds an unexpectedly reflective note beneath all the bloodshed.

That contradiction is what makes Geisha War work.

For all its ridiculousness, there is a genuine sense of resistance running through the film. Its grotesque spectacle becomes a weapon against the forces attempting to commodify and control its world. Nishimura takes the familiar machinery of exploitation cinema and turns it back upon itself, producing something that is simultaneously crude, playful and politically mischievous.

It is not his most accomplished film.

It may not even be his most outrageous.

But it is unmistakably his.

And as the final film from a director who spent decades proving that there was still room for strange, handmade, bloody and completely unclassifiable cinema, Geisha War makes for one hell of a final curtain call.

Underground Horrors is a series of reviews exploring the strange, confrontational and boundary-pushing films emerging from the underground of contemporary horror cinema.

  • Saul Muerte

Underground Horrors: Jump Scare

09 Wednesday Sep 2026

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There is something wonderfully rebellious about a film that seems to have been assembled from equal parts heavy metal, grindhouse cinema, 1990s music videos and a complete disregard for good taste.

Donnie Hobbie’s Jump Scare is that film.

The feature debut from Hobbie follows the all-female metal band Jump Scare as they retreat to a remote cabin to work on their new album. It’s supposed to be an opportunity to escape the pressures of everyday life and find some creative inspiration.

Unfortunately, their neighbours are cannibals.

It is, admittedly, a familiar horror premise.

But Jump Scare has absolutely no interest in behaving like a familiar horror film.

Instead, Hobbie takes the cabin-in-the-woods template and runs it through a neon-soaked, blood-splattered analogue nightmare. The result is a deliberately scrappy collision of comedy, gore, animation, psychedelia and heavy metal attitude.

It looks like a horror movie that escaped from a late-night music-video block.

And that’s a compliment.

There is a tremendous amount of visual personality here. Grainy imagery, saturated colours, stylised lighting, graphic overlays, practical effects and bursts of animation give Jump Scare the feeling of something excavated from a particularly deranged corner of the VHS era.

The film wears its influences proudly.

There are obvious echoes of The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, grindhouse cinema and the splatter-comedy tradition, but Hobbie isn’t particularly interested in disguising those influences. Jump Scare is closer to a mixtape than a traditional horror film: take something from here, something from there, turn the volume up and see what happens.

And, for considerable stretches, it is a hell of a lot of fun.

The band themselves are one of the film’s strongest assets. Their camaraderie gives the early sections a loose, lived-in quality, and the chemistry between the performers provides a welcome sense that these characters actually enjoy being around one another.

That matters.

Because once the cannibals arrive, the film could easily have become another disposable exercise in slaughterhouse horror.

Instead, the personalities keep it moving.

Hobbie also demonstrates an obvious affection for practical filmmaking. There is a joyous physicality to the violence, with blood, guts, creatures and assorted bodily misfortune given an appropriately handmade quality. Some of the effects are deliberately rough around the edges, but that imperfection is part of the film’s aesthetic.

Jump Scare isn’t trying to convince us that we’re watching reality.

It wants us to enjoy the artifice.

That gives the film a particularly punk-rock quality. It is less concerned with polish than with energy.

The problem is that energy can only carry a film so far.

At 102 minutes, Jump Scare occasionally feels as though it has run out of ideas before it has run out of runtime. The same jokes, stylistic flourishes and conversations can begin to repeat themselves, while the middle section lacks some of the momentum generated by the film’s opening.

There are moments when you can almost see the more tightly edited version of Jump Scare hiding inside the finished film.

And that’s frustrating because there is so much here to admire.

Hobbie clearly has an eye.

There are sequences that burst with invention, and the film’s visual confidence is remarkable for a feature debut. It understands that horror doesn’t always need to be dark, grim or self-serious. Sometimes it can be loud, colourful, stupid, funny and covered in blood.

In that sense, Jump Scare feels like something of a corrective to the more restrained tendencies of contemporary horror.

It wants to have fun.

Even when that fun becomes excessive.

The film also gets something right about its metal-band protagonists. Their world isn’t simply used as an excuse for a soundtrack. Music is woven into the film’s identity, with the aesthetic of heavy metal becoming part of its visual and comic language.

The result is less Texas Chain Saw filtered through a conventional horror-comedy structure than Texas Chain Saw dropped into a particularly unhinged music video.

And then somebody added puppets.

And animation.

And considerably more blood.

For all its rough edges, there is something admirable about a filmmaker arriving with this much personality. Jump Scare isn’t afraid to be ugly, ridiculous or excessive. It isn’t interested in sanding down its eccentricities in the pursuit of conventional genre polish.

