CutreCon, the International Trash Film Festival of Madrid, has spent fifteen years bringing to the Spanish capital the worst B-movies on the planet. On the occasion of this anniversary, they published an official book titled 15 years of CutreCon: 127 Unintentional Comedies (available for 20 euros through their website). A gem for any lover of cheap productions, shoddy imitations and cinema made on a shoestring with plenty of nerve.
To learn the details of this release, we spoke with the festival director, Carlos Palencia, who confesses that “fifteen years don’t come every day. It seemed to us a perfect opportunity to celebrate it by finally collecting in a single volume the best of the worst, that is, the most unusual, delirious and uproarious that has passed through CutreCon during all this time.”
The book has two very clear types of readers. On one hand, “those who have been coming to the festival for years and will find here a kind of sentimental memory of many of the atrocities we have screened.” On the other hand, “people who still do not know CutreCon well and can use the book as an entryway into this universe. In that sense, it functions both as a memory for veterans and as a guide for newcomers.”
They are all there, but not all that there are. A total of 127 films from across these fifteen years have been selected, reviewing only the most notable. “After fifteen editions, it was tempting to turn this book into a complete inventory of everything that has passed through CutreCon. But an exhaustive list can serve as an archive and, nevertheless, not tell what is truly important, which is what the festival represents and why it hooks so much. For that reason, this volume does not aim to be an encyclopedia or a full catalog, but a curated selection. We have gathered films so bad they are good, involuntary comedies that condense better than anything the spirit of CutreCon.”
A Cutre Book, With Every Letter and All the Details
Moreover, Palencia stresses that they have aimed to focus “exclusively on truly failed films. Over these fifteen years we have also screened magnificent documentaries about cutre cinema or splendid comedies that pay homage to bad cinema with full awareness of what they are doing, but those works, precisely because they are not bad films, did not have a place in this book.”
Each film comes with a data sheet: poster, Spanish title, original title, director, year of production, country of origin, genre and a short description in the usual humorous voice of CineCutre.com (the site where it all began). They were written by several authors, mainly Carlos Palencia himself together with Paco Fox, another expert in the field: “As coordinator and creator of the book, what I did was distribute the reviews in a fairly natural way. In Paco’s case, I proposed he handle those films that he knew would motivate him especially, so that he could write them with enthusiasm and with that distinctive touch of his. In the end, the important thing was that each text was written by someone who truly connected with the film in question,” explains Carlos.
