Movies & TV / Reviews
Fantastic Fest 2025 Review Roundup: Coyotes, The Cramps: A Period Piece, The Curse
Image Credit: Aura Entertainment
Fantastic Fest 2025 has been going strong over the past week, and it’s had quite the intriguing selection of films this time around. The Austin-based film festival has always been a place where you can see a variety of different styles of genre films, but the festival may have topped itself with some of the weird, wild and often wonderful swings that their selections take.
I’ve had the opportunity to screen a number of films from this year’s run, and you can check out my review of Lunatic: The Luna Vachon Story here. There are more to come and you can check out a few capsule reviews below.
Coyotes
Colin Minihan makes his first foray into the more comedic side of horror with Coyotes, and the result is generally quite a good time. Minihan’s second solo directorial effort centers its action in the hills of Los Angeles where a couple (Justin Long & Kate Bosworth) and their daughter (Mila Harris) find themselves contending with a pack of the titular animals that have turned vicious during a storm-caused power outage.
Long is always a delight to see in a horror film, and this is no different. He plays Scott as deeply in over his head, mining plenty of comedy out of that while also establishing great chemistry with Bosworth (his real-life wife) and Harris. A gaggle of supporting characters help provide humor and bodies for the CGI coyotes to try and rip into, highlighted by Britanny Allen who shines as an escort who gets caught up in the animal assault.
Minihan is a horror veteran best known for his work on Grave Encounters with Stuart Ortiz and his solo effort What Keeps You Alive. He strikes a very solid balance between the laughs and carnage here, taking a few lightly satirical jabs at the Hollywood Hills crowd in the process. The CGI animals may be a turn-off for some, but they add to the madcap, almost comic book-y tone the film is going for and there’s enough practical gore to balance things out. Despite some pacing stumbles late in the game, this is by and large a good time for audiences who just want some blood-soaked hilarity.
Rating: 7.5
The Cramps: A Period Piece
As camp as it comes, The Cramps: A Period Piece is an unabashed love letter to John Waters’ heyday. Brooke H. Cellars’ directorial debut revels in the low-budget aesthetics and bizarre comedy sensibilities that Waters was able to conjure in films like Female Trouble and Hairspray. It centers on Agnes Applewhite, a young woman with an overbearing mother who takes a job at a hair salon and starts to come into her own, only to find out that her menstrual cramps are unleashing a bloody monstrosity that leaves victims dead.
Cellars weaves a number of themes about body shame as women come of age into the very loose narrative, which favors vignette scenes over its overall plot. The cast is channeling low-budget DIY filmmaking while letting their charm show in their weird little group of outsider characters and bitchy rivals, while the 35mm Technicoler-esque visuals feel authentic to those bad taste epics of the 1970s. It takes a little while to settle in but once it does, there’s a lot to appreciate in how it tackles the horrors of a woman’s coming of age with heart, humor and Blob-like period monsters.
This is the very definition of a film that not everyone is going to vibe with, but Cellars clearly isn’t worried about that. Inspired by her own experiences with endometriosis, the director captures the period narrative with plenty of kitsch and bubblegum-colored midnight movie absurdity.
Rating: 6.5
The Curse
Japanese filmmakers have often been at the forefront of the intersection of technology and horror, a tradition that The Curse seeks to continue with uneven results. Kenichi Ugana (Visitors) turns his camera on social media with a story that centers on Riko (Yukino Kaizu), a hairdresser who finds herself trapped in a nightmare when she notices strange social media posts by an overseas friend. When that friend turns out to have died months before, Riko and those close to her are plunged into a curse that seems to be targeting them one at a time.
Ugana starts off The Curse with a remarkable scene of violence to set the stage, though it takes a while for the film to live up to those expectations. Kaizu makes an affable lead, but Ugana’s pacing is off here, going overly long in shots and leaning too heavily on tropes.
The themes about the harm of social media have a bit of bite to them, and the when the horror comes it’s appropriately brutal – neck stabs, decapitations, exorcisms – but the use of CGI blood undercuts some moments. The third act brings things back up nicely, including an ending that hits hard, but it can be a bit of a patience test to get there.
Rating: 5.0
Fantastic Fest takes place in Austin, Texas from September 19th through the 25th.