Sometimes that works beautifully.

Sometimes it doesn’t.

But I’d take an occasionally overstuffed film with this much personality over something technically accomplished and completely anonymous.

Jump Scare doesn’t reinvent the cabin-in-the-woods horror movie.

It throws the old model into a blender, adds a metal soundtrack, pours in a bucket of fake blood and hits the switch.

The result is messy.

Loud.

Occasionally exhausting.

But undeniably alive.

SUFF #20

Jump Scare screens at 9:45pm on Friday 11 September in Cinema 2, with a second screening at 8:00pm on Saturday 12 September in Cinema 4, as part of Sydney Underground Film Festival #20 at Factory Theatre, Marrickville.

For the full program and ticket information, visit the Sydney Underground Film Festival.

  • Saul Muerte

Underground Horrors: Bagworm

08 Tuesday Sep 2026

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There are few things more immediately relatable than stepping on a rusty nail.

The sudden stab of pain. The instinctive inspection of the offending piece of metal. The brief mental calculation of just how bad this might be.

Then there is Carroll.

When Oliver Bernsen’s Bagworm introduces its protagonist, he is already a man seemingly determined to make his own life as unpleasant as possible. A sexually frustrated hammer salesman, conspiracy-minded malcontent and habitual misanthrope, Carroll has developed an elaborate worldview in which the world is broken, society is collapsing and everyone else seems to be conspiring against him.

Then he steps on a rusty nail.

It is, perhaps, the least surprising turning point in cinema history.

What follows is a grimy, grotesque and frequently darkly funny descent into paranoia, physical deterioration and self-destruction. Carroll’s body begins to break down, but so too does his already precarious grip on reality. The question becomes increasingly difficult to answer: is the world genuinely falling apart around him, or is Carroll simply becoming incapable of seeing anything beyond his own increasingly distorted perspective?

Bagworm is at its most effective when it refuses to provide an easy answer.

There is certainly a straightforward body-horror film lurking underneath all the grime. The rusty nail becomes the gateway to an infection that gradually consumes Carroll, providing Bernsen with ample opportunities for increasingly revolting practical effects. His deteriorating body becomes a physical manifestation of the rot already present in his life.

But the film isn’t really interested in asking whether Carroll is sick.

He’s obviously sick.

The more interesting question is whether the infection is responsible for his behaviour or merely giving physical form to everything that was already there.

Carroll is not an easy protagonist to spend ninety-six minutes with. That seems entirely deliberate.

He is petty, suspicious, angry and convinced of his own righteousness. His relationships with women, friends and strangers become increasingly disastrous, yet he repeatedly interprets the resulting hostility as evidence that there is something wrong with everyone else.

It is a particularly contemporary form of horror.

The world hasn’t necessarily turned against Carroll.

Carroll has simply constructed a worldview in which it must have.

This is where Bagworm finds its sharpest satirical edge. Its protagonist’s paranoia and resentment place him within the orbit of the modern manosphere, where personal failure can be transformed into political grievance and loneliness becomes evidence of a conspiracy rather than an invitation to self-reflection. Critics have similarly read the film as an exploration of toxic masculinity, male isolation and the tendency to externalise personal misery.

Bernsen’s achievement is that he doesn’t make this entirely miserable to watch.

Bagworm is often very funny.

Not necessarily comfortable funny, and certainly not always “laugh with the character” funny. Much of the humour comes from watching Carroll’s increasingly bizarre attempts to navigate ordinary social situations while apparently possessing no ability to recognise how thoroughly he is sabotaging himself.

The comedy works because there is something painfully recognisable beneath the grotesquerie.

We’ve all encountered some version of Carroll.

Perhaps not quite this version.

Hopefully.

Peter Falls gives the film an important centre of gravity. Carroll is repellent without becoming entirely abstract. There are flashes of vulnerability beneath the hostility, moments where the character seems less like a cartoon of internet-age masculinity and more like a desperately unhappy man who has spent so long blaming everyone else that he no longer knows how to examine himself.

That distinction matters.

Because Bagworm isn’t particularly interested in redemption.

It isn’t a story about a troubled man discovering the error of his ways and becoming a better person. Instead, it watches him continue digging, apparently oblivious to the fact that he is holding the shovel.

And then it makes the shovel increasingly disgusting.

The physical deterioration is where Bernsen’s filmmaking becomes particularly effective. The film’s grubby aesthetic gives the horror a distinctly tactile quality, while Carroll’s deteriorating body increasingly resembles the physical embodiment of his internal state. The world around him feels just as diseased as he is.

