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CHATTANOOGA FILM FESTIVAL 2025: CFF Salutes Your Shorts

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It’s the first block of shorts, so with no further ado — let’s get into it!

Cat and Fish (2025): In this animated short by director and writer Nilram Ranjbar, a fish goes to a much better, larger body of water, all thanks to the sun and an unexpected friend: a cat. What charming animation in this, creating a near 3D version of string to match the colors and tones.

Damned (2025): Directed by Lukas Anderson, who co-wrote this short with Elio Andres, Jesse (Cole Kelley) breaks his house arrest — with just two weeks left on his sentence — as his parole officer tries to track him down with his ankle monitor. The police aren’t the only ones looking for him, as a demon (C.P. Walker) wants back the soul of the father. Or maybe it’s all about something more. This is a nice short, one that maybe needs the last line to tie it all up nice with a bow, but that’s fine. It’s working with a really truncated time in an attempt to share a much larger story. It feels like a full-length film could come from this.

Don’t Look (2025): Directed and written by John Wyatt, this starts with a young boy named Eli waking up to find monsters under his bed. Little does he know that it wasn’t his imagination. Maybe he shouldn’t go back to sleep. Well, not like he’s getting a chance — spoiler warning — as he definitely isn’t alone. A really quick film and one where I’d love to have seen perhaps something extra added, a twist or something that makes this story stand out.

Sin Eater (2025): Director and writer Corey Simpson tells the story of Minerva, who is trying to clean out the home of her dead grandmother when a stranger shows up to tell her that she must take on the burden her grandmother owned, the Sin Eater. Much like “The Sins of the Fathers” episode of Night Gallery, this shows how the pains of sin must be passed on to a new generation. What helps make this even better are the strobing Bava-style lighting, music that shoots for an Italian film feel at times and great sound design. It feels dark and gauzy, like those tapes you used to bootleg from the video store and then wondered, “What am I watching?” Trust me. That’s a good thing.

Lola (2025): Tessie’s grandmother, Lola, has been diagnosed with dementia. Tessie can’t handle it so she’s created a machine that tries to save the memories before an AI named Mena destroys it. Directed by Grace Hanna, who wrote it with Derek Manansala and Duke Yang, this has one memory — a night of karaoke singing — being recreated so that one perfect memory can be saved. Yet Tessie doesn’t realize that in her struggle to keep the past, she’s forgetting the time she has in the here and now. My father had dementia and days were struggles, as he forgot who he was and even who I was at times. No machine could keep him either, no matter how hard you’d try. Sometimes, you think you’d get through and then you’d realize he hadn’t been paying attention. It’s so frightening to lose someone before they’re gone and this movie does a great job of capturing that feeling. All we can do is enjoy the short window that we have together, no matter how conscious we may be of it. Memory is, as they say, fleeting.

The Bohannons – Night Construction (2025): A stop motion animation from Chattanooga’s The Skeleton Key Workshop, this shows the sun setting for the day and the moon and the night sky being put together. Directed and written by Matt Eslinger, you have to admire the guts of this band to have a bio that says this: “The Bohannons are one of Chattanooga’s finest exports, who make heavy rock ’n’ roll that’s equal parts Motörhead and Neil Young, with lead guitar chops that rival both.” I can report that this video and song kick ass.

Til Death Do Us Part (2025): Directed by Bronwyn Blanks-Blundell and Alexander Protich, this finds Doctor Frigg in her lab, trying to bring her one true love back to life. Slamming her fist on the desk, a tape recorder is activated, bringing something else back to life: her voice from the past, a transmission that may give her the information that she needs to move on. This is a nice short, one that uses its animation, music and sound design well.

