FANTASIA 29 (2025)—CURTAINRAISER FOR THE THIRD WAVE

Fucktoys (2025)—At RogerEbert.com, Matt Zoller Seitz writes: “Annapurna Sriram’s feature debut Fucktoys, about a sex worker earning a living while undoing a curse, is farce, psychodrama, theological inquiry, softcore, satire, and tragedy, all at the same time. And in an era when nearly everyone has gone digital, it’s been shot on 16mm color film by Cory Fraiman-Lott (another name film buffs should write down), cropped to CinemaScope dimensions, then seemingly pushed in developing so the colors seem to explode. For viewers tired of the metallic beige-ness of streaming series, this movie will hit like dopamine. And, as the title suggests, it is also, in an increasingly neutered cinema landscape, proudly and often graphically sexual, to the point where it could be described as ‘sticky.’ ” 

Winner of a special jury award at SXSW 2025 praising Sriram’s multihyphenation (director, writer and star), Audience Award winner at the Boston Underground Film Festival for Best Debut Film, and winner of a special jury mention at the Oak Cliff Film Festival, Fucktoys—as Fantasia puts it—is “a glitter-coated, piss-soaked fairytale for the forgotten.”

  

 It Ends (2025)—Siddhant Adlakha’s review at Variety for Alex Ullom’s It Ends extols this “brilliant, existential road thriller” as “a gateway for younger viewers into new forms of thought and self-reflection. The whole thing could be seen as rooted in the anxieties of close-knit friends being forced to separate after college, but also in its terrifying antonym: never being allowed to grow up and face the world.” 

Billing It Ends as a “major genre breakout”, Fantasia synopsizes that “writer/director Alex Ullom and his gifted cast work miracles and offer a compelling, constantly intriguing, and often terrifying road trip into adulthood.”  

Touch Me (2025)—Admittedly, they had me at tentacle sex. Oh yeah!! At Bloody Disgusting, Meagan Navarro characterizes Touch Me as “a psychosexual sci-fi horror movie that draws from retro Japanese horror, exploitation cinema, and perhaps even hentai” while at the same time infusing “its depiction of a toxic friendship curdled by trauma, codependency, and addiction with vibrant style and campy fun.” 

For his sophomore feature, Addison Heinmann (Hypocondriac) provides—as Fantasia puts it—"a singular work that breakdances seamlessly from tentacle sex and practical exploding heads to beautifully touching monologues and heartbreaking reflections on trauma and toxic relationships. Two codependent best friends become addicted to the heroin-like touch of an alien narcissist who may or may not be trying to take over the world.” 

“The aesthetic language of Heimann’s film is a visual and auditory fantasia of Japanese influences, bold neon lighting, deep, vibrating beats and triptychs and diptychs,” Robert Daniels writes at RogerEbert.com. “Heimann’s sense of the corporeal, the pleasure the body enacts, is so perceptive you nearly wish the entire movie was one continuous orgy. The film is also intermittently hilarious….”  

Queens of the Dead (2025)—Zombies have become a family tradition, at least among the Romeros. Daughter Tina directs a queered take of the ghoul genre invented by her father. Drag queens and club kids battle zombies craving brains during a zombie outbreak at their drag show in Brooklyn, putting personal conflicts aside to utilize their distinct abilities against the undead threat.” I can only imagine what those “distinct abilities” might be. 

“What sets Queens of the Dead apart from most other zombie flicks,” Carla Hay explains at Culturemix “is how the characters react to the zombies. In true diva fashion, someone in Queens of the Dead is likely to make cutting remarks about a zombie’s decrepit appearance and shout out some makeover advice in the midst of a zombie attack.” 

Whereas George Romero’s Dawn of the Dead “satirized brain-dead mall culture”, Jeffrey Berg recalls at Film-Forward, “Queens skewers social media and phone addiction, with zombies stalking about with their faces stuck in smartphone screens.”  

Queens of the Dead won the Audience Award for Best Narrative Feature when it premiered at the Tribeca Film Festival 2025.  

Redux Redux (2025)—On the basis of previous Fantasia entries Funeral Kings (2012) and The Block Island Sound (2020), I’m all in for Redux Redux, the latest creation by Kevin and Matthew McManus. Desperate to avenge her daughter’s murder, Irene Kelly (Michaela McManus) journeys through parallel dimensions to repeatedly track down and annihilate her daughter’s killer (Jeremy Holm). As she becomes consumed by vengeance, her humanity hangs in the balance, which harkens back to the Confucian adage: "If you seek revenge you should dig two graves.”  

Redux Redux, Brian Tallerico writes at RogerEbert.com, is “a film that takes elements of the serial killer genre, aspects of grief drama, and a splash of multiverse storytelling and mixes them into something that feels fresh and new.”