His house is decaying.

His relationships are decaying.

His body is decaying.

And somehow Carroll remains convinced that the problem is everybody else.

That is the joke.

And the tragedy.

Bagworm isn’t always as controlled as its best moments suggest. Its deliberately abrasive tone can become exhausting, and its third act doesn’t quite sustain the same combination of psychological unease and dark comedy that makes the earlier sections so compelling. Even critics who responded strongly to the film have noted that its various stylistic and thematic ambitions don’t always land with equal force.

But there is something admirable about the sheer unpleasantness of it.

Bernsen isn’t attempting to make Carroll conventionally sympathetic. Instead, he asks us to look at a particularly ugly form of contemporary loneliness and watch what happens when isolation, resentment and paranoia are allowed to feed one another.

The result is body horror with a distinctly social infection.

The rusty nail gets into Carroll’s foot.

The paranoia gets into his head.

And before long, it becomes difficult to tell where the disease ends and the man begins.

That is what makes Bagworm considerably more than another gross-out horror film.

It is a portrait of a man rotting from the inside out — and a world that may not be quite as responsible for the smell as he thinks.

SUFF #20

Bagworm screens as part of Sydney Underground Film Festival #20, celebrating the festival’s 20th anniversary at Factory Theatre, Marrickville.

For the full program and ticket information, visit the Sydney Underground Film Festival.

  • Saul Muerte

Underground Horrors: Species

07 Monday Sep 2026

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There are few expressions more insidious than “the daily grind.”

It suggests something mundane. Something repetitive. A little unpleasant, perhaps, but ultimately survivable. Get up. Go to work. Put in the hours. Do it again tomorrow.

In Species, the daily grind becomes something considerably more literal.

Marion Le Corroller’s electrifying debut takes the familiar anxieties of professional burnout and pushes them through the meat grinder of body horror, imagining a generation so thoroughly consumed by work that exhaustion becomes a physical transformation.

Margot wants to be a doctor.

For an ambitious young intern working in one of France’s most competitive emergency rooms, however, the dream is rapidly becoming a nightmare. The pressure is relentless, the hours punishing and the stream of young patients arriving with mysterious symptoms linked to extreme burnout is becoming increasingly difficult to ignore.

Then Margot begins experiencing changes of her own.

The harder she works, the more her body begins to betray her.

It is an appropriately grotesque premise for a film about workplace exhaustion. Rather than depicting burnout as a vague psychological malaise, Species gives it flesh, blood and plenty of opportunities for it to tear itself apart.

Le Corroller is clearly interested in the traditions of body horror, but Species isn’t simply an exercise in mutation for mutation’s sake. The transformations are an extension of the film’s social commentary. Margot’s body becomes the ultimate workplace casualty — an organism pushed beyond its limits by a system that expects productivity regardless of the consequences.

The horror is that nobody seems particularly surprised.

There is something darkly comic in the way Species treats this environment. The absurdity of professional expectations gradually becomes indistinguishable from the grotesque. The emergency room is already a pressure cooker before Margot’s physical transformation begins, and the film finds humour in the bureaucratic machinery surrounding people who are quite literally falling apart.

It is social satire with a viscous coating.

Le Corroller also demonstrates a clear affection for practical effects. When Species gets its hands dirty, it doesn’t hold back. Flesh stretches, ruptures and mutates with the kind of tactile unpleasantness that reminds us why practical body horror remains so effective. There is an immediacy to seeing physical matter behave in ways it absolutely shouldn’t.

The influence of contemporary French body horror is certainly apparent. There are echoes of Titane in its collision of identity, flesh and societal expectation, while the workplace anxieties inevitably invite comparison with The Substance. Yet Species is less interested in abstraction than in taking a very recognisable contemporary problem — exhaustion — and asking what it might look like if we could actually see it happening to the human body.

The answer is not pretty.

Nor is it subtle.

But subtlety isn’t necessarily the point.

Species operates at the intersection of visceral horror and social satire, and its best moments understand that the two can amplify one another. The more grotesque Margot’s transformation becomes, the more ridiculous the expectations placed upon her begin to seem.

The film’s central conceit also taps into something particularly recognisable about contemporary working life: the idea that exhaustion is not necessarily regarded as a warning sign, but as evidence of commitment.

You’re tired?

Work harder.

You’re struggling?

Push through.

Your body is changing?

There are patients waiting.

It is here that Species finds its most uncomfortable joke. The system doesn’t necessarily need to destroy you deliberately. It simply needs to keep demanding more until there is nothing left to give.