Meeet (2025): Six eccentric characters are starving in a bomb shelter. When one of them seemingly dies — maybe — the rest decides to eat her corpse. But just a little bit, right? Yet what happens next, well, it proves that writers — while being liars — often write their own justice. Directed by Laama Almadani and written by Yemi Eniolorunda, this makes one wonder about just how you would go through eating someone. We’ve all debated it, but the actual butchering and cooking seems like too much. And what wine do you serve with it? And even worse, if someone is so stoned that you can just into them and serve their body, which wakes them because it smells so good that they eat it themselves, could you finish your meal? What a great short, put together so simply. Loved it!

CHECK PLEASE (2024): I am a veteran of the wars of fighting for the check. The director, Shane Chung, is too. He said, “As a kid, I witnessed firsthand the quickness with which friends can turn on each other whenever my parents took me to dinner with their pals. It was all smiles until it came time to pay for the bill – then the fangs came out. “I got it!” “Don’t be ridiculous, it’s my treat!” “You can get me next time!” It got so serious for no reason. Arguing, subterfuge… it was killing with kindness taken to another level. I wondered how far someone could take fighting to pay for the bill. Inspired by my love of goofy slapstick action comedies like Drunken Master and Everything Everywhere All At Once, I thought: what if they literally fought each other? I challenged myself to write a ten-minute long action scene where two Korean-Americans fought each other with chopsticks, grill coverings, and credit cards… and CHECK PLEASE was born.”

Starring Richard Yan and Sukwon Jeong, this is a simple story but is so perfect. It gets across what it means to be a man — paying the bill — as well as the director’s attempts at getting across the feeling of assimilating to a new culture. It’s also filled with great action. I laughed really hard throughout and found joy here.

Baking and Entering (2025): Directed and written by Lance Harbour, Cole Keisling, Andrew Lacy, Zach Legaux and Brooklynne Scivally, this has Hugh, a pie baker in a food truck, dealing with a grizzly bear. Perhaps he should be happy to have a customer. This is a cute animated short that has a sweet ending and gives the viewer a nice moral, all in a short running time. I love the bear — his face when the metal window keeps closing is so endearing.

Feed (2025): Directed and written by Kara McLeland, this has Rachel and Nick having a party guest over, almost lamenting that over the past year how their lives have changed because of the Harbor Initiative. Gone are the days of concerts and going out, instead they stay home — because a space alien baby is part of their lives. That child never sleeps on certain nights of the full moon and must feed differently on Thursday and no one can keep up on the message boards, but now they’re eating fingers and destroying relationships. Maybe this dinner party isn’t just for our married couple. I love this, a tension-packed short that rightly takes it time to drop the hammer on you.

We Need to Talk About Balloons (2025): Dani’s mom is a social media influencer using her daughter for her mom brand, but Dani would rather be Dani the Destroyer, a magician. But why would a magician be called a destroyer? Directed by Jennifer Bonior and co-written with Dycee Wildman, this shows that you shouldn’t try and run a child’s life, much less tell her that she has to move on from doing balloon popping magic, unless you want to be a stain on the wall of a glittery balloon shop.

The Lily and the Scorpion (2025): Outlaws The Lily and The Scorpion are on the run after a bank job gone wrong. These partners are losing trust in one another and it’s like everything is falling to pieces. Directed and written by Charlie Netto, this has two female outlaws in the west, which is a story not often told. But what happens when one of them wants to go straight and end the outlaw life? This could so easily be a full-length movie with the storytelling in it. I loved this — an exploration of freedom, for a little while, until one needs to be safe.

You can watch this and many other films at CFF by buying a pass on their website. Over the next few days, I’ll be posting reviews and articles and updating my Letterboxd list of watches.

Sizzlin’ Summer of Side-Splitters 2025: Nine Lives (2016)

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June 23-29 Cat Week: Cats! They’re earth’s funniest creatures (sorry chimps, you’re psychos).

I saw this at the drive-in, a second feature with something else that I can’t remember, but you don’t forget a movie in which a not far from being cancelled Kevin Spacey plays Tom Brand, a workaholic tycoon who becomes a cat.

