Strange Brew Film Society

JuneSploitation 🍁 — Canuxploitation Spotlight: Rituals (1977)

Five doctors are flown by plane deep into the Northern Ontario wilderness for their annual hiking trip. They wake up the first morning to find every pair of boots gone except one. By the time deer heads start appearing on poles, it's clear someone out there knows exactly who they are.

Shot just north of Sault Ste. Marie on the Batchawana Bay of Lake Superior, the location isn't just a backdrop. Where other rural revenge films offer pretty scenery as wallpaper, Rituals uses the Canadian wilderness as a main character.

Directed by UK filmmaker Peter Carter and starring Hal Holbrook, Rituals was shot in 1976 but sat unreleased for two years — landing in 1978 directly into the crossfire of a critical backlash against genre cinema led by journalist Robert Fulford's attacks on filmmakers like Cronenberg. It was kinda panned on release, but now stands as one of Canada's best films from the canuxsploitation era 🍁

🍁JuneSploitation 🍁

Deranged (1974)

Before Texas Chain Saw Massacre became the definitive Ed Gein adaptation, this Canadian production actually had it beat by a couple months.

Deranged follows Ezra Cobb, a man so consumed by grief after his domineering mother's death that he exhumes her body and brings her home. When taxidermy fails, he begins looking for fresher materials to work with.

Shot in Oshawa, Ontario on a budget of $200,000, producer Tom Karr funded the film himself using income earned promoting Led Zeppelin and Three Dog Night.

Co-director Alan Ormsby brought in a young Tom Savini as special effects artist and gave him one of his first professional jobs in film.

Then of course, there's Roberts Blossom giving us one of horror's most quietly terrifying performances as Ezra. You know him better as Old Man Marley in Home Alone. This makes for one of the most morbid and disturbing double features imaginable 🎞️

`

🍁🎞️ DEATH WEEKEND (1976) 🎞️🍁

It's June so you know what that means: Junesploitation!!All month we're counting down the greatest Canuxploitation films ever made — the wild, weird, and criminally underseen genre pictures that emerged from Canada's most unlikely experiment in cinema history.

In the 1970s, the Canadian government introduced a 100% capital cost allowance on domestic film investment — meaning investors could write off every dollar put into a Canadian production. American money flooded north, budgets were modest, and nobody was checking whether the films were any good. The result was an avalanche of low-budget horror, action, and exploitation pictures shot in Ontario forests, Montreal back alleys, and Nova Scotia coastlines — then quietly sold back to American drive-ins. Most were forgotten. A handful were masterpieces.

Directed by William Fruet, produced by a pre-Ghostbusters Ivan Reitman and shot on the Ontario lakeshore, it follows Diane, played with fierce conviction by Brenda Vaccaro, as a woman who refuses to be a passive victim when four men invade her weekend and her safety. Canadian critics dismissed it as a derivative American product. Genre scholars now recognize it as one of cinema's earliest Final Girl narratives, making it an essential part of cult film history.

🎬I Like Movies🎬

With Chandler Levack back in the spotlight thanks to her amazing new film "Mile End Kicks", it’s the perfect time to revisit her debut: "I Like Movies".

Set in early 2000s Ontario, this coming-of-age story hits hard for anyone who grew up when DVDs were everything, video stores were sacred ground, and discovering cinema felt like discovering yourself.

It’s awkward, funny, a little painful—and completely honest about what it means to be young, obsessed, and maybe a bit insufferable when you think movies are your whole personality. If you ever worked at a video store (like I did), this one really hits you in all the right feels.

This isn’t just nostalgia bait—it’s one of the sharpest portraits of movie love, and growing up Canadian we’ve gotten in years.

🇨🇦🎞️Happy National Canadian Film Day 🇨🇦🎞️

Celebrate with one of strangest films by one of our greatest and strangest filmmakers, My Winnipeg.

Directed by the patron saint of Strange Brew Film Society, Guy Maddin, this “docu-fantasia” blends memory, myth, and history into something completely unique. Shot in stark black-and-white, it transforms Winnipeg into a dreamscape where fact and fiction blur together.

Winner of Best Canadian Feature at the Toronto International Film Festival and Best Canadian Film by the Toronto Film Critics Association, this film over the years is now celebrated as one of the greatest Canadian films of all time.

Maddin has built a career out of pushing boundaries, crafting deeply personal, surreal films that feel like lost transmissions from another era — earning him a reputation as one of Canada’s most original directors.

Perfect viewing for today. 🎬🇨🇦

🐇🐣EASTER VIEWING RECOMMENDATION🥚🧺

Denys Arcand’s Jesus of Montreal (1989) is one of the most powerful and provocative films ever to come out of Canada 🇨🇦✨

A group of actors are hired to modernize a Passion Play in Montreal—but as their performances grow bolder and more political, the line between art and reality begins to blur in haunting ways. What starts as theatre slowly transforms into a striking parallel to the life of Christ himself.

📍Shot on location in Montreal (including the iconic Mount Royal), and filmed with a largely Quebec cast, the film blends realism with allegory in a way that feels both grounded and transcendent.
🏆 It won the Jury Prize at Cannes, earned an Academy Award nomination for Best Foreign Language Film, and dominated the Genie Awards—taking home Best Picture among multiple wins. Today, it’s widely regarded as one of the greatest Canadian films ever made.

A perfect watch for Easter season… or anytime you want something spiritual, subversive, and unforgettable.

🎙️🎞️UNDERTONE🎞️🎚️

Written and directed by Ian Tuason in his feature debut, the film was produced by Toronto genre company Black Fawn Films. Shot on a modest budget in Tuason’s own childhood home in the Rexdale neighbourhood of Toronto, Undertone tells the story of a podcast host who slowly unravels a mystery of demonic possession and familiar guilt.

(not so) Hot take: we really need to stop marketing every horror movie as “the scariest thing you’ll ever see." That kind of hype sets audiences up for the wrong experience.

Undertone isn’t trying to be a constant jump-scare machine. It’s a slow burn in the purest form, the kind that patiently builds tension piece by piece until everything finally erupts. If you walk in expecting wall-to-wall scares, it's going to feel VERY slow. But if you’re willing to sit with the atmosphere and let the film work on you, the last 15 min haunted house ride of this film is a showstopper.

Nothing brings people together like complex math and existential dread 🔳 Had an incredible time tonight for a sold out screening of Cube! Thanks so much to the amazing team at for inviting me to co-present this strange and unique film. And a huge thank you to Halifax film fans for continuing to show up and support Canadian cinema 🇨🇦🎞️

🇨🇦The Canuck Character Canon 🇨🇦

Few character actors are as instantly recognizable as Julian Richings.

Born in Oxford, Richings moved to Canada in 1984 and started one of the most prolific careers in Canadian film and television, with over 225 credits to his name.

He’s appeared in a wide range of Canadian cult favourites and genre classics, including Hard Core Logo, Cube, Wrong Turn and the modern Canadian horror hit Anything for Jackson.

For decades, Richings has been one of the quiet pillars of Canadian cinema — the kind of actor whose presence instantly elevates a film. If you’ve watched enough Canadian movies, you’ve definitely seen him.

A true legend of Canadian character acting.

Before escape rooms and puzzle horror became everywhere, there was Cube (1997).

Director Vincenzo Natali’s minimalist sci-fi thriller proved you didn’t need a huge budget to create tension. Just a mysterious system, a group of strangers, and rules nobody fully understands.

Movies like Saw, Exam, and The Platform expanded on the same core idea: put people inside a deadly system and watch what happens.