Like the terms "women’s film" or "black film" or even "art film," "queer film" defies definition. "Queer" has been used to describe movies as disparate as the work of Fassbinder, John Waters, and Todd Haynes. It’s been used as an adjective to explain Chuck and Buck and Boys Don’t Cry. Is queer film simply gay film with attitude? Or is queer supposed to mean gender transgressive, both and neither? The Queer-O-Rama film festival at the Coolidge Corner Theatre attempts to answer none of these questions. Instead, it simply celebrates the ambiguity of its subject with a hit-and-miss assemblage of oddball documentaries, arty features, erotic shorts, and other indefinable fare.

The festival mixes local premieres (American Mullet, Gay Propaganda) and foreign films such as Burnt Money from Argentina and Second Skin from Spain, which stars Javier Bardem of Before Night Falls. There’s the delightful American documentary Ruthie and Connie: Every Room in the House, which was featured in the 2002 Boston Jewish Film Festival and won the audience award for best documentary in the 2002 Provincetown International Film Festival. At the other end of the spectrum is the great 1980 musical flop Can’t Stop the Music, directed by Nancy Walker and starring the Village People (midnight screenings on Friday, February 21 and Saturday, February 22 will offer free admission to anyone dressed as a member of the band).

But the festival spotlight is decidedly on Fenton Bailey and Randy Barbato, filmmakers who have found their niche in the tabloid and E! school of shocking, schlocky (and entertaining) documentary. The pair met at New York University graduate school and have written, directed, and produced many films, including their best-known, The Real Ellen Story (1998; screens Saturday, February 15, at 1:30 and 5:30 p.m., with Out of the Closet, Off the Screen: The William Haines Story), about Ellen DeGeneres at the height of the "Yep, I’m gay" brouhaha, and The Eyes of Tammy Faye (screens Saturday, February 15, at 9:30 p.m.), their popular 2000 documentary about former televangelist and reigning mascara queen Tammy Faye Bakker Messner.

Also on the bill is Party Monster (1997; screens Saturday, February 15, at 3:45 and 8 p.m.), Bailey and Barbato’s documentary about the disturbing "murder in clubland" that roiled downtown Manhattan in the mid ’90s, when party promoter and scenester Michael Alig killed his roommate and fellow "club kid," a drug dealer named Angel Hernandez. (Alig allegedly chopped up Angel’s body, put it in a cardboard box, and dumped it in the East River.) Bailey and Barbato returned to this subject this year and turned Party Monster into a feature film of the same name starring Macaulay Culkin, Seth Green, and Chloë Sevigny as the messed-up, druggie club kids. It debuted at this year’s Sundance Film Festival (to largely negative reaction). The Party Monster documentary is also flawed, but the subject matter is irresistible.

Similarly, Bailey and Barbato’s Out of the Closet, Off the Screen: The William Haines Story (2001) about the 1920s Hollywood screen star who refused to hide his homosexuality is an erratic but fascinating look at how Hollywood has contributed to secrecy and outright lies about non-hetero sexuality.

For sheer camp value, there’s Gay Propaganda (2002; screens Friday, February 14 at 6 p.m.), a silly confection ("curated" by J.D. Disalvatore) in which a troupe of women and men recreate well-known scenes from mainstream movies and "queer" them. It’s like running a video camera at a gay theme party: some of the mini-parodies are clever, such as From Queer to Eternity, with two women in a clinch in the rolling surf. Others are dismal, such as a bunch of lesbians in suits and ties doing Joe Pesci and Ray Liotta ("I’m funny? How am I funny?") from GoodFellas. And few lesbians over 35 will be able to resist Patrice Donnelly’s dead-on turn as a Sapphic Mrs. Robinson in a spoof of The Graduate. Gay Propaganda is a pop-culture treasure simply for unearthing the now middle-aged Donnelly, the track star who played heartthrob Tory Skinner in the 1982 classic Personal Best, quickly became a lesbian pin-up, and then pretty much disappeared from movies.

One of the queerest films in Queer-O-Rama has to be Jennifer Arnold’s American Mullet (2002; screens Sunday, February 16, at 2 p.m.), which has its Boston premiere at the festival. Few documentaries mix bikers, trailer-park denizens, lesbians, glitter rockers, and country-western aficionados, but this treatise on bad hair manages to do so. It’s a look at the people who wear the short-on-top, long-at-the-bottom hair style known alternately as the mullet and the shlong. Before the joke wears thin, it is a off-kilter slice of American life.

Queer-O-Rama’s assortment of camp, classics, and cultural oddities offers just one clear answer about what makes a film queer: it’s all in the eye of the beholder.