Yes, he’s also married to Jennifer Garner, so all is well in his world, even if he rarely sees her. He’s too busy building the biggest builder ever or something. He gets his daughter Rebecca (Malina Weissman) a cat to make up for almost forgetting her birthday, buying it from the strange pet store of Felix Perkins (Christopher Walken). As he learns another building will be taller than his, he is blown off the roof and isn’t saved by his assistant Ian (Mark Consuelos). Tom goes to the hospital, near death, but his mind is inside Mr. Fuzzypants.

Directed by Barry Sonnenfeld, who was the cinematographer of Blood Simple, Raising Arizona and Misery, but also directed the Men In Black movies and Get Shorty, not to mention Wild Wild West. Somehow, this was the last movie he would direct. Somehow, this took five writers: Gwyn Lurie, Matt R. Allen, Caleb Wilson, Daniel Antoniazzi and Ben Shiffrin.

But at least Lil Bub was in it.

JUNESPLOITATION: Crime Busters (1977)

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June 26: Junesploitation’s topic of the day — as suggested by F This Movie— is Eurosploitation!

I due superpiedi quasi piatti (The Two Almost Flat Superfeet) puts Terence Hill and Bud Spencer together again (it is the tenth of seventeen movies they would be in together) and sends them to Miami.

In this film, they’re Matt Kirby and Wilbur Walsh, longshoremen who decide to rob a grocery store and, in the process, end up being cops. Look, this is even years before Police Academy, and it has a lot of the same notions.

Somehow, they got David Huddleston to be in this as Captain McBride, who is in charge of the boys. Soon, they all learn that the same criminals who controlled the docks where they worked are behind a lot more.

Also known as Trinity: In Trouble Again, Two Supercops and Crime Busters, this is not related to Miami Supercops, another Hill and Spencer movie. Hill and Spencer made five movies in Miami that are in my favorite genre: Italians making their movies partially in America.

There’s even more meta in here, as a hot dog cart plays the theme song of their movie,  Even Angels Eat Beans. During a scene where Matt is trying to get Wilbur to be kinder, he remarks, “He who finds a friend finds a treasure.” That would be a future Hill and Spencer title.

If you’ve seen any of those, you know what this movie is all about. Hill is the good-looking nice one, and Spencer is the giant grump. Somehow, they may not start as friends, but they get that way, which leads to slap fights with bad guys and frequent bean eating. However, a formula is called that because it works, and these movies make me happy as I can be—just joyous, singing along to the music and happy that I live in a world where they were filmed.

This was directed and written by E.B. Clutcher, who also made nearly every union of these two, directed The Unholy Four and shot movies like Django, Erik the Viking and Nightmare Castle. Yes, that’s the Americanized name of Enzo Barboni, the director of Trinity.

Meanwhile, in the middle of this comedy, Hill’s character becomes involved with an Asian family and works to help them as the criminals target them. Their daughter? Laura Gemser. Throw in some Oliver Onions soundtrack, and there’s no way I could love this more.

You can watch this on YouTube.

WEIRD WEDNESDAY: Bloodthirsty Butchers (1970)

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Released as a double feature with Torture Dungeon, Bloodthirsty Butchers finds Andy Milligan making another one of the classics. Sweeney Todd, to be exact.

Sweeney Todd (John Miranda) and Maggie Lovett (Jane Hilary) come together to kill off their customers, steal their money and valuables, and give the bodies to Tobias Ragg (Berwick Kaler) for disposal. After a few kills, they start getting way into murder, so they decide to start using the bodies to make meat pies, including one that has a woman’s entire breast in it.

Shot in London, this actually feels like it could be in its period, unlike the New York City Milligan movies, where you can see modern buildings and hear the traffic. Milligan made five movies in 1970 alone — Torture Dungeon, Nightbirds, Guru the Mad Monk and The Body Beneath are the other films — and it’s pretty wild that he was doing so much so often. Then again, to the casual viewer, these movies are overly melodramatic films made by a lunatic who can’t even use a tripod, but to those who love these movies, well, they’re also excessively melodramatic films made by a lunatic who can’t even use a tripod. Perspective is important.

