It’s awards season once again — and believe it or not, the alt-cinema goblins at the Dairy Arts Center’s weekly Friday Night Weird showcase know a little something about prestige.
Co-curator Shay Wescott says she never imagined the nonprofit’s offbeat film series would overlap with the hobnobbing world of haute couture that is the Academy Awards. But in the nearly 10 years of the program, they’ve screened Best Picture winners and nominees like Everything Everywhere All at Once, Triangle of Sadness and last year’s stand-up-and-holler body horror masterpiece The Substance, alongside underground gems you won’t find on Netflix.
“Recognition feels increasingly decentralized,” Wescott tells Boulder Weekly. “There isn’t a formula to determine what deserves your attention; you just have to take risks. Look to festivals, auteurs, critics and your local independent theater to find these films first — because I promise you, they are there. 2025 is already getting weird, whether you like it or not.”
From a pair of Shakespearean sendups to a millennial-core emo caper and a spectrum of strangeness in between, here’s what’s on deck this month at Friday Night Weird.
Grand Theft Hamlet | Feb. 7
Sam Crane & Pinny Grylls, 2024, UK, 1:29, R
Get in, losers — we’re adapting Shakespeare in GTA Online.
Two out-of-work actors aim to bring the Bard’s seminal tragedy Hamlet to life within the hyper-violent open world of the long-running Grand Theft Auto video game series in this singular documentary from Sam Crane and Pinny Grylls. Shot entirely in-game at the height of COVID lockdown in the U.K., the film’s subjects are all portrayed by their digital avatars.
"If I could just request that you refrain from killing each other," Crane asks of the onlooking gamers who gather as digital witnesses to their experiment. "And don't kill the actors either."
Since the film’s debut at last year’s SXSW Film Festival, where it took home the Jury Award for Best Documentary Feature, Grand Theft Hamlet has garnered plenty of buzz from critics and viewers along its journey to the Boedecker Theater screen. Wescott says that’s partly because it wrestles with big questions about cultural production in our increasingly automated world.
“At a point when I think a lot of us are genuinely worried about the future of art and how new technologies will change the way we make and experience art, who controls the production and access to art, or even what we consider art, Grand Theft Hamlet is completely inspired,” she says. “It’s not just about modernizing Shakespeare or pointing out that his work will never not be relevant — I think it’s really about reaffirming a belief that art will never die.”
Tromeo & Juliet: A Very Tromatic Valentine’s Day | Feb. 14-15
Lloyd Kaufman, 1996, USA, 1:47, NR
“I hope Shakespeare would be proud of not one, but two completely irreverent adaptations of his work playing this month,” Wescott says of the special two-night, Valentine’s Day weekend screening of Tromeo & Juliet, a trashy low-budget twist on the Bard’s classic tale of star-crossed lovers from B-movie juggernaut Troma Entertainment.
“I tend to personally gravitate more towards the type of ‘weird’ films that transcend their genre status to make relevant commentary or advance the visual language of film,” she adds. “But I also think the flipside of that is reminding ourselves that we can’t hold anything too sacred.”
Nothing is sacred in this 1996 update on the timeless story co-written by James Gunn, replete with “all the body-piercing, kinky sex and car crashes that Shakespeare wanted but never had.” Both screenings will be hosted by local author and filmmaker Mathew Klickstein, who will be joined remotely on Feb. 15 by director and Troma co-founder Lloyd Kaufman for a post-screening Q&A with the audience.
“Lloyd is a hero for what he has done for independent film, very much in the vein of [cult film director] Roger Corman,” Wescott says. “He is incredibly incisive and funny and down to earth and full of incredible stories that need to be shared.”
Invader | Feb. 21
Mickey Keating, 2024, USA, 1:10, NR
The Chicago suburbs set the stage for this home invasion film from shapeshifting horror maven Mickey Keating. Wescott says the emerging filmmaker’s raw take on the disturbing subgenre — following a young woman (Vero Maynez) who makes a horrifying discovery after her cousin goes missing — is especially unnerving due to its quick runtime and lack of bullshit.
“Like Thomas Hobbes’ quote on life, the new one from Keating is nasty, brutish and short,” Wescott says. “The choice to make this 70-minute film so lean and stylistically sparse is, in many ways, what makes it so chilling.”
Borrowing from the naturalistic “mumblecore” movement that swept independent film in the mid-00s, Wescott says Invader is the unlikely mash-up you didn’t know you needed.
“Much like what Promising Young Woman did for ‘the nice guy,’ there is something inherently unnerving and almost untrustworthy about meek, brooding and almost always male mumblecore protagonists,” she says. “Mumblecore’s commitment to naturalism can be just as alienating to audiences as the idea of violence in horror films.”
“Even most horror aficionados cite the [home invasion] genre as the one that scares or even repels them to the point of not watching,” she continues. “I think when you’re dealing with real fear, this kind of raw and confrontational filmmaking is not only justified, but maybe necessary.”
RATS! | Feb. 28
Carl Fry & Maxwell Nalevansky, 2025, USA, 1:30, NR
Swapping naturalism for sensory overload, Screen Rant describes this ultra-saturated dark comedy debut from filmmaking team Carl Fry and Maxwell Nalevansky as “a kind of anti-mumblecore punk blast of electricity.”
Set in the fictional town of Pfresno, Texas, during the emo heyday of 2007, RATS! goes down the rabbit hole with 19-year-old Raphael Tinski (Luke Wilcox) who gets mixed up in a madcap nuclear plot following his arrest at the hands of an unhinged cop (Danielle Evon Ploeger). The result is a “youthful, gross and totally absurd” romp, soundtracked by period-appropriate screamo acts like The Blood Brothers and Thursday, sure to light up the pleasure centers of that special 30-something in your life.
“If you take all the film festival reactions to [this movie] and put them in a blender, you would get Napoleon Dynamite as a stoner comedy directed by John Waters, but make it emo,” Wescott says. “It’s all very millennial core and immensely pleasing to the teenager with impossibly side swept bangs that I still long to be.”