And Margot is very much a product of that system.

Le Corroller’s direction is energetic and visually confident, particularly for a debut feature. There is an infectious willingness to push the material into increasingly strange territory, and the film’s mixture of blood-soaked practical effects, absurd humour and social commentary gives it an identity of its own.

At times, however, Species can feel as though it is operating at maximum intensity when a little restraint might have made its sharper ideas hit harder. Its satirical targets are rarely difficult to identify, and the film occasionally favours escalation over deeper exploration.

But there is something refreshing about a debut that would rather overreach than play it safe.

And Species certainly overreaches.

Thankfully, it does so with enthusiasm.

The result is an exhilarating piece of contemporary body horror that understands the grotesque potential of modern working life. Its monsters aren’t simply lurking in the shadows. They are sitting in fluorescent-lit offices, hospital corridors and examination rooms, smiling politely while asking you to work another shift.

Because that’s the real horror of the daily grind.

Eventually, something has to give.

In Species, it’s the flesh.

SUFF #20

Species screens Friday 11 September at 9:45pm in Cinema 1 as part of Sydney Underground Film Festival’s 20th anniversary program at Factory Theatre, Marrickville.

For more information and tickets, visit the Sydney Underground Film Festival.

  • Saul Muerte

Underground Horrors: Lucid

07 Monday Sep 2026

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There is something inherently unsettling about a dream.

Not necessarily because of what happens within it, but because of the strange rules governing the experience. Familiar places become alien. People we know acquire unfamiliar faces. Memories surface without invitation. Cause and effect become slippery. And beneath it all is the uncomfortable knowledge that the nightmare is coming from somewhere inside us.

Lucid, the surreal art-punk horror film from Canadian filmmakers Deanna Milligan and Ramsey Fendall, takes that premise and runs headlong into the subconscious.

Set in the 1990s, the film follows Mia Sunshine Jones (Caitlin Acken Taylor), an art student whose creative ambitions are beginning to collapse beneath the weight of a seemingly insurmountable block. With her place at art school under threat, Mia turns to a mysterious lucid-dreaming elixir in the hope that she can unlock the creativity she feels slipping away.

Instead, she opens a door that perhaps should have remained closed.

The resulting descent into dreams, memories and increasingly monstrous manifestations makes Lucid less interested in conventional nightmare mechanics than in the uncomfortable connection between creation and self-examination.

For Mia, the problem isn’t simply that she can’t make art.

It is that she may not yet understand what she is trying to express.

Milligan and Fendall approach this psychological territory with an appropriately handmade aesthetic. Shot on 35mm and Super 8, Lucid has a tactile quality that distinguishes it from the increasingly polished digital language of contemporary genre cinema. The imagery feels deliberately unstable, as though the film itself is slipping between waking reality and the fragmented visual language of a dream.

That is where Lucid becomes most compelling.

Rather than treating lucid dreaming as a convenient supernatural gimmick, the film uses it as a mechanism for peeling away the layers Mia has constructed around herself. The deeper she travels into this increasingly fractured reality, the more difficult it becomes to distinguish between imagination, memory and emotional trauma.

The monsters, consequently, are more than things to be feared.

They are things to be confronted.

One of the film’s most striking ideas is that artistic expression cannot necessarily be separated from the experiences that produce it. Creativity may be liberating, but it can also be invasive. To create something genuinely personal may require confronting the parts of yourself that you would rather leave buried.

That makes Lucid an interesting companion piece to some of the more traditional forms of body and psychological horror appearing at SUFF this year. Where films such as Bagworm externalise transformation through the physical body, Lucid turns inward. Its battleground is the imagination itself.

And imagination proves to be a particularly dangerous place.

There is an undeniable influence of 1990s alternative and underground culture running through the film, but Lucid isn’t simply nostalgic window dressing. Its period setting becomes part of the film’s identity: a world of handmade art, subcultures and analogue imagery that feels particularly appropriate for a story about an artist struggling to discover her own voice. The filmmakers’ use of 35mm and Super 8 reinforces that connection, giving the film an aesthetic that feels deliberately tactile and imperfect.

It is also a film willing to take risks.

At times, those risks work against it. Lucid isn’t particularly interested in holding the audience’s hand, and its narrative can become as fragmented as the dreamscape through which Mia is travelling. There are moments when the symbolism threatens to overwhelm the story itself.

But that is also part of the film’s appeal.

Lucid isn’t particularly interested in behaving itself.

It wants to be strange.

It wants to be messy.

