Panic Fest 2025: Addison Heimann’s Touch Me is 31 flavors of weird

The Panic Fest horror/genre film festival is currently running in KC for its 2025 season at Screenland Armour. These film reviews are from indie and studio horror/comedy/sci-fi features premiering right now in the Northland, or hitting major theaters/VOD soon. Catch up with all our coverage here and there’s still time to get tickets for individual screenings at the Panic Fest 2025 website.

I don’t love it when someone describes a movie as “weird.” It’s a broad term that lets the person using it off the hook. What kind of weird do you mean? H.P. Lovecraft madness involving tentacles and indescribable elemental evil? Gregg Araki, MTV-friendly heightened surreality? Hentai-inspired sexual antics? John Waters kitsch?

There are all kinds of flavors out there, and lots of movies that include more than one, like a messed-up soft-serve twist cone.

For the purposes of this review, I want you to know that I’m using “weird” to describe Touch Me not because I’m avoiding getting specific, but because I have to, as a collective term. Addison Heimann’s movie is a Baskin-Robbins of weirdness that includes all of the aforementioned flavors, plus a few more. It’s a genre-spanning freak buffet about, among other things, unhealthy attachment styles, friendship, trauma recovery, unhealthy coping mechanisms and…um…tentacle sex.

Five years ago, Joey (Olivia Taylor Dudley) met Brian (Lou Taylor Pucci), a tentacled alien in the body of a super-hot guy. Brian’s touch is addictive in its ability to make Joey feel instantly calm, and the “inter-species intercourse” she had with him was next level. But one night, sex with Brian went too far, and Joey ran off to stay with her best friend Craig (Jordan Gavaris), whom she’s been freeloading off of ever since.

A run-in with Brian at a coffee shop during an emotional and financial low point for Joey turns into an invitation to hang out at his swanky compound for a weekend. Joey returns to her problematic fave, with an intrigued Craig in tow, for a few days of healing, rest and (you guessed it) freaky tentacle sex.

But after Joey discovers what else Brian’s up to between meditating, hip-hop dancing and carnal pleasures, things take a tense turn, even more so when it turns out Brian is also hooking up with Craig.

Touch Me takes inspiration from a wide variety of sources. There’s Araki and Waters in the film’s unabashedly queer perspective, bright pop-art visuals, self-involved characters and sexually frank, self-effacing humor. References to Japanese cinema—both “pink films” and classics like Kwaidan, House and Tokyo Drifter—abound in Touch Me’s production design and in several shots that pay direct homage to specific films.

As campy as everything gets, part of the appeal of Touch Me is how straight the cast plays it. Dudley gives an impressively committed performance right from the get-go, in a single-take monologue that essentially brings us up to speed on all the exposition in a way that feels natural and charming.

Gavaris, probably best known for his outstanding work on Orphan Black, brings the same level of charming vivacity to Craig, throwing himself into a role defined by equal parts selfish hedonism and wide-eyed curiosity. Pucci, for his part, is also excellent in a role as a petulant narcissist with cult leader magnetism, as is Marlene Forte as his put-upon, jealous assistant.

Touch Me is the kind of wildly original movie that takes a bowlful of ideas and influences and throws them at the wall like sexy spaghetti and somehow manages to make most of those things stick. Heimann smartly spends enough time developing his characters, their relationships and their circumstances so that when things get kinky (and they get very kinky), it’s not surprising, or repulsive, but an often-funny advancement of a previously-introduced concept. Its weirdness is never there for its own sake, it’s there to make a point and express Heimann’s uniquely bizarre aesthetic.

If you’re down to experience its wavelength, it has highly specific treats in store.