Cincinnati film buffs, rejoice. The Psychotronic Film Festival, a yearly three-day event showing off cinema’s weirdest and wackiest works from across the globe, is back for a milestone fifth year.
The festival is running at the Esquire Theatre, located at 320 Ludlow Ave., from Wednesday, August 26 to Friday, August 28th.
Each year, festival organizer Justin Wiese — also the creator and head of local film collective Outer Cinema Cincinnati — aims to shock and delight audiences with classics they’ve likely never seen. The throughline for each film? It’s gonna be weird.
In years past, Wiese tended to choose at least one well-known film to draw audiences in; examples from years past include John Waters’ iconic 1981 comedy “Polyester” or Nobuhiko Obayashi’s beloved 1977 horror film “House.”
Now that the festival’s success is well-established, however, it’s time to get even more esoteric. This year’s selections are largely unknown genre flicks that were previously unwatchable in high quality (or even at all) until recent restorations. Wiese isn’t worried, though. He knows from his own screenings that the Queen City’s cinemagoers are chomping at the bit for new experiences.
“I’m really excited about this year because it’s a lot of things that were basically unavailable to see until this year. And the Cincinnati film scene is always so curious and so hungry for things they haven’t seen before,” Wiese said. “So I can do a lineup like this year’s, where it’s all pretty much movies that people aren’t familiar with, but I can count on the audiences to be there because everyone’s just as excited as I am to watch these.”
Wiese took special care to point out his three can’t-miss picks from this year’s iteration. First, “The Devil Queen” — a campy Portuguese crime flick from 1974 set inside the seedy underbelly of a Brazilian crime ring run by a group of drag queens.
“It’s a really cool portrait of, you know, not only this kind of underworld of Rio de Janeiro in the early ’70s, but also drag culture and queer culture in Brazil,” Wiese said.
Next, Wiese’s most-anticipated screening of the festival: “Love Massacre.” Until this year, Patrick Tam’s forgotten 1981 classic was essentially only watchable in poor quality from a VHS rip. It’s hard to explain what makes “Love Massacre” interesting without giving away the plot, so here’s a brief synopsis: imagine the slow romanticism of Hong Kong New Wave — a la Wong Kar Wai — but the romance gradually gives way into a slasher flick.
“It’s an astounding mix of genres … it’s like a very brutal slasher movie, but it’s gorgeously photographed. It’s got a really great lead performance by Brigitte Lin from ‘Chungking Express’ and ‘Police Story,'” Wiese said. “This one was kind of a hard one to get a hold of, but I’m so stoked to be able to play it right in the middle of the film festival because I think it’s really gonna knock the socks off people.”
Finally, Friday caps it all off with another unusual screening at the Psychotronic: a modern film. It’s pretty unheard-of for a film with a release year beginning with ‘202’ to screen at the festival, but Wiese thinks this one — a 2025 riff on the 60s spy thrillers of old titled “Reflection in a Dead Diamond” — deserves the spot.
“It’s so stylish, so bizarre… There’s plenty of insane car chases and gory violence. Visually, there’s nothing quite like it. It’s so spectacular. And when it came out last year, I tried to get a hold of it to screen at the Esquire, but it never worked out. We made sure to get it this time, because I think it fits in with all the older films that I programmed, too. I’m just really excited for people to get to see it because it was my favorite movie that came out last year,” he said.
Other films screening at the festival include “Sheila and the Brainstem,” a 1989 punk-rock sci-fi social satire; “Embalmer,” a shot-on-video 1996 slasher flick with an entirely Black cast filmed in Washington, DC; “The Manitou,” a supernatural horror film where a woman starts growing a tumor on her neck that is actually revealed to be the reincarnation of an evil Native American shaman; “Challenge of the Tiger,” a martial-arts flick starring ‘Bruce Le’ (read that again); and 1981’s “Roar,” an adventure-comedy with a focus on animal rights activism often cited as the most dangerous film ever made. The premise isn’t super important: what you want to know is that it was filmed up close with live tigers, and 72 crew members were injured by the (untrained!) tigers during filming.
Wiese plans to celebrate the festival’s five-year milestone in some form, although he hasn’t yet announced what that will be. For him, the focus is the films. It’s a focus that’s helped the Psychotronic grow bigger and better every year, to the point where moviegoers now regularly travel from out-of-state to attend the festival.
“It’s been such a great five years curating this thing. When we first did it, I was so nervous of how it would be received and if people would come. You know, I do all this by myself, so it’s pretty crazy that it’s gotten bigger each time. Like, it’s really surreal,” he said.
What he enjoys the most, though, is growing the presence of Cincinnati’s film scene even larger each year.
“I’m so fortunate that I have a platform to make Cincinnati more visible as a place to come see these crazy cult films, and the Esquire has just been the best for giving me giving me the space to do all this,” Wiese said. “It’s stuff like this that really invigorates local film scenes. And it’s not just my festival doing this, but others like it around here and around the country. It proves that people are still very eager to go out to the theater … and all of the major motion picture companies should pay attention to it. Right now, we’re in a golden age of discovery. Cinema right now is really cool.”
