Brooke H. Cellars’ hair salon retro pastiche about toxic mother-daughter relationships and other lady problems reaches for the scuzzy charge of cult camp – but never finds the conviction, comic timing or performative snap needed to make that mode live.
★★
There is an obvious lineage haunting The Cramps: A Period Piece (2025): Cry-Baby (1990), But I’m a Cheerleader (1999), films that prove this kind of stylisation only works when the performances are nailed down to the beat. The film knows those reference points, perhaps too well. It goes after that mix of vulgarity and sweetness, but what lands feels like imitation without weight. Camp only works if you believe it. Here, too much of it feels second-hand.
Recent films show this mode still has bite. Forbidden Fruits (2024) and Fucktoys (2025) commit to their worlds and carry them through. The vision draws you in, and the jokes land. The performances understand that artificiality needs delicate control and a heartfelt power. By contrast, The Cramps: A Period Piece never finds a convincing register.
Set in a stylised version of America, the film follows Agnes Applewhite, a young woman trying to push past a restrictive home life and a controlling mother while stepping into the workplace for the first time – all while dealing with a Cronenbergian case of menstrual cramps. A job at a salon full of eccentrics offers a glimpse of independence, but the film drifts from one setup to the next without building pressure. It tries in vain to balance grotesque parody with an underlying sincerity, something that needs a sure hand and a delicate touch. Here the two impulses pull against each other and cancel out.
The body horror hook should carry it. Her menstrual clots seem to take on a life of their own, absorbing and dissolving anyone unlucky enough to get too close, like a bargain-bin The Blob (1958, or 1988). It is a good idea. The film does not push it. The kills don’t amount to much, the escalation stalls, and the joke wears thin.
The issue is not that the film is broad or stagey – that can work. The issue is comic timing. Line readings land flat. You can hear actors waiting for their cue, then handing the scene back. Dialogue is over-enunciated, pauses hang, and the rhythm plods along. It feels like a deliberate attempt to channel the stiff, artificial delivery of cult mondo cinema, but that kind of bad acting only works if it has charm and charge behind it, a sense of genuine derangement. There is no shortcut to camp – you have to sell it.
Instead, The Cramps: A Period Piece plays like a talent show staging Hairspray at the community centre. The look is there, but the zing is not. What should feel filthy and alive instead feels phoney and derivative.
There are some highlights. Teddy Teaberry (Wicken Taylor) and Holiday Hitchcocker (Michelle Malentina) have more presence than the central pairing, hinting at a sharper film just out of reach. The final scene, which gives the mother character some shape, lands cleanly. For a moment, the film finds a texture it has been missing.
It is not enough. The Cramps: A Period Piece understands the films it wants to echo. But it never turns that understanding into something with its own pulse.
Cramps: A Period Piece played at the Overlook Film Festival in New Orleans.
Whitlock&Pope 