The 24th annual Tribeca Film Festival recently wrapped in New York City after an exhausting—but rewarding!—11-day run. As usual, an overabundance of intriguing films unspooled across the Big Apple, making Tribeca the fest where all the cool cats go. And Fango was there, hitting the (blood) red carpet, taking in 13 film premieres, and talking up the celebs!
Most notably, this year saw the fest fold its Midnight sidebar into the expanded Escape from Tribeca section (expertly co-programmed by Jonathan Penner and Brooklyn Horror Film Festival’s chief Matt Barone). There you could catch retrospective anniversary screenings of American Psycho (with director Mary Harron hosting) and Shivers (David Cronenberg in person!), as well as a documentary on arguably the world’s worst director, Andy Milligan. A few of Milligan’s previously-lost grindhouse flicks also played to an aghast audience.
Meanwhile, the cutting-edge new films at Escape from Tribeca were represented by the likes of Tina Romero’s colorful Queens of the Dead; RZA’s explosive Walking Tall throwback One Spoon of Chocolate; the latest found-footage freakout Man Finds Tape and five more unique titles. The rest of Tribeca Fest offered other films sure to attract genre fans. Enough blabbin’! Let’s dive in and round up these pups!
Videoheaven
Pop culture scholar Alex Ross Perry’s thorough documentary hits PLAY on the rise and fall of the video store. The doc features an endless rollout of clips from just about every movie or TV show that ever featured a scene set in a video store or someone ogling a cassette, from the sublime (Cronenberg’s Videodrome) to the ridiculous (Troma’s Toxic Avenger).
Narrated by Maya Hawke and sans the usual “expert witness” approach, Videoheaven explores how Blockbusters and the like became a mecca for film fans, families, and nerds in the 1980s. Nearly three hours long, much of Videoheaven feels like a college lecture, but cinephiles will dig it.
Birthright
Aussie Zoe Pepper scores an impressive debut as the writer/director of this pitch-black-comedy-cum-parental-relations horror show. A loser and his pregnant wife return to his folks’ nice country home out of financial desperation and are immediately met with cold shoulders and bitter recriminations. Escalating tension and paranoia overtake the two couples in a familial power struggle, leading to many surprising plot turns and dark laughs. A must-see!
Dog of God
The spirit of Ralph (Fritz the Cat) Bakshi looms large over this (very) adult animation film from Latvian brothers Raitis and Lauris Ābele. The story is set in a 17th-century Eastern European town, where superstition (witchcraft and lycanthropy) rules the day, and an abusive priest holds sway over the downtrodden populace. Created via the rotoscope technique, Dog of God is a true visual feast and quite extreme. Lovers of transgressive animation will lap it up.
Queens of the Dead
“I’m so excited for her,” Christine Forrest (Knightriders) told me a few weeks before the world premiere of offspring Tina Romero’s film debut. Former Brooklyn DJ Tina is the daughter of Forrest and the late George Romero. Her horror comedy pitting drag performers against zombies excited a lot of people at Tribeca besides Mom; the movie took home the coveted Audience Award!
Queens of the Dead excels with its colorful and well-defined characters and vastly overcomes its low budget with panache. Loved the grungy Bushwick location work and cameo by ghoul godfather Tom Savini, too!
Man Finds Tape
Tyro writer-directors Paul Gandersman and Peter Hall add some new twists to the faux documentary/found footage genre. Set in a sleepy Texas town, the story tracks a podcaster and his sister as they investigate supernatural shenanigans, a creepy television preacher, and a mysterious murder caught on camera. The filmmakers added a welcome dose of Lovecraftian cosmic horror to their tale, and they were rewarded with a very receptive Tribeca audience.
“It’s been amazing,” Gandersman says. “This is more than we ever could have hoped for. Just the audience response, the questions at the Q&A, and people talking to us after the screenings. And then the reviews have been nice, and how people are reacting to it.
“We’re so thankful that this festival wanted to include us,” he continues. “We’re a handful of small filmmakers in Austin just making our little thing, and you really don’t know. We like it, but are other people going to? Being able to play at a prestigious festival like this, and one with such a low acceptance rate, is a shock. It’s astonishing. We submitted it back in December, and we got invited a week later. Honestly, that helped finish the film because, ‘OK, it’s working. Let’s not change the formula too much.’”
“It’s been fantastic,” adds Hall. “I come from a heavily involved film festival background, and each festival has its own personality. None of us had been to Tribeca. To echo what Paul said, the audiences have been fantastic. After the second screening, we were standing outside the theater for nearly an hour talking to people who kept coming up and just wanted to talk about our little movie. Having that kind of experience is really, really meaningful to us.”
One Spoon of Chocolate
Like the Man Finds Tape guys, Wu-tang Clan rapper/director RZA (Man with the Iron Fists) couldn’t have found a better crowd than the Tribeca Film Festival to world premiere his latest joint, One Spoon of Chocolate. The movie, an exciting echo of ’70s drive-in hits, follows an Army vet/ex-con (Shameik Moore) who relocates to a small Ohio burb with terrible secrets. Besides rampant racism and systemic police corruption, the place also harbors an organ-stealing ring!
