There are strange tides washing at Pincer Point. Foul winds blow in legends of pirates that steal sailors’ souls. Yet gusting in from across the ocean are the goofiest B-movies of Roger Corman.
In The Peril at Pincer Point, which premieres this week at South by Southwest, sound engineer Jim Baitte (Jack Redmayne) has been dispatched to a strange seaside village by a demanding filmmaker, only to get caught up in a nautical mystery. But how on Earth does anyone elevator pitch a movie that’s equal parts The Wicker Man, The Lighthouse, Lake Michigan Monster, and Viking Women and the Sea Serpent?
“You don’t,” said Noah Stratton-Twine. “We wrote it, and three weeks later we were shooting it.”
It’s both kin and alien to Stratton-Twine’s debut feature, sasquatch comedy Two Big Feet, which he called “my step into what can be done on a very low budget and was very evocative of the more contemporary stuff like mumblecore.” This time, along with fellow writer/director Jake Kuhn, in Pincer Point they’ve handcrafted what he called “an analog comedy that doubles down on its stupidity.”
It’s still micro-budget filmmaking, Kuhn said, “and both me and Noah were talking a lot about this idea of how to make something that’s extremely low-budget have its own mythology, and not just be four people in a bedroom with white walls talking to each other.”
The origin of their salty knee-slapper is the small English seaside village of Walberswick, a sleepy place where an exciting day out involves walking to the next town for a pizza. Stratton-Twine explained, “There’s only two pubs there, and they’re two minutes from each other, and both of their bathrooms are decorated with crustaceous regalia.”
“The town’s famous for crabbing,” said Kuhn. Indeed, it was home to the British Open Crabbing Championship until the event was canceled because it was becoming too popular. It’s the kind of remote resort, miles from any distractions, that makes for an ideal writers’ retreat, and so it’s become where Kuhn and Stratton-Twine head to when they’re working on a script.
With what would become Pincer Point, Kuhn explained that the main impetus remained as it has always been – to make each other laugh. This time, they loaded the script with in-jokes about Walberswick, like all the crabs, “and at the local pub there’s this pint called Ghost Ship, so OK, a ghost ship has got to play into it.” As for the Corman influence, on this particular trip, they were both reading the B-movie icon’s memoir, How I Made a Hundred Movies in Hollywood and Never Lost a Dime, Kuhn said, “and we were like, ‘It would be great to watch Attack of the Crab Monsters,’ and I think watching that and a bunch of his other movies swirled into the sincerity of just making something which is just fun and entertaining.”
When it came to finally filming The Peril at Pincer Point, the only suitable location was Walberswick. Yet instead of the glowering locals that greet Redmayne’s fish-out-of-water, Kuhn and Stratton-Twine were welcomed with open arms. Stratton-Twine said, “We were walking up to the pubs and psyching ourselves up and going, ‘Is there any chance we could potentially, before you open or in off-hours, we can shoot in your pub garden?’ and instead of London where they’d go, ‘Oh, we’ll put you through our invoicing system,’ they were like, ‘Oh my God, absolutely!’”
The Peril at Pincer Point
Visions, World Premiere
Saturday 14, 5:15pm, Alamo Lamar
Sunday 15, 9:45pm, Alamo Lamar
Wednesday 18, 10pm, Alamo Lamar
This article appears in SXSW 2026 Festival Guide.