It wants to crawl inside the head of its protagonist and rummage around in the places where memory, fear and creativity become indistinguishable.

And for a film about an artist desperately searching for inspiration, there is something wonderfully appropriate about that approach.

The result is an ambitious piece of independent horror that feels less concerned with delivering a neatly constructed nightmare than with asking what happens when we deliberately surrender control of our own minds.

Sometimes the things we discover there are frightening.

Sometimes they’re grotesque.

And sometimes they are the very things we need to confront before we can create anything worth showing the world.

Lucid may occasionally lose its way inside its own dreamscape, but its willingness to embrace uncertainty is precisely what makes it such an intriguing piece of underground cinema.

SUFF #20

Lucid screens Friday 11 September at 7:45pm in Cinema 3 as part of the Sydney Underground Film Festival’s 20th anniversary program at Factory Theatre, Marrickville.

For more information and tickets, visit Sydney Underground Film Festival.

  • Saul Muerte

Underground Horrors: Boorman and the Devil

07 Monday Sep 2026

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There is a peculiar pleasure in watching a cinematic disaster being taken seriously. Not excused, exactly, but examined with enough curiosity to discover what might have been buried beneath the wreckage.

Few films arrive with quite the baggage of Exorcist II: The Heretic. John Boorman’s 1977 follow-up to William Friedkin’s The Exorcist has spent decades occupying that strange territory reserved for movies that are discussed almost as much for their failure as for their contents. A notorious sequel. A critical punching bag. A cinematic oddity. A film so frequently invoked as an example of Hollywood hubris that its actual ambitions can become almost incidental.

David Kittredge’s Boorman and the Devil is interested in those ambitions.

Rather than constructing another gleeful autopsy of one of cinema’s most infamous misfires, Kittredge approaches The Heretic with something considerably more valuable: curiosity. The result is a documentary about a much-maligned horror sequel that gradually reveals itself to be less interested in proving that everyone was wrong than in asking why anyone would attempt something so strange in the first place.

On paper, the sequel looked almost impossibly well positioned. Boorman arrived having already established himself as a filmmaker of considerable ambition, while The Exorcist had become a cultural phenomenon. Yet instead of attempting to reproduce Friedkin’s approach, Boorman took the material somewhere considerably more abstract.

And that, perhaps, was the original sin.

The Exorcist II: The Heretic isn’t particularly interested in being The Exorcist II in the conventional sense. It is stranger, more metaphysical and more concerned with ideas than the straightforward continuation audiences might reasonably have expected. The result is a film that can feel less like a conventional horror sequel than a fever dream constructed from fragments of mythology, psychology and spiritual inquiry.

Kittredge understands that contradiction is precisely where the story becomes interesting.

The documentary’s greatest strength is its refusal to reduce The Heretic to either of the two easiest interpretations: misunderstood masterpiece or unmitigated disaster. Instead, Boorman and the Devil allows both possibilities to coexist.

There is plenty here to remind us why the film was so violently rejected. The production was troubled, the tonal shifts were substantial and the distance between what audiences expected and what Boorman attempted was enormous. Yet alongside those failures sits an extraordinary amount of artistic ambition.

That ambition is what Kittredge wants us to reconsider.

The documentary benefits enormously from access to Boorman himself. His presence gives the film an immediacy that no amount of archival reconstruction could quite replicate. Alongside him are recollections from Linda Blair and Louise Fletcher, while contemporary filmmakers including Mike Flanagan and Karyn Kusama offer their own perspectives on the film’s peculiar legacy.

What emerges is less a conventional making-of documentary than a meditation on artistic risk.

That distinction matters.

There is something increasingly unusual about the idea of a major studio giving an established filmmaker the resources to make something genuinely eccentric. Contemporary filmmaking is hardly devoid of experimentation, but the scale at which The Heretic was allowed to pursue its particular vision feels increasingly alien.

Kittredge consequently finds something unexpectedly contemporary in a film that was once dismissed as an embarrassing relic.

Boorman and the Devil asks us to consider whether failure itself has become too threatening to contemporary filmmaking. A film that takes no risks can be competent, polished and entirely forgettable. A film that takes enormous risks can collapse spectacularly — but it can also produce images, ideas and artistic possibilities that would never have existed had everyone involved simply played it safe.

That makes The Heretic a fascinating subject not merely because it failed, but because it failed while attempting something.

And there is a difference.

Kittredge’s documentary is at its most compelling when it recognises that the history of cinema is littered with films whose reputations have changed because the cultural conversation around them changed. Sometimes reassessment reveals a genuine masterpiece. Sometimes it merely makes a fascinating failure more fascinating.

