The Cramps: A Period Piece (2025) Film Review

Equal parts camp and shlock horror, Brooke H. Cellars‘s The Cramps: A Period Piece (2025) takes the humour and queer authenticity of a John Waters film and merges it into a gory creature feature that’ll get a standing ‘ovulation’ from period-havers in the audience!

Agnes (played by Lauren Kitchen) is a beautiful apple-cheeked young woman who lives with her passive-aggressive mother and uptight baby sister, all under the shadow of their austere, religious, late father’s portrait. Frozen in an atmosphere of deference towards his ghost, these women continue to perpetuate his particular rules on decency and dignity, largely through the denigration of poor Agnes, who fails to be as thin, delicate and passive as demanded.

Lying to her family – who make it clear that they’d never approve of a girl like her working anywhere except the switchboard, a job dear daddy got her – Agnes secretly begins working at a bustling local salon. The misfit group working there include Laverne, a bolshy drag queen played by the incredible Martini Bear, rockabilly icon and flaming liability Holiday (Michelle Malentina), and cute-as-a-button Satanist Teddy (Wicken Taylor), with a clientele consisting of narcoleptic drag queens and suspiciously attractive young men.

As Agnes experiences freedom for the first time and develops a beautiful relationship with the salon girls, she’s also experiencing the terrors of Aunt Flo – and hers is a real nightmare. The horrors of the period experience play out, first through interpretative dance, bad dreams, and everyday indignities, before turning literally monstrous. Despite experiencing a brutal period for most of the film, Agnes is surprisingly upbeat and positive throughout – she’s far more worried about her ability to disappoint and hurt people than their ability to hurt her. Sweet, innocent Agnes can’t fight back, so her body does it for her.

First, it’s the creepy OBGYN, who shows a startling (but terrifyingly typical) disregard for her symptoms and experience. He constantly belittles her, is rough and invasive with physical examinations, and suggests that she’s weak for being unable to handle period pain. Although this film appears to be set around the 1950s or ‘60s, these are things that the majority of young period-havers experience even today, and will make you want to close your legs up tight – but the discomfort gives way to a vindicating payoff, as the patronising creep gets a face full of glittery red period goo.

Later, other terrible people suffer similar fates. Her personal red avenger takes on the foes that sweet Agnes would have let get away with hurting her, and becomes a sort of manifestation of the audience’s desire to protect the innocent Agnes from some of the worst parts of menstruating and of being a woman.

The Cramps: A Period Piece is done in such a delightfully retro, Roger Waters-inspired way that it’s an absolute delight to watch – especially when painfully awkward. The whole thing has the air of an amateur dramatics performance or a RuPaul sketch, with wooden or over-the-top performances adding to the camp appeal. There are so many moments throughout the film where the director has put in deliberate inconsistencies or poor visual effects – think Agnes miming washing someone’s hair in a sink with no water, or one character cutting open a fruit only for a different one to bite into it. These create so many tiny moments of disharmony that intentionally take the audience out of the story and highlight the low-budget silliness of the whole thing.

The Cramps: A Period Piece is a thoughtful and political commentary on a woman’s right to control her body, the importance of pride in your community and the life-saving influence of a supportive found family. Agnes suffers horrendously when dealing with an OBGYN, and is saved by a Satanic gynaecologist who is the first to be honest with her that periods are terrible, but that she isn’t alone. It is genuinely touching at times, with a lot of the heart coming from Agnes or our favourite pink-haired Satanist, Teddy. It’s interesting but unsurprising to know that director Brooke H Cellars took inspiration from her experiences with endometriosis to create this piece.

But it’s also hilarious. Laverne gets some of the best lines in the film – “like a queef in the wind” being one of the best – but Agnes is full of corny homespun phrases like “leaping lasagne!”, and even Teddy gets the fantastic line “your pussy’s possessed, depressed, and she’s lashing out.” Every actor plays their part perfectly, toeing the line between authentic and theatrically deranged. The gore is mostly done through physical effects, none of which aim to look particularly realistic, which really just adds to the fun of the whole thing.

If detailed, gory, and crude descriptions of menstruation bother you, you may not enjoy this film. If you don’t want to see an attempted rapist’s arms melted off his body, or a backstabbing beauty queen get her comeuppance, perhaps give it a miss. However, if you’re up for something kitsch, camp, fun and freaky, The Cramps: A Period Piece will be as satisfying as a bar of chocolate at your time of the month!