“Man, I was sitting in the audience beside my wife, holding her arm, like a little kid holding a mom’s arm,” RZA recalls of his big opening night. “I was just so nervous showing this to the audience because now the truth has to come. I know this is not a great analogy, but we say this in our business, ‘A film is like a baby.’ And you want people to like your baby. ‘Is that a pretty baby or is that an ugly baby?’
“And when I started hearing the audience cheer and laugh and feel good, and feel angry, I was like, ‘OK, they recognized this for what it is,’” RZA continues. “At the end, when they cheered, I got younger after those two years of stress. It felt so good to hear the audience respond that way to my film.”
Reflection In A Dead Diamond
Festival darlings Hélène Cattet and Bruno Forzani (Amer, Let the Corpses Tan, The Strange Color of Your Body’s Tears) return to Tribeca with their latest genre love letter. Previous efforts by the French husband-and-wife team paid homage to giallo films and Spaghetti Westerns. This time, they tackle 1960s European spy films with their usual visual beauty, surrealism, and bloody flourishes. The story jumps back and forth between past and present as a now-retired spy (a grizzled Fabio Testi) ruminates on his more glamorous and violent spy-smashing days. Wait till you behold the sexy secret agent with the killer mirror-sequined dress! As in their past pictures, the Shudder/IFC-bound Reflection in a Dead Diamond boasts style to burn.
How Dark My Love
The Tribeca Film Festival always unveils the best new documentaries, and this edition is no exception. With How Dark My Love, director Scott Gracheff delivers a revealing portrait of New York-based artist Joe Coleman, who fans may remember for his haunting Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer poster and many other paintings of real-life murderers and bad guys. The doc is a fascinating deep dive into Coleman’s process, his punk-rock roots and prior drug addiction, and, especially, his relationship with his long-time muse, wife Whitney Ward. This excellent movie deservedly won Tribeca’s Documentary Audience Award.
How Dark My Love’s triumphant road to Tribeca has been incredibly gratifying for all involved, including director Gracheff.
“We submitted our film to Tribeca two hours after submissions opened last September, and this was always a dream of ours,” he says. “The Tribeca Festival IS New York City, and our film is such a New York story. For decades, NYC provided the canvas for Joe and Whitney’s wildest artistic explorations, often into the darkest corners imaginable, so we couldn’t have hoped for a more appropriate home for our world premiere. To witness an enthusiastic audience hungry for a film like ours was very inspiring.
“Our pre-premiere party was held at the Jeffrey Deitch Gallery, the current home of ‘Carnival,’ an amazing show Joe has curated,” Gracheff continues. “It also features some of his most iconic works, including the Whitney portrait, which is really the third main character in our film. All in all, it was a great night!”
Coleman brings up another high point while witnessing the culmination of the film’s 12-year (!) journey to Tribeca. “My favorite single highlight of the screening was seeing our great niece Sadie sobbing with a wondrous joy at the movie,” he says of the documentary’s young scene stealer. “Watching herself grow up on screen and telling us later that now she doesn’t have to try to explain her crazy family to her friends, she can just tell them to watch the movie.”
The Degenerate: The Life And Films Of Andy Milligan
And now for something completely different, we have this wide-ranging exposé of one of horror’s most notorious filmmakers. Unlike the inept but unintentionally funny works of Ed Wood Jr. (Orson Welles by comparison!), Milligan’s movies (Torture Dungeon; The Rats Are Coming! The Werewolves Are Here!, et al.) are barely watchable. Drawing heavily from the superb Milligan biography The Ghastly One (author Jimmy McDonough appears throughout the doc as a talking head), Josh Johnson and Grayson Tyler Johnson cover the late Milligan’s tortured path to obscurity through clips and rare interviews from actors who survived his movies. The Degenerate is a funny and insightful look at a twisted “auteur,” but I am not compelled to reevaluate Milligan’s awful movies anytime soon.
Shivers
The climax of my Tribeca 2025 jaunt was catching the 50th-anniversary screening of Canadian genre legend David Cronenberg’s first full feature, Shivers, a sort of Night of the Living Dead crossed with a soft-core porn movie. What a treat to see Cronenberg introduce the film, then sit back for a post-screening Q&A moderated by author Joe Hill. I’ve met the director many times over the years, and he’s just as witty, erudite, entertaining, and spry at age 82!
“I haven’t seen this for like 30 years,” Cronenberg said at the start. “I can barely tell you what it’s about, which is probably a good thing.”
The acclaimed Torontonian also recounted Shivers as a learning experience: “I had two weeks to figure it out because that was our shooting schedule, and I had $185,000 to make the movie. You can see there are things that work really well, and things that don’t work really well. I had restrictions. A lot of people have thought, in retrospect, that it was kind of a brilliant idea for me as someone trying to transition from underground films to a professional film that I should choose the horror genre. That was one of the few places where a low-budget independent film could get financing and distribution, but I didn’t know that before.”
Despite its flaws, Cronenberg wouldn’t change a frame of Shivers. “It is of its time, an artifact of its time, and as an artifact of what I was capable of at the time,” he said. “In the film, you can actually see me learning how to make a movie.”
Cronenberg’s restored film was the final Tribeca 2025 show for many of us at Saturday night’s Shivers celebration, concluding 11 days of non-stop motion picture pleasures. If next year’s edition is even half as good as this one, moviegoers have much to look forward to.
