The world of cinephilia found an unlikely champion late last year when pop singer Charli XCX’s account on the movie-logging platform Letterboxd was leaked to the public, revealing the “Brat Summer” superstar to be a surprisingly erudite and voracious movie watcher. Never one to shy away from the spotlight, Ms. XCX doubled down during her appearance at this year’s Coachella, embracing her newfound fan base with backdrops featuring the names of her favorite filmmakers, including “Ari Aster Summer,” “Celine Song Summer” and, perhaps most incongruously, “Cronenberg Summer.” To be sure, the films of David Cronenberg, the Canadian filmmaker who made his name on cerebral sci-fi and graphic body horror, aren’t most people’s idea of “summer fun” – and yet, in a year as strange as 2025, “Cronenberg Summer” sounds a whole lot more inviting than what’s going on in the real world.
To this end, The Brattle Theatre has thrown down the gauntlet with a Cronenberg Summer of its own, programming a full week of the director’s most memorable and outrageous works. The series kicks off on Friday with a double feature of Cronenberg’s earliest hits, “Rabid” (1977), starring adult superstar Marilyn Chambers as a woman afflicted with a ravenous, parasitic armpit, and the killer-kid creepfest “The Brood” (1979). “Videodrome” (1982), which screens Saturday, is a heady mix of cyberpunk, techno-eroticism and Marshall McLuhan-esque media theory; it’s paired with “Scanners” (1981), a film that is “heady” in a very different sense. Sunday brings the two films that arguably brought Cronenberg the closest he’s ever come to the critical and commercial mainstream – his Jeff Goldblum-starring remake of “The Fly” (1986) and “Dead Ringers” (1988), with a career-best performance by Jeremy irons as a pair of malevolent twin gynecologists, and “Naked Lunch” (1992), his adaptation of the nigh-unadaptable novel by William S. Burroughs.
Though most closely associated with the horror boom of the 1980s, Cronenberg has worked consistently up to the present, and while his run of relatively “straight” pictures (including “A History of Violence” [2005] and “Eastern Promises” [2007]) are not present here, The Brattle rejoins the director for his late-career return to form. Tuesday brings “Crimes of the Future” (2022), a lightly autobiographical (and surprisingly funny) sci-fi oddity starring Viggo Mortensen as an aging performance artist whose medium is bespoke bodily organs. The series closes Wednesday and Thursday with a two-night run of Cronenberg’s latest, “The Shrouds” (2025), a strikingly elegiac (yet appropriately icky) parable clearly inspired by his wife’s recent passing. It really might be a Cronenberg Summer – though the director’s definition of “beach body” might differ drastically from yours.
If you prefer your transgressive auteurs in a more lighthearted vein, the Somerville Theatre has you covered with a tribute to Baltimore’s legendary “Pope of Puke,” John Waters. On Thursday, the Somerville screens “Female Trouble” (1974), arguably the greatest of Waters’ early underground films, starring Divine at the peak of her powers as teen delinquent turned international criminal Dawn Davenport. Friday brings a double feature of two of the director’s more palatable works: “Hairspray” (1988), Waters’ unlikely breakthrough into mainstream family entertainment, and “Pecker” (1998), his underseen entry in the ’90s indie-quirk cycle. It all leads to Sunday’s Filthy Formal at the Crystal Ballroom, an interactive show/party/twisted school dance presented by Identical Cousins featuring signature cocktails, drag and burlesque performances and a pencil-your-own-mustache photo booth. It’s enough to make our favorite filth-elder proud and a reminder that Pride Month is and remains a safe haven for gleeful freaks.
This Waters tribute segues perfectly into Summer Camp, the Somerville’s new weekly screening series dedicated to the most outrageously campy cult classics in the history of film. The series kicks off next Wednesday with “Beyond the Valley of the Dolls” (1970), one of the wildest and most subversive studio films ever made. The story behind the film (“BVD,” as it’s known to its fans) is legendary: 20th Century Fox, desperate for a hit, hired maverick sexploitation auteur Russ Meyer to direct an in-name-only sequel to their adaptation of Jacqueline Susann’s bestselling Hollywood melodrama. Meyer enlisted film critic (and drinking buddy) Roger Ebert to pen an outrageous parody of that film’s trashy charms, and Meyer directed his actors with such a straight face that many weren’t certain if they were starring in a comedy or a drama. The result is one of the most delirious Technicolor farces ever made, filled with wildly groovy costumes, ludicrous plot twists, and irresistibly quotable dialog (“This is my happening, and it freaks me out!”). That Meyer and Ebert were admittedly alien to the Hollywood they claimed to expose is half the fun – this is a live-action cartoon (though decidedly adults-only) the likes of which we’d never see again.
Oscar Goff is a writer and film critic based in Somerville. He is film editor and senior critic for the Boston Hassle and his work has appeared in the monthly Boston Compass newspaper and publications such as WBUR’s The ARTery and iHeartNoise. He is a member of the Boston Society of Film Critics, the Boston Online Film Critics Association, and the Online Film Critics Society.
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