TV Guide said that Bloodthirsty Butchers was a “gory and typically cheap retelling of the Sweeney Todd legend.” One star.

I may have ranked it much higher.

You can watch this on Tubi.

WEIRD WEDNESDAY: Blood Rage (1987)

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Identical blonde twins Todd and Terry are at the drive-in with their mother, who is making out with her boyfriend in the front seat. Seeing so many people having sex — including his mom — from the back seat flips out Terry, who starts killing people with a hatchet. He smears the blood all over his brother, because that’s how forensics worked in the 1980s, and he escapes scot free. That’s how Blood Rage — one of the few films to be set on Thanksgiving — begins.

Ten years later, Terry (Mark Soper in a dual role) lives with his mother (Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman star Louise Lasser). On the night of Thanksgiving, Mom reveals that she’s about to marry Brad. We also learn that Todd has escaped from the mental hospital. Terry doubles down to keep his brother locked up by killing Brad by chopping off his right hand — which still clutches a can of Old Style — before splitting his head in half with a machete.

Todd’s doctor and her assistant are looking for him, but run into Terry, who stabs and dismembers both of them before hooking up with new neighbor Andrea who is planning a house party.

Meanwhile, Mom is freaking out learning that Todd is getting closer, but Terry is the one we should be worried about. He’s on a real tear, wiping out all sorts of people, like a tennis-playing couple. All manner of mistaken identity occurs, ending with a swimming pool battle between the twin brothers, and Mom kills Terry when she really wanted to kill Todd. And oh yeah — her incestual relationship with her son is revealed as the reason for his insanity. She blows her brains out and Todd just stands there as the police close in.

This movie is also Nightmare at Shadow Woods, with none of the gore left. You should avoid that one as the real reason to enjoy this — I mean, unless you enjoy 1980s films about incest — is the rampant gore.

Come for Ted Raimi, condom salesman. Stay for hatchets to the face and a doctor’s assistant sliced in half, as well as rampant synth music from Richard Einhorn, who also scored Shock Waves and Don’t Go in the House. It was directed by John Grissmer, who was also behind 1973’s The Bride (Last House on Massacre Street).

You can get the art on this post at Tim Monsters!

WEIRD WEDNESDAY: The Black Six (1973)

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Matt Cimber has pretty much lived a life—he was married to Jayne Mansfield, he created the Gorgeous Ladies of Wrestling, and he directed movies like Butterfly, The Witch Who Came from the Sea and Hundra, amongst others. In 1973, he convinced six currently playing NFL stars to appear in a black version of the biker film. The results? Amazing.

The Black Six is made up of six All-Pro NFL stars:

  • Gene Washington, San Francisco 49ers (who was also in Cimber’s Lady Cocoa and Airport ’75)
  • Willie Lanier, Kansas City Chiefs (who is in the NFL Hall of Fame and was named to the NFL 75th Anniversary All-Time Team)
  • Carl Eller, Minnesota Vikings (an NFL Hall of Famer who went on to found substance abuse clinics)
  • Mercury Morris, Miami Dolphins (a Pittsburgh native who was drafted to West Texas State, the alma mater of tons of pro wrestlers, including Tully Blanchard, Stan Hansen, Ted DiBiase, Dusty Rhodes and both Funk brothers to name but a few)
  • Lem Barney, Detroit Lions (an NFL Hall of Famer who sang backup on Marvin Gaye’s “What’s Going On” and played himself in Paper Lion)
  • Joe Greene, Pittsburgh Steelers (one of my hometown heroes, Greene is probably one of the greatest — if not the greatest — Steelers ever. He  appeared in a famous Coke commercial, as well as Fighting Back: The Rocky Bleier Story and Smokey and the Bandit II and is also an NFL Hall of Famer)

Washington already had some acting experience, so he stars as Bubba Daniels, a Vietnam War vet who returns home to find that his brother has been killed by a white supremacist biker gang. Their leader, Thor, is played by Ben Davidson, an avid real-life biker who played for the Oakland Raiders. You can also see him in M*A*S*H*, Conan the Barbarian and as Porter the Bouncer in Behind the Green Door.

