One of my favorite horror movies of the last few years has been Patchwork, an unexpectedly great horror-comedy/revenge story about three murdered women whose souls somehow end up hanging out together in the same sewn-together patchwork body.
If it sounds gruesome, well, yeah, it is. But it’s also an incredibly hilarious and genuinely female-centered little indie movie. Think woman-centric screwball comedy Frankensteined together with Re-Animator and passing the Bechtel Test with flying colors, and you’re in the right ballpark (it’s streaming on Netflix and Amazon if you wanna give it a look).
Jewel-like discoveries like that don’t usually grow on trees for genre fans, but they kinda do at the BoneBat Comedy of Horrors Film Festival, where I saw Patchwork for the first time. Over seven iterations of the festival, hosts/curators Steve Holetz and Gordo Caulkins have served up scores of winning horror-comedy shorts and features, including cult faves like Wolfcop and the Irish creature comedy Grabbers. And in recent years the festival’s even invited some great live music acts to play the house. BoneBat’s batting average quality-wise, on both the filmic and musical fronts, is near-peerless.
BoneBat’s looking to do it again at SIFF Cinema Uptown April of next year, and they’ve organized another Kickstarter campaign to fund it. Previous BoneBat Kickstarters have successfully funded the fest, enabling its programmers to nab SIFF Cinema Uptown as a venue for the last two years. But as we know, in this devalued world, there’s no such thing as a done deal.
We’re normally not tub-thumpers for Kickstarter campaigns here at the SunBreak, but BoneBat’s been doing something great, even therapeutic, for the last seven years. Now more than ever, staring into the abyss of the horrific and laughing your ass off at it is a form of therapy we could all use.
The BoneBat 2018 Kickstarter wraps up on Monday, December 18. Give it a look.
