MARCH 27 » 9:45p
MARCH 30 » 9:30p
EAST COAST PREMIERE
2009, USA, 80 min.
Director: Chad Ferrin Screenwriters: Chad Ferrin, Roham Ghodsi, Rosie Roberts
Cast: Noah Segan, Andrea Rueda, Ezra Buzzington, Elina Madison
In this genre-blending, mind-bending throwback to grindhouse cinema at its best, a group of deviant, drug-addled med students are systematically hunted and raped to death by a horrifically endowed husband/wife serial killing duo from the 1970s.
Noah Segan (Brick, Deadgirl) leads the pack of doomed students as Justin, a dabbler in dissociatives and deliriants, who inadvertently takes this motley crew to psychotropic hell only to find that hell has followed them back. Incidentally, this shape-shifting hell is sporting relentlessly murderous genitalia. As the bodycount rises, disorientation descends; fact and fiction become increasingly difficult to parse as hallucinations and flashbacks create a darkly moody visual landscape punctuated with genuinely hilarious moments of schadenfreude.
Despite the terrifying and (literally) vicious thrust of the film’s premise, director Chad Ferrin (who may be familiar to BUFF’s audience from 2005’s The Ghouls) manages to bring a youth-gone-wild playfulness to the unfolding bloodbath, particularly with a killer soundscape provided by the raucous, experimental L.A. punk band, The Mae Shi. Oscillating between fun and freakish, this is one of the few times where you’ll hear BUFF emphatically say “NO TO DRUGS!”
Think “wildly original, ironic-hipster Argento in a mind-fuck of a psychedelic whodunit that brashly defies all metaphysical tenets.” In other words, you’re in for a rollercoaster gorefest that innervates both the brain and the viscera (a rare find indeed). Someone’s Knocking at the Door is brutal, beautiful, and definitely not for the faint of heart.
— Nicole McConvery
* No one under 18 permitted into this screening.
PLAYING WITH
Yellow Light
Ryan Tse
Hong Kong
15 min.
Disjointed time, like a humorless god, giveth a lonely author ample time with a blowup doll and taketh away his best friend and any modicum of sense about his surreal situation.
