Philadelphia Unnamed Film Festival 2023 - Preview

Philly Unnamed Film Festival
8th annual - 2023
Preview

By “Doc” Hunter Bush, staff writer and podcast czar

Get ready to start your spooky season with Philadelphia’s premier genre- and independent film -friendly film showcase: PUFF! For their eighth year, the Philly Unnamed Film Festival is bringing an eclectic assortment of films to South Philadelphia for anyone who wants to enjoy them. PUFF will run from Weds, Sept. 27th to Sun, Oct 1st. I’ve perused the trailers for the films listed (most can be found on the PUFF YouTube channel) so I can give you an idea of what will be available on each of the fest days. I’ll provide the ticket link at the bottom of course, but before that let’s see what’s on offer.

Sept 27th:

The festival kicks off with Caddy Hack (2023), a film that asks the questions: What if the gopher from Caddyshack (1980) was supernaturally evil? and What if there were a lot of them? During a prestigious golf tournament, caddy after caddy are turning up dead from “mutated” gopher attacks and it’s up to the surviving caddies to stop it to save their jobs and their lives. The trailer is short but packs a goopy punch with plenty of sticky-looking dismemberment, glowing-eyed gopher puppet monsters, a nut shot, and even an exploding head! Caddy Hack probably isn’t a lock for the Best Picture Oscar, but it sure looks like a crowd pleaser!

After the Bizarre Block of short films (experimental shorts that defy easy categorization), PUFF is showing Killer Workout (sometimes known as Aerobicide) the 1987 slasher whodunnit set in the then-novel world of physical fitness. Five years after a young model is burned in a tanning salon incident, her twin sister Rhonda (Marcia Karr) is operating a gym where a string of murders begin to take place. The plot is overly complicated, and the kills are only occasionally gym-centric (multiple are committed with a huge novelty safety pin), but the score is great, and you won’t be the only one laughing.

Sept 28th:

The Horror Shorts block kicks things off, followed by Grieve (2023) from writer/director Robbie Smith. The trailer doesn’t give away much as far as narrative, but has buckets of mood and atmosphere! Sans dialogue, under somber piano music we see disassociated imagery of a man (educated guess is he’s grieving) at a remote house in the woods. The description mentions something about an eldritch presence that feeds on (what else?) grief, so I expect this will deal with unclear reality, and focus heavily on the vibes. I love this kind of thing personally. How about you?

The 2nd film of the day is a 10th Anniversary screening of Motivational Growth (2013), which - if you’re anything like me - you heard about due to the involvement of genre legend Jeffrey Combs. In the film, Ian (Adrian DiGiovanni) is a shut-in and habitual loser who hits his head and starts conversing with the enormous mold culture growing in his bathroom (voiced by Combs). The Mold initially helps Ian improve his life before beginning to steer things in a more sinister direction. This film is an odd-feeling balance between silly and brutal but if you can get on its wavelength, you should have a good time.

Sept 29th:

PUFF kicks the weekend off with a steamy revenge thriller. In Emanuelle’s Revenge (2023), the titular Emanuelle (Beatrice Schiaffino) begins an erotically-tinged cat-and-mouse relationship with a wealthy playboy (Gianni Rosato) after his obsession and abuse leads to the death of a young model. I don’t know how graphic this abuse might be, so if you’re especially sensitive to these themes, you might not want to start your day with this one, but - given the title - I’m guessing the bad guy is gonna get his comeuppance. In case that sweetens the pot.

After the Global Grab Bag (an assortment of international shorts) comes writer/director Nick Verdi’s Sweet Relief (2023). The trailer is slim on story, but there are flashes of knife-based violence, a man guiltily emptying a large duffel bag, and a trio of young women all in the woods of New England. There’s also a person online dubbed “Sweet Angel” who appears to be a mouse-man of some kind, who is also briefly seen in the woods. The whole thing happens under a nursery rhyme about dealing with grief. Nick’s previous film, Cockazoid - which I saw at last year’s PUFF and reviewed on MovieJawn - is an intense and fascinating spiral into a fragile male psyche, so I’m interested to see how much this film makes use of its female protagonists. This seems like a potent viewing experience.

Friday closes out with Hunting for the Hag (2023?) a found footage excursion into the woods of Illinois to find the Hawthorne Hag. This looks a bit like The Blair Witch Project (1999) - hand held camera, three friends (though they’re all women here), some of whom are skeptical, etc. - and maybe that’s all it is. And maybe that’s enough for you (there are some die-hard found footage fans out there, bless them) but the last time I thought a film screening at PUFF looked kind of basic, it was Echoes of Fear (2018) and the third act blew me away. Obviously I’m hoping for something like that here.