Boorman and the Devil doesn’t necessarily need to convince you that The Exorcist II: The Heretic is secretly a great film.

It only needs to make you curious enough to watch it again.

That is a considerably more interesting proposition.

For horror audiences, there is another reason the documentary resonates. Genre cinema has always been particularly susceptible to critical dismissal when it refuses to behave according to expectation. The horror sequel is expected to deliver familiar pleasures with familiar machinery. Boorman instead delivered something dreamlike, philosophical and formally eccentric.

The question isn’t whether that decision worked.

The question is whether we still value filmmakers enough to allow them to make that decision.

In an era increasingly dominated by intellectual property, established formulas and the gravitational pull of audience expectation, Boorman and the Devil becomes an accidental argument for artistic recklessness. Not recklessness without consequence, but the kind that accepts that failure is occasionally the admission price for originality.

There is something rather fitting about a documentary examining one of Hollywood’s great cinematic disasters arriving at that conclusion.

Perhaps The Heretic wasn’t a failure because John Boorman reached too far.

Perhaps its real failure was that audiences weren’t prepared for where he reached.

Boorman and the Devil doesn’t erase the film’s flaws, nor should it. Instead, it digs through the wreckage and finds something considerably more valuable than a verdict: the evidence of ambition.

And sometimes that is enough reason to look again.

SUFF #20

Boorman and the Devil screens Friday 11 September at 7:45pm as part of the 20th Sydney Underground Film Festival at Factory Theatre.

For tickets and the complete SUFF #20 program, visit the Sydney Underground Film Festival.

  • Saul Muerte

Dead Wrong: Snatchers Revives The Body Snatcher with Aussie Dark Humour

30 Saturday Aug 2025

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Dark comedy has always thrived on uncomfortable juxtapositions, and Snatchers, the Canberra-made debut from directors Craig Alexander and Shelly Higgs, gleefully leans into the clash between the morbid and the mundane. A contemporary riff on Robert Louis Stevenson’s The Body Snatcher, refracted through the lens of Australian gallows humour, it delivers a brisk, twisty tale of desperation, friendship, and the fine line between survival and exploitation.

The set-up is deceptively simple. In a near-dystopian Australia, lifelong friends Mac (Alexander) and Fettes (Justin Hosking) eke out a living as undervalued, underpaid orderlies. When a Jane Doe rolls into their orbit, seemingly a fresh candidate for organ harvesting, the duo sees an opportunity to cash in on their grim surroundings. But when the corpse proves not to be as dead as expected, their plan mutates into a moral and logistical quagmire — a farcical spiral of bad decisions, shifting allegiances, and grim comedy.

What distinguishes Snatchers is not just its premise, but its tonal balancing act. The film operates as a modern Australian take on the Burke and Hare mythos, where grave-robbing becomes a working-class hustle. Yet, instead of solemn Gothic horror, Alexander and Higgs infuse the narrative with a distinctly local irreverence. The humour is dry, the banter unpolished, and the absurdity of the situation constantly undercut by the casual bluntness of its characters. Where a British version might lean into macabre wit, Snatchers feels bracingly Antipodean — equal parts cheeky, grim, and self-deprecating.

Hannah McKenzie, as the not-so-dead Jane Doe, injects a lively volatility into the proceedings, a reminder that the “corpse” has agency of her own and won’t be easily reduced to commodity. The film finds much of its energy in this disruption, forcing Mac and Fettes to navigate not only their friendship but the moral sinkholes of their scheme. The twists come quickly, some predictable, others slyly surprising, but always tethered to the film’s central question: how far will ordinary people bend ethics when the system leaves them with so little to lose?

Though undeniably modest in scale and budget, Snatchers makes a virtue of its scrappy production. Its humour doesn’t always land cleanly, and its narrative leans into familiar beats, but the sheer audacity of its premise — and the willingness to entwine Stevenson’s gothic lineage with Australian socio-economic bite — keeps it engaging. As a festival entry, it embodies the SUFF spirit: resourceful, transgressive, and proudly unpolished, a film that finds life in the margins where mainstream cinema rarely dares to tread.

The Prognosis:

At 80 minutes, Snatchers doesn’t overstay its welcome. Instead, it lingers in the uneasy laughter it provokes — laughter that’s always one step away from horror, one step away from despair.