Bubba and his gang — the Black Six — decide to avenge that death, which leads to battles with racist townies, uncaring police and Thor’s gang. The final battle ends with Thor blowing up his own bike to kill them all or so it would seem. According to Mercury M, orris’ book Against the Grain, the players protested that ending — guess they didn’t realize that nearly every biker movie ends with the heroes getting killed — so that’s why the movie ends with the title card that says “Honky, look out…Hassle a brother, and the Black 6 will return!” 

It’s all pretty depressing stuff, to be honest. But you can say that for nearly all biker and blaxploitation cinema. It’s still amazing to be that at one point, the NFL didn’t have the control that it does today and that six of its biggest stars could go off and make a movie together.

You can watch this on Tubi.

WEIRD WEDNESDAY: Black Heat (1976)

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Tim Brown played football and acted, but because of the success of Jim Brown, who did the same things, he had to change his name to Timothy Brown. He stars in this as “Kicks” Carter, a Vegas cop fighting Ziggy’s (Russ Tamblyn) gang. He has to get revenge for his partner’s death and handle TV reporter Stephanie Adams (Tanya Boyd). Also, fight gun runners and save women from a house of ill repute. That’s a lot of work.

Directed by Al Adamson and written by John D’Amato, Sheldon Lee and Budd Donnelly, this is also known as The Murder Gang and Girl’s Hotel.

Regina Carroll shows up—well, she was Adamson’s wife—and so do Jana Bellan (Mary Lou from Sixpack Annie) and Adamson stock player Geoffrey Land. It seems like Tamblyn is having a lot of fun being an absolute lunatic, and he makes this worth watching.

JUNESPLOITATION:L.A. Bounty (1989)

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June 25: Junesploitation’s topic of the day — as suggested by F This Movie— is Wings Hauser Tribute!

This movie is a dream.

Worth Keeter, moving up from the Earl Owensby studios, is directing.

Sybil Danning as vigilante ex-cop Ruger in a movie made to get away from her sex symbol status but just look at the cover of this with her holding a rifle and man, it’s just what 17-year-old me was afraid of, that there were girls out there that looked like Sybil Danning and someday I might have to talk to them. She also wrote and produced this effort, which happened when International Video Entertainment realized how well the Sybil Danning Adventure Video releases they made — she just hosted — did so well.

Gary Graver is shooting it.

Wings Hauser as Cavanaugh, a drug dealer who is, as all Wings Hauser bad guys must be, absolutely beyond evil and out of his mind. He’s also a painter in this. An insane painter.

A candidate for mayor of Los Angeles has been kidnapped and his wife nearly killed, saved only by Ruger shooting first at the criminals. The politician’s wealthy wife, Kelly Rhodes (Lenore Kasdorf, Rico’s mom!), doesn’t dig that Ruger lives in a filthy trailer like she’s Martin Riggs or something, but they quickly bond over, you know, hating drug-dealing scuzzbuckets and being hunted by that very same drug-selling villain.

The sad part is that Steve James was supposed to be in this, and then they even shot photos of Danning with him for Ruger: L.A. Bounty 2, but yeah, I still don’t want to admit that Steve James is dead. Danning kept pushing for this character, as Ruger was in the comic book Concrete Storm with James as Major Washington Lyons and another comic in 2015, too.