Sept 30th:

Saturday at PUFF is jam-packed! Beginning with the Local Block (short films from the Philly area), the first feature is Scream Therapy (2023), a horror comedy from writer/director Cassie Keet. When five thirty-something BFFs head to the desert for a weekend of restorative scream therapy (as well as drinking and drugs), they end up in the sights of an “incel cult” with a looming human sacrifice deadline. This has one really solid joke in the trailer, and the set up seems like it should be both kinda vicious and pretty funny.

Enter the Clones of Bruce (2023) plays next, a documentary about the unusual phenomenon of Bruce Lee-alikes. At the time of his death in 1973, Bruce Lee was just about to break big in America. For a while, his previous films were licensed and re-released to feed fans’ desire for more Bruce Lee movies, but after they had run out, studios turned to more duplicitous means. Hiring martial artists that “looked like” Bruce Lee (re: they were Asian) and giving them stage names like Bruce Li, Bruce Le, Bruce Lai, and Dragon Lee, genre film producers pumped out so many Lee-alikes that - as someone in the trailer points out - some people thought “Bruce Lee” was a character like Sherlock Holmes, played by different actors. This subject is endlessly fascinating to me, and this doc offers some of the “clones” the ability to speak on their times subbing for Bruce Lee, which sounds incredible!

The third film of the day, Psychosis (2023) caught my attention like a fish hook, with dramatic, unique imagery and a mix of black & white and full color footage. Described as a cross between Darren Aronofsky’s Pi (1998) and Philip K. Dick’s A Scanner Darkly (book 1977 / film 2006), this seems like a w-i-l-d time. When a man (Derryn Amoroso) who experiences auditory hallucinations is drawn into the orbit of a deranged bargain bin batman vigilante (Pj van Gyen) and a hypnotic guru (Adam MacNeill), reality appears to become unstable. There’s violence, mind control, potential supernatural elements; this looks like a real kitchen sink film and I. am. here for it!

The next film is an as-yet-unannounced Mystery Movie (exciting!), before the night closes out with a screening of T Blockers (2023), the third feature from 18 year old Alice Maio Mackay! When a trans filmmaker and her friends find an old horror film that predicts the future, only they know that their town is being taken over by ancient parasites. Now they’ll have to deal with the problem if they want to get back to partying. This seems like exactly the blood-and-neon soaked way you’d wanna end your evening.

Oct 1st:

The final day of PUFF 8 kicks off with the Music Videos block, followed by an afternoon screening of the 2001 - I kid you not - masterpiece that is Josie and the Pussycats! When sinister record label MegaRecords needs a new band with which to spread their subliminal advertising, they choose the titular trio of girl power pop punks (Rachael Leigh Cook, Rosario Dawson, and Tara Reid), setting off an anti-capitalist adventure comedy with a soundtrack full of ear worms that will get stuck in your head - in a non-sinister way - for days! Legitimately a great cult film.

The fest comes to a close with Hist-o-Rama 3D!: It Seemed Like a Good Idea at the Time (2023), a collection of outdated industrial and educational short films converted into 3D to, and I quote, “given an otherworldly dimension, allowing the past to reach out and touch us in ways their creators never imagined.” I don’t really know what that means in an exact way, but it sure sounds interesting.

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I’ve never had a bad time at a PUFF screening. The organizers are friendly, funny, and welcoming to both the audience and, frequently, filmmakers. The vibes, as they say, are impeccable. Please support PUFF whenever and however possible and that includes treating yourself to some of the screenings mentioned above! I don’t think you’ll regret it.





PUFF 8 will run from Weds, Sept. 27th to Sun, Oct 1st.
Tickets are available HERE.

"COCKAZOID" (2022)

Cockazoid (2022)
Written by Nick Verdi, B.R. Yeager
Directed by Nick Verdi
Starring Jimmy Laine, Ethan Hansen, Franklin Statz
Running time 1 hour, 26 minutes

By “Doc” Hunter Bush, MJ Podcast Czar

It’s finally turning cold in Philadelphia after a unseasonably late turn from the warm weather. And oddly I find my mind returning to a flick I caught a few months back at this year’s Philadelphia Unnamed Film Festival. Cockazoid is a very uncomfortable film, as emotionally cold as the Massachusetts landscape it takes place in, but I find it exceedingly fascinating. It’s been sitting in the back of my mind since the screening ended, a sinister hum undermining my every quiet moment.

