The Cramps: A Period Piece had its world première at Fantastic Fest 2025, 20th Sept
Red curtains open, revealing Agnes Applewhite (Lauren Kitchen) centre-stage, first dancing awkwardly in a prim, drably coloured lace dress with white gloves, then more enthusiastically in a short red-sequinned number, then suddenly naked and anxious, until multiple hands tear open her belly as though she were in George A. Romero’s Dawn of the Dead (1978) or Day of the Dead (1985). As Agnes is woken in her bed by the telephone, it becomes clear that the sequence which opened The Cramps: A Period Piece has all been a dream, but it is still introducing us to who Agnes is: a young woman looking to break out of constraining fashions and stage fright, but suffering from debilitating abdominal pains which the viewer can infer from the title are period cramps. Even those opening red curtains hint at the gushing menstruation to come.
Facing constant disapproval at home from her stern widowed mother (Brooklyn Woods) and conformist sister Liberty (Harlie Madison), Agnes seeks refuge from the oppression of this domestic situation in a new job as the shampoo girl at the Hairbrain Beauty Salon. In spite, or perhaps because, of her gawky klutziness, Agnes quickly finds her place with the other misfit staff – high-wigged trans owner Laverne Lancaster (Martini Bear), tartish ‘hair assassin’ Holiday Hitchcocker (Michelle Malentina) and pink-haired Teddy Teaberry (Wicken Taylor), who is like sweet-natured Frenchie from Randal Kleiser’s Grease (1978) only a Satanist. These women welcome Agnes under their wings, while offering her any makeover she likes. In truth, Agnes’ identity is not fully formed, and as she tries on different clothes, hairstyles and experiences, she is also discovering who she is and who she wants to be, while learning to stand up for herself.
“A young girl should have long hair,” insists Mother when Agnes mentions her desire for a trendier, shorter cut, “I know the trends of today, and they’re all going to fade away. Traditional never goes out of style.” There is an irony in Mother’s words: for while they express her deep conservatism, and underscore a life dedicated to maintaining the strict values of her departed husband (framed photographs of whom haunt every room in the stuffy house), they also serve as a sort of manifesto for writer/director/editor Brooke H. Cellars’ feature, which, a ‘period piece’ in more than one sense, reconstructs in 35mm the styles and aesthetics of its setting in the late 1950s or early 1960s with retrospective glee, while also resurrecting the transgressive, paracinematic spirit of John Waters.
Aside from her imperious Mother and denial-ruled sister, there are two additional obstacles in the way of Agnes’ progress towards liberated selfhood. One is the rival beauticians Tangerina and Vinyl von Cuntley (Sylvia Grace Crim, Vincent Stalba) from the Electric Chic Boutique, who have half-challenged, half-blackmailed Laverne into competing in the Annual Hair Extravaganza Bonanza, with the very future of Hairbrain Beauty Salon the stake. And the other is Agnes’ own anatomy, as her painful periods – signifiers of personal renewal – assume a monstrous life of their own and, in the manner of Irvin Yeaworth’s The Blob (1958), envelop and dissolve anyone who gets in her way. Agnes’ menstrual cycle will turn out to be both crippling curse and source of empowerment.
The Cramps: a Period Piece is all at once coming-of-age comedy, bizarre creature feature, and “let’s put on a show” campfest, in which sisters, both cis and trans, do it for themselves and for one another, and men – even supposedly dishy ones like Falcon (Gabriel Steven Perez) – are pushy and predatory. For the most part, this is cheap, taste-testing trash cinema, and it knows it, revelling in its own tawdry anything-goes hilarity – but for all the broad flamboyance and in-your-face artifice, Cellars ultimately grants both Mother and Liberty genuinely moving grace notes that show the patriarchal trap in which they have become tragically stuck even as Agnes manages to break free.
strap: In Brooke H. Cellars’ mid-century menstrual monster movie, a salon shampoo girl finds her people and comes of age in conservative patriarchal America
© Anton Bitel
