Fantastic Fest 2025 is wrapping up as we speak, with in-person attendees of this festival experiencing surprise showings of titles like Gore Verbinski’s Good Luck, Have Fun, Don’t Die (in its world premiere) and what’s apparently the first public 70mm screening of One Battle After Another. Combine all that with a slew of memorable pre-announced screenings, and Fantastic Fest 2025 has certainly given this staple of Texas moviegoing a worthy 20^th anniversary bruhaha.

Just as the folks involved in coordinating Fantastic Fest 2025 are putting up folding chairs and banners as we speak, so too is my virtual coverage of the event winding down. Today, I’ve got two final movie reviews of films that screened at Fantastic Fest 2025. One of them even held their world premiere at the event. Read on to discover the kind of subversive and unorthodox genre fare that Fantastic Fest has housed for decades now.

The Restoration at Grayson Manor (dir. Glenn McQuaid)

Boyd Grayson (Chris Colfer) and his mother, Jacqueline (Alice Krige), have never gotten along. In The Restoration at Grayson Manor, though, they’re stuck together in their big mansion (the titular Grayson Manor) after Grayson lost his hands in an accident involving him saving his cruel mother’s life. Now, he’s trapped in bed and preparing for a life with new prosthetic hands connected to his subconscious. These hands start crawling all over the place like Thing in The Addams Family and lashing out at people per Boyd’s deepest pent-up fantasies.

Writer/director Glenn McQuaid (who penned the script with Clay McLeod Chapman) has an enjoyably sick mind coming up with depraved, mean-spirited twists to this story. Happily, The Restoration at Grayson Manor doesn’t dovetail into abrupt sentimentality in its third act. It instead remains steadfast in its commitment to realizing a world where everyone is scheming and duplicitous. Within the hallowed halls of this lavish domicile is mountains of body horror, corpses, and semen-covered treachery.

If there’s a problem, though, it’s that McQuaid and Chapman can’t come up with a fittingly bizarre or darkly hysterical finale to wrap everything up. Grayson Manor’s climax just fizzles out and not in a way radiating intentionality. It’s also frustrating that those disembodied prosthetic hands crawling all over the place keep evoking memories of Thing, the earliest form of Life’s alien, or Spongebob’s hands in the episode “Artist Unknown.” That visually derivative problem deprives Grayson Manor’s primary adversaries of distinctiveness.

You could do much worse for 90 minutes of grim entertainment than The Restoration at Grayson Manor. After all, tangible commitment emanates from every cast member during all the gruesome madness. However, there are also significantly more cohesive films out there juxtaposing opulent surroundings with blood-soaked deceit.

A Useful Ghost (dir. Ratchapoom Boonbunchachoke)

Did MacGruber have you hankering for more ghost/human sex? Good news, Ratchapoom Boonbunchachoke’s feature length directorial debut A Useful Ghost is here to placate your cultural desires. This feature’s primary narrative, told by a stranger to Academic Ladyboy (Wisarut Homhuan), follows the grieving March (Witsarut Himmarat) mourning the passing of his wife Nat (Davika Hoorne). Ah, but she’s not truly gone. She eventually comes back to life as a ghost that possesses a red vacuum cleaner.

March’s wealthy mom, Suman (Apasiri Nitibhon), who has dealt with ghosts in her factory before, and the man’s other relatives don’t approve of him carrying on a romance with a ghost. However, the pair refuse to separate. More importantly, Nat becomes important to high-society folks like Dr. Paul (Gandhi​ Wasuvitchayagit), who have very specific plans for this spirit.

Boonbunchachoke’s script is initially a darkly comical enterprise about human spirits ending up in unexpected machines. This extends to it functioning as an absurdist romp where a non-anthropomorphized vaccuum cleaner gently rolls down the highway or sits in a hospital waiting room chair. Visual jokes of this object “hopping” into a seat or getting on an elevator are immensely chuckle-worthy. Ditto the eventual wide shot of March canoodling this appliance. There’s also that striking earlier scene of him engaging in some nipple play with Nat’s mechanical form. Those vacuum suction appendages have never been so erotically useful.

Like many ghost stories, though, there’s a deeper meaning to A Useful Ghost. Here, that richer subtext involves yesteryear’s demons and the bourgeoisie controlling the general consciousness memory. The production starts out like a subdued Adult Swim short and ends channeling Atlantics. The road getting there is a bit bumpy, but Boonbunchachoke’s ambitious tone keeps the endeavor constantly engaging. He especially excels realizing this as a visually rewarding enterprise. Those qualities are especially apparent in a third-act sex scene between ghost and fleshy human forms.  Cinematographer Pisit Tandaechanurat proves just as adept at erotic intimacy as he does humorously juxtaposing a self-sufficient vacuum cleaner against bustling city backdrops.

Lead performer Davika Hoorne is also tremendously involving in her work as Nat. She’s especially laudable in making every adjustment in her character’s moral growth feel so organic. Hoorne must play so many different corners of Nat. Remarkably, she lends equal levels of conviction to each of those layers. This unique enterprise also has the courtesy to go out on a grisly bang. Narrative audacity doesn’t just begin and end with A Useful Ghost’s opening scene. Boonbunchachoke keeps things inspired right until the intentionally abrupt cut to credits.