PUFF Postscript - 2020

Philadelphia Unnamed Film Festival
PUFF Postscript 2020

by Hunter Bush


With the news that Cineworld would be shuttering their theaters until 2021 coming out over the weekend, digital film festivals are looking more and more like the new status quo as opposed to a stop-gap solution. To that end, I sincerely hope you took advantage of the PUFF 2020 screenings over the weekend because things like PUFF - the Philadelphia Unnamed Film Festival - are important for filmmakers who don’t have studio backing. If you didn’t, you missed out on some great stuff, but we are trying our best to regularly cover similar fests here at Moviejawn.

As with my coverage of last year’s PUFF, I’ll just be briefly summarizing & reviewing the flicks I saw (*) and hopefully giving you an idea whether you should keep an eye out for them.

Hail to the Deadites -

I’m an Evil Dead fan (see the above enclosed photo of early-20s Hunter meeting Bruce Campbell at a book signing). If I had to choose one, Evil Dead 2 is it, but damn do I love all three (AND the Ash vs Evil Dead series may it R.I.P.). As such, I really enjoyed Hail to the Deadites, director Steve Villeneuve’s documentary about the fandom around the franchise. It introduces us to collectors, some members of the cast and crew and even performers continuing the ED outreach through music. If, like me, you’re a big fan, this doc is probably for you! If you’re not, though… If you’re only tangentially aware that ED exists but haven’t seen it, or if you have but it didn’t tickle you, I don’t think Hail to the Deadites will do much to encourage you to check it out or change your mind. To be fair, the focus of the picture is the fans, but personally I could have done with a little bit more detail about the thing they hold so dear. Not just why *they* love it, but purely what it is and why it has continued to resonate with folks for 40 years.

Beasts Clawing At Straws -

The most stylish picture of my PUFF experience, this has a lot to love if you enjoy crime thrillers with enough of a sense of humor to balance the tension. Initially trying to figure out how each character we’re following is related to the others is a little confusing - though, to be fair, I was in the middle of a heavy duty allergy day so the antihistamines may have given me Garbage Brain - but eventually everything becomes crystal clear. In my PUFF Preview, I thought the trailer for Beasts looked a little like the work of the Coen Bros., and there are certainly aspects of that, but writer/director Yong-Hoon Kim (working from the novel by Keisuke Sone) has different aims in mind. Like the Coens however, Yong-Hoon handles violent moments with a light touch, preventing things from becoming too grim. The performances are all really wonderful and the score is incredible - at one point during a flashback, I think it riffed on the music from Lethal Weapon - and the cinematography was gorgeous! If ensemble crime flicks are your thing, keep an eye out for Beasts Clawing At Straws!

Seeds (2020) -

I didn’t completely change my opinion of Seeds, but I think the trailer gave me the wrong impression going in. Visually, I found Seeds absolutely gorgeous! I don’t know if it was a poor transfer for the trailer, or maybe I didn’t watch it in the right resolution, but I was way off the mark. The tone and pacing as well are much more appealing than they first seemed. The stilted delivery - and it is stilted - doesn’t come off as entirely amateurish when viewed as a part of the whole. If anything, it adds a certain vibe to the film reminiscent of Italian horror or some of the slow burn supernatural thrillers from the 70’s. There are still moments that drop like stones. Some are due to the delivery to be sure, but others are just clunky exposition or unnecessary story components. Writer/director Skip Shea definitely had a vision and, I think, realized it and I can easily see Seeds developing a following especially among fans of SOV (shot on video) horror.

The Silent Party -

I have complicated feelings about this one. There’s some well-done genre storytelling moments (i.e. “Fun with Guns”), the kind of thing you want from a revenge story, but what I’ve mostly been chewing over since watching is the moral ambiguity. From the trailer, I’d guessed that there would be no clear black and white morality, no straight up Good Guys and Bad Guys but I didn’t anticipate the degree to which this would be proven true. It’s a bit hard to go into without spoiling important aspects of the picture, but I was surprised at the effort the filmmakers made in service of creating a unique antiheroine in Laura (Jazmín Stuart). Definitely a flick that I’ll be thinking about for a while.


I don’t think any of these features will quite end up being my favorite of the year but I’ll never stop supporting small cinema, festivals and filmmakers like these. I hope that next year PUFF (as well as other alternative film festivals) will safely be able to exist in a public space again because if there’s one positive thing 2020 has done it’s remind me how important movies and the film community in general are.

I love a big high-budget blockbuster, but most likely few of them will ever surprise me as thoroughly as Seeds did, or leave me with something I can truly ruminate on like The Silent Party, which is why we as film fans need to have access to smaller productions. I had never heard of any of the films that I saw as part of PUFF this year and without PUFF they might never have made a blip on my film radar. Regardless of how I ultimately feel about the individual films, that would be a great shame.

Follow PUFF on Twitter and Facebook for updates and I hope next year I’ll be able to see you all at things like PUFF so we can share some popcorn and trade notes. Until then though, support alternative spaces, for god’s sake VOTE and as always Long Live the Movies.

(*) Unfortunately I did not get the opportunity to see any of the short film blocks this year, or to screen Poser.