Elizabeth Purchell’s Muscle Distribution has proven to be the vanguard of the contemporary underground – carefully drawing through lines between transgression & progression and the garish & the refined. As the filmscape monopolizes, distribution is kowtowed, and queer or otherwise unconventional voices are snuffed out in favour of safe, neolibbed Oscarian fodder, Muscle picks up the pieces and gives home to the outsiders. From Sept 3-6 at the Roxy Cinema in NYC, MUSCLEFEST is a perfect sampler of what the contemporary underground has been cooking up.
[note to the reader: while this piece was quickly banged out in 24 hours as a favour to our editor Jenn, this is not a hack job – I can attest that I have seen every single one of these films. I’ve kept a keen eye of what Muscle’s been doing for a while and vouch that Liz’s taste is the cutting-edge of everything cool happening in cinema right now. Muscle is not just championing the best of the underground, but actively reforming ‘the canon’ to not just be more inclusive, but more transgressive, erotic, and all-out bizarre. You’d be a fool to not get on board before it’s too late.]
Castration Movie iii: Junior Ghosts—Premorphic Drift; a fragmentary passage (2026, dir. Louise Weard)
The Castration Anthology’s most thorny, brutal, and bleak entry yet. Izzy (Avalon Fast) is blindsided by her partner Trent’s (Henri Gillespi) desire to transition and finds her worldview captured by TERFisms. Junior Ghosts is a return to the mumblecore-by-way-of-Jacques Rivette style dramedy of the first Castration but exchanges the long-form conversational comedy of Traps for a hyperreal anti-romcom realism. Louise Weard has proven to be one of the underground’s foremost provocateurs but never without a humanist warmth that lulls the viewers into a complicated, dialectical sympathy for people at their absolute worst.
[note: while there is connective tissue and continuity across the Castration films, they stand alone and are not required viewing for understanding and enjoying them on their own.]
“The best installment yet. simultaneously confronting and warm in its exploration of trans identity, the people who love us, and the ones who refuse to.” – Vera Drew, director of The People’s Joker
“Louise Weard is able to make jokes which are genuinely hilarious even in the most uncomfortable moments, mostly through her willingness to put the worst parts of people (and herself) on the screen. The final line here rivals the “I’d jerk off instead” line from Happiness in how it is both sickening and disgusting and also deeply hilarious.” – Lucy Belamtrami, writer for circlebjork
Crocodile Dose (2026, dir. Jason Waters)
Project X for the Bladee generation. Crocodile Dose is an ultraregional coming-of-age movie about the hedonism of youth, boys-being-boys, and the chaotic-though-joyous changing priorities of teenagers. Bolstered by a virtuosic Vyvanse-esque edit by Tucker Bennett (best known for his work with Eugene Kotlyarenko), the Croc Dose lads have made an odyssey of web 4.0 filmmaking that feels like a reintroduction to teenage boys as a cinematic touchstone; like Superbad for 2026’s brewing Woke 2.
“Crocodile Dose is a barrage of brainrot screenlife madness, told with a hypermodern visual language that feels totally natural among these zoomers and their friends.” – Alan Jones, programmer of Bleeding Edge and director of Orson
“An authentic bottled at the source coming of age friendship flick for the generation born into brainrot, told in their language and visual hubris.” – Tucker Bennett, director of In the Glow of Darkness
Dildo Heaven (2002, dir. Doris Wishman)
Doris Wishman, best known for her hippie-tinged nudist films and soft-core roughie sexploitation joints in the 60s, was working at a sex shop in the 90s. Now in her late 80s, she returned to filmmaking after being rediscovered and reclaimed by movie nerds and third-wave feminist interest in her work. Dildo Heaven, her second last film, screened once in New York shortly before she died in 2002, before being restored last year by Muscle. Dildo Heaven is sort-of an SOV sex comedy, but really, it’s a bizarre, drone-y, experimental, dreamlike art film and an assemblage victory lap for one of sex-cinema’s undersung heroes. A curio supreme and best enjoyed with a crowd of people ‘on the level.’
“Aspirational. A whole SOV world of women who desperately want to fuck their bosses, the men who can’t satisfy them, the dildos that can, and the peepholes that lead to the sexual wonders of Doris Wishman’s past. Delightful nonsense.” – Kai Perrignon, head programmer of Brunswick Underground Film Festival
“Doris Wishman’s The Thousand Eyes of Dr. Mabuse. Does the bare minimum to justify its title. Inspiring.”– Will Sloan, host of Michael & Us and The Important Cinema Club podcasts
a night with alterotics (dir. Anaïs Alias and Avery Jaye )
alterotics is DIY porn-art, which, to me, brings to mind either a well-shot Wal Mart ring-light OF link-in-bio e-girl, or a theatre-kid doing cosplay with a plug in. Instead, alterotics auteurs Avery Jaye and Anais Alias exploit the limits of making porn as platonic friends in The Naturists, dopamine-fried goon brain and therapy-speak in the Trecartin-esque Character Syndrome, fetishistic animal play in SOV horror-porn Rat Trap, and play with a barrage of digital video night-colours, metafiction, and politics in the-closest-thing-to-real-porn Superlanacy Clinic. alterotics is the only pornography I’ve seen that thinks that video of the girl with paws on singing about “cummies” is worth writing about in a PhD thesis. Its hilarious, ridiculous, thoughtful, unflinching real-sex art; eponymously appropriate: alt erotics; spirited, humanistic mind-bending t4t pornographic play.
Dog Movie (2024, dir. Henry Hason)
Dog Movie is an unflinching cringe comedy revelling in ultrareal tenderqueer passive aggression. Henry Hason’s microbudget feature plays like Curb if Larry David knew what microaggressions were, could barely afford rent, and had to exploit tenancy laws. An uncomfortable, sympathetic, T4T comedy of manners.
“…We need more trans fuck-ups onscreen. We all know one. We all love one. We all root for one to get their shit together.” – Willow Maclay, author of Corpses, Fools and Monsters: The History and Future of Transness in Cinema
Puppygirl (2026, dir. Henry Hason)
A spiritual successor to the Hason’s Dog Movie, Puppygirl sees a charming-if-not-insufferable asexual t-girl fall curious for her alterotics friends fetish pornography and run with it the best they can. An auto-fictional documentary showcasing openhearted sexuality and the limits of an open hearted can-do attitude.
Drinking and Driving (2026, dir. Avalon Fast and Jillian Frank)
Avalon Fast and Jillian Frank team-up for a scrappy teen drama about the stir-crazy ennui of small-town Canadiana. Following their masterful queer, witch-y CAMP, Fast and Frank further confronts the gravity of sisterhood, sexuality, getting fucked up, and sorting out which memories matter and which don’t with an even sharper sense of intimacy. Drinking and Driving has the contours of a realist microbudget drama yet slowly, but surely, descends into a complex reformation and reclamation of memories. To me, this film is something supernatural; a quiet pandemonium and a muted shriek from the abyss. Content warning: gave me teenaged back-of-car bong toke PTSD flashbacks.
“Living in bisexual hell, longing for bisexual heaven. Brilliant balance of people and place […] Hauntingly real, no film has felt more like what being 17 was like for me.” – Heather Fraser, programmer at Brunswick Underground Film Festival
“avalon fast is the past present and future.”– Louise Weard, director of Castration Movie