  • Saul Muerte

SUFF – Snatchers
Unrated 15+
Starts Thursday, September 11, 2025 · Comedy · 1 hr 20 min

Between Dream and Delirium: Julie Pacino’s I Live Here Now Blurs Reality into Madness

30 Saturday Aug 2025

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Julie Pacino’s debut feature announces itself less as a narrative than as a hypnotic state of being. With I Live Here Now, she crafts a film that drifts between dream, paranoia, and fractured identity, where each scene feels like a step deeper into a psychological labyrinth. It is a strikingly assured first feature, one that refuses to provide a map, demanding instead that its audience surrender to its vertiginous rhythms.

Lucy Fry, in a career-defining performance, embodies Rose, a young actress who retreats to a remote hotel in Idyllwild, California, in search of respite from her unraveling life. But the more she seeks refuge, the more porous the walls of her reality become. Time loops back on itself, doubles materialise, and memory seeps into performance until the categories lose meaning altogether. Fry is magnetic precisely because she grounds this hallucinatory descent in something tangible: the unease of someone who no longer trusts her own perceptions.

Pacino wears her influences with confidence. Sheryl Lee’s presence inevitably conjures the spectre of Twin Peaks, and David Lynch’s fingerprints are felt in the film’s elastic time, uncanny repetitions, and ominous hum that seems to vibrate through the very air. Yet Pacino’s aesthetic is not mere homage. Her saturated colour palette recalls Argento’s lush operatics, while the film’s elliptical logic suggests Buñuel’s surreal provocations. Layered on top is a contemporary awareness of performance itself — how identity, memory, and desire are all rehearsed roles, prone to fracture under pressure.

Shot on 35mm, the film achieves a tactile, dreamlike fragility. Every frame looks like a half-remembered photograph, poised on the edge of fading. The supporting cast — Madeline Brewer, Cara Seymour, Sheryl Lee, and a gleefully slippery Matt Rife — all slot into the hallucinatory mood, each embodying figures that may be confidantes, doubles, or projections of Rose’s disintegrating psyche. The film offers no clear answers; its power lies in its refusal to resolve whether we are witnessing dream, reality, or a fragmented plurality of selves.

If Tokyo Evil Hotel was SUFF’s splatter assault on the senses, then I Live Here Now is its slow, intoxicating hypnosis. It burrows into the subconscious and gnaws away at the seams of certainty, drawing the viewer into a space where dread and desire cohabit uneasily. As Rose descends, so do we — through layers of paranoia and fractured selfhood, into the uncanny realisation that the mind itself is the ultimate haunted house.

The Prognosis:

I Live Here Now is not a film to be solved. It is a film to be inhabited, to be surrendered to. And in that surrender, Julie Pacino has crafted a debut that is both daringly elusive and deeply resonant — a Lynchian dream refracted through her own distinct lens.

  • Saul Muerte

SUFF – I Live Here Now
Unrated 15+
Starts Thursday, September 11, 2025 · Drama · 1 hr 36 min

Spinning Into Madness: Pater Noster and the Mission of Light Turns Vinyl into a Psychedelic Curse

29 Friday Aug 2025

Posted by in Movie review, Sydney Underground Film Festival

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Christopher Bickel is not a filmmaker interested in polish. He is interested in sweat, noise, and the intoxicating dirt that clings to the celluloid ghosts of exploitation cinema. With Pater Noster and the Mission of Light, his latest DIY descent into the grindhouse abyss, Bickel channels the cracked spirit of 1970s cult horror while infusing it with a distinctly contemporary awareness of obsession — musical, spiritual, and cinematic.

The hook is irresistible: Max, a record store clerk chasing the thrill of rare vinyl, stumbles upon an LP from a long-forgotten commune band called Mission of Light. What begins as crate-digging curiosity spirals into something altogether darker, as Max and her friends trace the record’s origins to a secluded cult whose rituals are soaked in both blood and distortion. Before long, the chiming folk harmonies become incantations, the needle-drop becomes a curse, and the grooves themselves seem to open onto a world of psychedelic terror.

Bickel, whose underground reputation was forged on unapologetically abrasive, micro-budget projects, makes no effort to hide the seams. In fact, the seams are the point: a stitched-together tapestry of lurid colour, stroboscopic editing, and gory practical effects that recall the handmade ferocity of vintage splatter cinema. The budget is meager, but the imagination is unruly. When the film tilts fully into ritual bloodletting and cosmic chaos, it achieves the kind of unhinged sensory overload that expensive horror often can’t touch.

What’s most surprising, though, is the music. The filmmakers wrote and recorded a full album in the guise of Mission of Light, and its jangling, upbeat folk tunes — deceptively sunny, unnervingly catchy — weave through the film like a viral infection. Their recurrence creates a peculiar dissonance: the music seems to gnaw at the edges of the viewer’s mind, becoming both a nostalgic echo of 1970s counterculture and a sinister tool of indoctrination. By the time the cult’s rituals are in full swing, the songs are inseparable from the horror, leaving the audience haunted by melodies as much as imagery.