And this from Rock Paper Shotgun: “This could well be the single weirdest E3 announcement. 1980s action-movie “star” Sybil Danning is making a “cloud-based” action shooter. It’s called Ruger, and will be loosely based on the 1989 movie L.A. Bounty. The baffling press release states: “While it is still early in the development cycle, Ruger will be a highly stylized, almost comic book styled shooter. The story, written by Sybil, is being held close to the vest, but watching L.A. Bounty is sure to shed at least some light on what it’s all about. There is definitely room in the faux-retro market for more names than Tarantino and Rodriguez, and Sybil Danning certainly has the pedigree to be credible. Incredibly, the game and a Ruger film are being developed simultaneously.””

If I ever meet Jim Rossignol, who wrote that, we may discuss why he put star in quotes about Sybil Danning.

Ruger speaks 31 words in this entire movie, which also has Anthony Kiedis’ dad Blackie Dammit, Frank Doubleday — Romero from Escape from New York — and Robery Quarry in the cast.

Every fact about this movie is that Sybil didn’t dress sexy and was wearing high-waisted jeans. Have you seen Sybil Danning in 1989? She could dress like an aging U.S. Senator and be volcanic.

But yeah. Wings Hauser. He talks to God, he paints naked women, he builds death traps and kills everyone around him, friend, foe and bystander. They should put heat this movie in a spoon and shoot in my eye.

You can watch this on Tubi.

WEIRD WEDNESDAY: The Black Gestapo (1975)

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Lee Frost was behind some strange films like Race With the Devil, Love Camp 7, Chain Gang Women and The Thing with Two Heads. None of those films will prepare you for this one. After all, how does one prepare for a movie where an army of black men gets inspired by the wrong side of World War II and becomes the new master race?

General Ahmed (Rod Perry of TV’s S.W.A.T.) starts a People’s Army to protect the black people of Watts. Still, after chasing the drug dealers out of town, his second-in-command, Colonel Kojah (Charles Robinson, who played Fabulous from Sugar Hill and would go on to be Mac on TV’s Night Court), takes over, turning the group into a fascist paramilitary outfit that controls every racket in town.

With a concept like that, you’d hope that the film itself would be more out of control. Sadly, it isn’t. That said, Uschi Digard shows up, and really, that’s worth seeing the film in the first place. Comparing the Black Panthers to the Third Reich and castration are things that you don’t see in movies any longer. I’d argue that this is the lone movie that combines both.

You can watch this on Tubi.

Sizzlin’ Summer of Side-Splitters 2025: Whiskers (1997)

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June 23-29 Cat Week: Cats! They’re earth’s funniest creatures (sorry chimps, you’re psychos).

When Klon put this challenge together, it was to get people to lighten up. I’m in a basement with no windows, working two jobs at home, never leaving, always trying to make people happy, then I cut the grass. No complaints other than I’m past fifty and wondering how I got here and how soon I will be dead. But hey, Whiskers, a movie in which a child, upset that his parents will get rid of his pet, makes a wish on an Egyptian cat goddess and transforms his pet into a 30-year-old man.

There’s war on the horizon, false flags, no one cares about anyone and ICE is brutalizing people and don’t worry, this sadly won’t age and man, how can I be angst ridden when that cat is on a skateboard? Just take a gander. That cat is ready to fucking shred, you sad sack fucks.

So yeah, Jed Martin (Michael Caloz) spends so much time with. his cat Whiskers that his parents decide to get rid of it. 1990s parents. The human Whiskers is Brent Carver, who goes all out in this. There are also bullies who call Jed Cat Boy.

Jim Kaufman’s directing credits are mostly for TV, but he did do Night of the Demons III. This was written by Wendy Biller and Christopher Hawthorne.

Also for parents, of which I am not one: Michael Yarmush, who is Fingers, and Michael Caloz, who plays Jed, were the voices of Arthur and D.W. on the much-despised cartoon Arthur.

This is not religious, it’s Canadian. That can be confusing.

You can watch this on Tubi.