Camp screens July 24 as part of the Friday Night Weird underground film series. Courtesy: Camp Productions
Ah, summer in Boulder — the temps are hot, the creek is cold and the movies are … weird. That’s how it’s going down at the Dairy Arts Center, at least, where everyone’s favorite weekly underground cinema showcase is back for another month of off-the-wall fare you won’t find on Netflix.
To catch you up to speed on what’s in store, we caught up once again with the nonprofit arts center’s resident “Queen of the Weird” Shay Wescott for our regular rundown on everything coming to the big screen at the Boedecker Theater in July.
“He’s back for the first time.” That’s the tagline for Blind Cop 2, the “sequel” to a nonexistent original from filmmaker Alex Bonk, following a grieving blind police officer (George Fearing) tasked with cleaning up the streets after an influx of illegal weapons threatens to throw the city into chaos.
“Usually I would reserve a word like ‘bold’ for films that are courageous, challenging, provocative,” Wescott says. “Blind Cop 2 is not necessarily any of those things, but I can’t think of a better word for a feature debut that is a sequel to an original that doesn’t exist.”
“As an unabashed fan of paracinema, ’80s camp and unnecessarily large explosions, I was immediately charmed by the pure silliness of this movie, reminding me of a lot of the early Friday Night Weird films we started this program with,” she continues. “But like all of the best bad movies, it’s also lovable simply because someone cared so much to actually make it.”
After glimpsing the ghost of his late mother, American novelist Ohm Bauman (Adam Scott) retreats to a remote inn in rural Ireland to scatter his parents’ ashes. There’s just one problem: A witch haunting the honeymoon suite.
Consumed by disturbing visions and a shocking disappearance, Bauman is forced to confront the dark corners of his past in this supernatural horror film described by English film critic Mark Kermode as “Barton Fink meets Father Ted via Stephen King.’’
“You’ve probably already heard that Hokum is pretty scary (it is) and that it’s drawn a lot of (deserving) comparison to The Shining,” Wescott says. “It’s the particularly Irish sensibility, droll and bleakly funny — with a pitch perfect Adam Scott performance, channeling the jerks from his earlier career like Step Brothers and the cameo as the bully from Boy Meets World — that makes Hokum more than the average popcorn movie.”
Time is running out for Australian filmmaker Anthony Frith, who has six days and a paltry budget to produce The Land that Time Forgot, a knockoff “lost-world dinosaur epic” for the notorious Sharknado film studio known as The Asylum.
Mockbuster is the behind-the-scenes documentary of the “controlled chaos” of making the ridiculous B-movie in his hometown of Adelaide, South Australia. Mining the tension between financial restraint and creative ambition, the result is a whole greater than the sum of its parts.
“Despite the cynical business of monetizing bad movies, Mockbuster reminds us that real artists will always find a way to make real art — and Anthony Firth manages to make a better documentary than our glimpses of The Land that Time Forgot would lead you to believe,” Wescott says. “If the Roger Corman ‘B-movie film school’ could give us Francis Ford Coppola and Martin Scorsese, then maybe there’s still hope for what comes out of The Asylum.”
Trauma, redemption and witchcraft collide in Camp, Canadian filmmaker Avalon Fast’s vibey summer-camp sendup about a grief-stricken counselor (Zola Grimmer) who finds solace after tragedy through the supernatural power of sapphic love.
“Another voice is the burgeoning subgenre of ‘girly horror,’ Fast gives her film’s witchy vibes something more earnest and tender than its predecessors — though the outfits are still a goth girl’s dream — completely unbothered by alienating anyone with its definitively feminine perspective,” Wescott says. “An intentional slow burn, Camp has also been cited as a hangout movie, and there’s something also quietly radical about allowing girls screen time to just exist.”
The reviews of Julia Ducournau’s body-horror drama Alpha may not carry the same enthusiasm as those surrounding the film’s Palme d’Or-winning predecessor Titane, but Wescott says you shouldn’t let that keep you from checking out this singular film about a troubled 13-year-old girl and a blood-borne disease that turns the afflicted into marble.
“Ducournau’s newest film has somehow struck a chord in its plainness and sincerity, provoking a lot of viewers for not being provocative — at least not in the way we expect,” Wescott says. “Alpha is not so secretly a metaphor for the AIDs epidemic, with many not able to see past the generational gap of the issue to the obviously still unhealed wound, and the more universal repulsion to death and decay.”
“Ducournau has drawn a lot of comparison to David Cronenberg (who holds godly status for Friday Night Weird), especially in Titane as her Crash and now Alpha as her The Shrouds, a film I also really liked and was glad we programmed despite mixed reviews,” Wescott continues. “I’m hopeful we can create more space for filmmakers of this caliber to be celebrated both for the projects that display their audacity, but also the ones that reveal their vulnerability.”