For all its disjointedness — the pacing takes time to find its grip, and some performances verge on pastiche — the film exerts a strange cumulative power. It sneaks up on you, wearing you down with repetition and atmosphere until its final stretches feel like an outright possession. It is less a film you watch than one you are slowly, insidiously absorbed into.

The Prognosis:

Pater Noster and the Mission of Light is not for everyone. Its rough edges are sharp, its indulgence in retro exploitation tropes unapologetic. But within SUFF’s lineup, it is precisely the kind of discovery audiences come to this festival for: a work made with passion, sweat, and delirious creativity, chewing through its limitations to deliver something singular. Bickel has crafted a nightmare that’s equal parts grindhouse revival, cult exposé, and vinyl collector’s hallucination — a low-budget hymn that worms its way into your soul, humming as it feeds.

  • Saul Muerte

SUFF – Pater Noster and the Mission of Light
Unrated 18+
Starts Thursday, September 11, 2025 · Horror · 1 hr 37 min

Neon-Bathed Terror: Nishimura’s Tokyo Evil Hotel Haunts and Horrifies

29 Friday Aug 2025

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SUFF 2025 – Where Cult Cinema, Transgression, and Innovation Collide

In the annals of Japanese horror cinema, Yoshihiro Nishimura occupies a singular, slippery niche — one forged in latex, arterial spray, and an irreverent carnival of grotesquery. From Tokyo Gore Police to Helldriver, his films have thrived on excess, turning the body into a site of anarchic spectacle. With Tokyo Evil Hotel, Nishimura returns to his splatter roots but cloaks the viscera in something more spectral, an unnerving meditation on urban legends and the hidden machinery of Japan’s entertainment underworld.

The premise sounds almost folkloric: a cursed hotel, five suicides in a year, a ghostly figure in a wheelchair propelled by betrayal and heartbreak. But Nishimura, ever the provocateur, is less interested in quiet ghost story chills than in conjuring a fever dream. The film drags the viewer down its neon-lit corridors, where reality and nightmare blur into one another. Images arrive in waves — some baroque in their grotesquerie, others achingly poetic — before dissolving into the next eruption of slime, latex, or digital delirium.

What anchors this onslaught is not narrative cohesion (which Nishimura deliberately unravels) but mood, texture, and metaphor. The hotel itself becomes a nexus of exploitation, its walls absorbing the residue of despair from a culture that glamorises seduction while feeding on vulnerability. Nishimura weaponises the tropes of J-horror — the wrathful woman, the haunted threshold, the cyclical nature of trauma — and splices them into his splatter lineage. If Ring and Ju-On explored the horror of technological contamination, Tokyo Evil Hotel maps the horror of commodified intimacy, where every smile has a price and every fantasy its corroded underbelly.

The cast — Masanori Mimoto and Natsumi Tadano among them — give just enough grounding to keep the delirium tethered to human suffering, though their characters often feel like archetypal vessels swept along by the director’s vision. The real star, as always with Nishimura, is the texture: prosthetic ingenuity, practical gore, and uncanny tableaux that feel equal parts Kabuki and Cronenberg.

Yet the film is not without fracture. The disjointedness — the lurch from social critique to grotesque comedy to lyrical melancholy — sometimes undermines the impact. For some, this instability will feel frustrating; for others, it is precisely Nishimura’s method, a refusal to let the viewer rest. In the context of the Sydney Underground Film Festival, however, Tokyo Evil Hotel feels entirely at home. SUFF thrives on works that assault the senses, destabilise the familiar, and revel in the unruly. Nishimura’s latest is all of that: a cacophony of horror tropes remixed, a lurid nightmare of betrayal and exploitation, and a work that refuses to be neatly filed under ghost story or gorefest.

The Prognosis:

Tokyo Evil Hotel is less about narrative payoff than about immersion — in slime, in sorrow, in spectacle. It is a haunted funhouse mirror of Japan’s social anxieties, one that cackles, weeps, and bleeds in equal measure. Disjointed but unforgettable, it reminds us why Nishimura remains a cult legend: because no one else so gleefully drags horror into the gutter, then refracts it through neon into something unnervingly beautiful.

  • Saul Muerte

SUFF – Tokyo Evil Hotel
Starts Thursday, September 11, 2025 · Horror · 1 hr 30 min