The Gutter’s own Carol Borden really enjoyed the campy, lo-fi body horror of The Cramps: A Period Piece at Fantastic Fest. Here are some quick thoughts. (There are more thoughts on it at Monstrous Industry):

Brooke H. Cellars’ The Cramps: A Period Piece (USA, 2025) is a period piece in more than one way. It is indeed about an especially bad period and a bad period in someone’s life, but it’s also set in a very John Waters, queer and drag-influenced depiction of 1960s America. There is more than one drag queen with a beard playing a role in The Cramps. And that is a magnificent thing. Agnes Applewhite (Lauren Kitchen) wants change in her life. Her home life is a smidge shy of a Gothic melodrama. Agnes quits job her late father found her as a switchboard operator and takes a new job as a hair wash girl at the Hairbrained Beauty Shop. Her mother does not approve and attempts to will Agnes back into conformity. But Agnes loves her new life. Agnes even meets a boy at work, Falcon Fireshaft (Gabriel Steven Perez)—and he likes her! But her period interferes and it’s much worse than dysmenorrhea or even endometriosis.

The Cramps: A Period Piece is everything I love about scrappy lo-fi, DIY film-making. It has a unique vision—a unique idea of what filmmaking is and what movies should be about. It does a lot with very few resources. It’s creative, delightful, funny and daring. It’s doesn’t care about the illusion of reality and embraces the artificial. It expects you to suspend your own disbelief. But The Cramps also has an emotional realism that is completely believable. The Cramps takes risks. The Cramps just goes with effects made from glitter, glue, and plastic wrap. And maybe riskiest of all, The Cramps is daring in its unapologetic focus on women and its unapologetic queerness.

Read more of her thoughts here. Carol received a review copy of The Cramps: A Period Piece.