BizarroLand Film Festival (until January 2022: Sick 'n' Wrong Film Festival) is a

film festival A film festival is an organized, extended presentation of films in one or more cinemas or screening venues, usually in a single city or region. Increasingly, film festivals show some films outdoors. Films may be of recent date and, depending upon ...

that is showcasing the most aggressively bizarre midnight, underground, outsider, and weirdo cinema of all genres. It is based in

Orlando, Florida Orlando () is a city in the U.S. state of Florida and is the county seat of Orange County, Florida, Orange County. In Central Florida, it is the center of the Greater Orlando, Orlando metropolitan area, which had a population of 2,509,831, acco ...

and run by Stephen Stull. It is cited as one of the most bizarre genre film festivals in the USA and ''

Dread Central Dread Central is an American website founded in 2006 that is dedicated to horror news, interviews, and reviews. It covers horror films, comics, novels, and toys. Dread Central has won the Rondo Hatton Classic Horror Award for Best Website f ...

'' listed it as one of the ''best horror festivals in the world''.

History

It was founded in 2015 by Stephen Stull. In an interview with ''PopHorror'', Stull defines the philosophy of the festival: ::''Sick 'n' Wrong'' is a film festival for what I generally refer to as aggressively bizarre movies. If anybody has ever seen movies referred to as

midnight movies The term midnight movie is rooted in the practice that emerged in the 1950s of local television stations around the United States airing low-budget genre films as late-night programming, often with a host delivering ironic asides. As a cinematic ...

, they're going to understand right away what I'm talking about. If I were ever to program a lineup of features that had already played and were never submitted, just a dream lineup, I would love to have

Eraserhead ''Eraserhead'' is a 1977 American surrealist film, surrealist horror film written, directed, produced, and edited by David Lynch. Lynch also created its Eraserhead (soundtrack), score and sound design, which included pieces by a variety of oth ...

and The Holy Mountain and

The Greasy Strangler ''The Greasy Strangler'' is a 2016 American black comedy horror film directed by Jim Hosking, and written by Hosking and Toby Harvard. The film stars Michael St. Michaels, Sky Elobar, Elizabeth De Razzo, Gil Gex, Abdoulaye NGom and Holland MacFal ...

at the festival. If somebody hasn't seen movies like these, it's really hard to define because they end up assuming I'm talking about gore porn, and that's definitely not the case. The festival is held annually in different venues in the Orlando area and is a permanent fixture in the arts calendar of Orlando. The festival team is also engaged in the production of movies, for example ''The Transformations of the Transformations of the Drs. Jenkins'' that premiered at ''

GenreBlast Film Festival The GenreBlast Film Festival is an annual event held in the Winchester, Virginia area that specializes in genre film. GenreBlast is the largest genre film festival in the Washington, D.C. region, spotlighting short and feature films that are typi ...

'' 2021. The film featured the festival director Stephen Stull and collaborators like

Michael J. Epstein Michael J. Epstein (born 1976), is an American filmmaker, musician, writer, and auditory scientist. Epstein has also spoken and written about the impact of local media on the arts, music service gatekeeping, effective social networking, and crowd ...

. In January 2022 the festival got renamed into ''BizarroLand Film Festival''.

Awards

''The Sickies'' are Sick 'n' Wrong's awards statues. They are designed by Brad Bailey and hand sculpted and painted by Paul and Debra Berg. They are being awarded annually in 12 categories, including: * The Sickest Award "for the most gut-wrenching visual content" * The Wrongest Award "for the most morally abhorrent story" * The Golden Tentacle "for the movie that best embodies the spirit of S'n'W" * The Audience Favorite, voted on by festival attendees

Film Production

The festival also launched a production arm in 2021, raising money for an anthology film, ''Fat Fleshy Fingers'', on Kickstarter. The film premiered at Film Maudit 2.0 in January 2023.

References

External links

* Film festivals in Florida Fantasy and horror film festivals in the United States Culture of Orlando, Florida Festivals established in 2016 Short film festivals in the United States {{US-film-festival-stub