Cockazoid is the brainchild of director/co-writer Nick Verdi (co-written with author B.R. Yeager) and it’s …unsettling to say the least. Andrew (Jimmy Laine) is a loner. A disaffected young man who, it is obvious from the film’s opening moments, has become untethered from reality. He travels back to his hometown using a family tragedy as an excuse but his ultimate goal is to kill all the white men (not unlike himself) in Massachusetts. While he doesn’t even come close to achieving his goal, he comes a lot closer than most people ever would.

Now, I’m going to say something that might sound really odd: This movie is very funny. It’s super dark in tone, and filled with an almost continual sense of dread. The kills in the movie are brutal and the kind of low-budget explicit where the unrealism of them makes them more horrific - watching Andrew attempt to dismember a victim’s corpse in the woods with just a pocket knife and some random stick he found on the ground is kind of nauseating but it’s also hilarious in its futility. It’s why butchers don’t cut meat with a Swiss Army knife. It’s only because this is a film; because you can see that the torso he’s mutilating is fake, that it’s funny at all.

There’s a kind of sick humor in Andrew himself. He’s so cartoonishly incompetent and socially impotent that to even compare him to any type of specific mindset feels like an insult. He’s a cautionary tale. What sadly occasionally does really happen when extreme, deep-seeded mental illness and the kind of self-aggrandizing keyboard warrior mindset get too high on their own supply and think their fantasies of being some kind of philosophical warrior for a higher truth are in any way connected to reality. It’s the kind of thinking we see whenever any mass shooter or aspirant serial killer’s manifesto comes to light.

That’s also what I found most interesting in Cockazoid. Andrew’s inner monologues contain just glimpses into his beliefs, if you can even consider them actual, capital-B “Beliefs”. These brief bits of his headspace seem as unrelated to each other as they are to reality. One moment he’s rattling off statistics: how many white men live in Massachusetts, how much square footage the state has available for him to bury his army of victims, etc., and in the next moment he’s fantasizing about retiring to the afterlife to live in a mansion with a roof shingled in their teeth. This seemingly constant flux of his core motivation makes Andrew both more frightening and more pathetic in equal measure. Does he just want to kill for the sake of killing or is he hiding behind the scapegoat of a nebulous “greater purpose”.

I’m trying not to overuse the word “fascinating”. Just because it’s bad writing, not because I’m worried what you’ll think of my being fascinated by Cockazoid. I think the point of Cockazoid is to be fascinated by it. And disgusted, in equal measure.

The filmmaking is incredibly well done. Everything, everywhere feels cold. There’s hardly a moment where the tension or discomfort is allowed to ease up. The neighborhoods, woods, and fields of Massachusetts feel labyrinthine and claustrophobic. There are occasional peeks into Andrew’s early life that are shown as degraded and warped VHS home videos in his mind’s eye, a format that is inherently off-putting no matter what’s shown, but with the feeling of a horrific impending revelation looming, it becomes nail-biting.

Jimmy Laine’s performance as Andrew is just as incredible. There’s something to be said for a performance that isn’t afraid to be ugly that’s absolutely commendable when it fits the subject matter this well. As a character, Andrew has hyped himself up to the point that he almost has to kill someone or else admit that maybe the problem isn’t the entire world, maybe it’s just him. But once he’s done it, he has to justify it, which leads him back to the same place, mentally. And around and around it goes. As a performer, Laine’s large eyes bulge and shift, his motions are ungainly and awkward, the internal struggle he is having is clearly depicted at all times.

Not that I see myself as any great tastemaker, but I hope this article can help generate a little buzz about this film. It really should be seen. I reached out to director Nick Verdi, and as of yet he has gotten no real response about getting Cockazoid any proper distribution, which is honestly a disappointment. It’s not a film for everyone, nor is it one I could see myself rewatching every year - it’s much too unpleasant for that - but it’s still a film I’d like to own. I’d like to be able to show it to people (certain people who would appreciate/could handle it). It’s honestly a masterclass in low-budget filmmaking, in maintaining a very specific tone, in managing that sense of dread; all things that (especially) horror filmmakers should have access to. I hope it becomes more readily available soon.

Just as a footnote: the film’s title, as Verdi explained after the screening, is a derogatory term for white people (a bastardization of “caucasoid”), which I only mention because it’s not explained in the film itself, but I think it’s a fabulously perfect title in how the meaning and the almost creature-like imagery it conjures perfectly coalesce in the themes of the film.

Cockazoid is currently unavailable to view but hopefully that will change.
In the meantime, watch the teaser trailer for Sweet Relief, Nick’s next project, here on YouTube.
Support small films. Long Live the Movies.

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.This piece was written for MovieJawn, a fabulous site where you can find tons of other excellent movie-centric writings, a shop where you can subscribe to the quarterly physical zine, or listen to me on the  Hate Watch/Great Watch  podcast! Support the MovieJawn Patreon here!

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