Cincinnati's oddest annual movie gathering returns to Clifton's Esquire Theatre this month, running Wednesday, August 26 through Friday, August 28 for its fifth year. The Psychotronic Film Festival is a three-day showcase of unusual films from around the world, staged inside the theater at 320 Ludlow Ave. This year's lineup leans almost entirely on movies that were, until very recently, nearly impossible to see in good quality.
The festival is organized by Justin Wiese, who leads Outer Cinema Cincinnati and has spent five years tracking down prints of films mainstream critics ignored, according to Cincinnati CityBeat. Wiese has said this year's slate is unusual even by his own standards, since many of the selected films were largely unavailable to watch until recent restorations, per the same outlet. The result is a program that leans heavily on an international archival movement that has quietly resurrected decades of overlooked genre cinema.
Love Massacre and The Devil Queen Lead a Restoration-Heavy Lineup
Topping Wiese's own most-anticipated list is Love Massacre, Patrick Tam's 1981 Hong Kong New Wave slasher starring Brigitte Lin, who also appeared in Chungking Express and Police Story. The film combines the era's romantic New Wave sensibility with slasher-horror elements, and until recently it circulated mainly in poor-quality VHS-rip form, per CityBeat's reporting. Hong Kong's M+ Museum completed a 4K digital restoration in 2025 using an original 35mm picture negative discovered that same year, according to M+ Museum.
Also on the bill is The Devil Queen, a 1974 campy Brazilian crime film starring Milton Gonçalves as a Black drag queen crime boss presiding over a Rio de Janeiro underworld run by drag queens. Wiese has described it as a portrait of Rio's early-1970s underworld and Brazilian drag and queer culture, per CityBeat. A new 4K restoration of the film premiered at the 2023 Berlin International Film Festival before Kino Lorber gives it a 2026 U.S. theatrical rollout, according to Film Obsessive.
Closing the festival on Friday is Reflection in a Dead Diamond, a 2025 spy thriller riffing on 1960s Euro-spy pictures and starring Fabio Testi as a retired secret agent. Wiese has called it his favorite movie released the previous year, per CityBeat. The film, directed by French filmmaking duo Hélène Cattet and Bruno Forzani, world-premiered in competition at the 2025 Berlin International Film Festival, according to the British Film Institute.
From Wendy's Threat to Cult-Movie Institution
The Esquire Theatre itself has a history that makes it a fitting home for genre-film obscurities. The Clifton venue opened in 1911 as the Clifton Opera House and, decades later, was slated for demolition to make way for a Wendy's fast-food restaurant, according to Wikipedia. Six years of grassroots advocacy from local residents saved the building, which reopened as an independent art-house theater on April 20, 1990. The Esquire has hosted Cincinnati's Rocky Horror Picture Show shadow cast, The Denton Affair, on a biweekly basis since 2000, per The Denton Affair.
The Psychotronic Film Festival itself grew out of a 2019 monthly cult-cinema series that Wiese and Clifton record shop Torn Light Records launched at the Esquire, kicking off with a screening of Alex Cox's 1984 punk comedy Repo Man, according to Cincinnati Magazine. That partnership formalized into the annual festival in 2022, with its inaugural three-day run held from September 29 to October 1 that year. The festival takes its name from a term coined in 1980 by film writer Michael J. Weldon, who used it to describe the low-budget, eccentric genre films mainstream critics tended to ignore, per Wikipedia.
Deeper Cuts Fill Out the Fifth-Year Bill
The rest of the bill runs from stunt-heavy spectacle to shot-on-video horror. Roar, a 1981 adventure-comedy about animal-rights activism, was filmed up close with live tigers and injured 72 crew members during production, according to CityBeat. Also on the schedule: The Manitou, a supernatural horror film about a woman whose neck tumor turns out to be the reincarnation of an evil Native American shaman, and Challenge of the Tiger, a martial-arts film starring Bruce Le. Rounding out the list are Embalmer, a 1996 shot-on-video slasher with an entirely Black cast made in Washington, D.C., and Sheila and the Brainstem, a 1989 punk-rock science-fiction social satire.
Past editions of the festival have included Russ Meyer's 1965 sexploitation feature Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill!, Alex de la Iglesia's 1997 crime film Perdita Durango, and a 50th-anniversary screening of the 1974 blaxploitation zombie film Sugar Hill, according to Cincinnati Magazine's earlier coverage. The festival has also previously screened John Waters' 1981 comedy Polyester and Nobuhiko Obayashi's 1977 horror film House. Wiese has said the event has grown bigger and better every year, and moviegoers now travel from out of state to attend, per CityBeat.
A Festival Growing Alongside Cincinnati's Theater Scene
The festival's growth arrives amid broader shifts in how Cincinnati's historic theaters are run. In May, local nonprofit Cindependent took over daily operations of the 100-year-old Mariemont Theatre from the private operator that also runs the Esquire, part of the Mariemont Theatre's nonprofit takeover. Wiese, for his part, wants events like the Psychotronic Film Festival to make Cincinnati more visible as a destination for cult film fans, per CityBeat.
As for how the festival will mark its fifth anniversary, Wiese has not yet announced the form that celebration will take, according to CityBeat. What is set is the calendar: three days of newly restored obscurities unspooling at the Esquire, the same Clifton theater that has hosted the festival since it began.
