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It's four twenty-minute shorts mashed together into a horror anthology. The gimmick this time around is that all four shorts are directed by and predominantly feature women; three of the four shorts had to do with motherhood in some way, and two of those had to do with kids behaving weirdly.

Here's the thing, though - I feel like I've seen two dozen short horror films in the last couple of years, what with this anthology format exploding in popularity during this decade. And they're just not very good! None of them are good. They're fun little snippets at best, and when they're thematically tied together, sure, great, whatever.

That said... they're good enough for a quick background viewing to get you in the mood for some scary-creepy seasonal fun.

Neo Yokio: Season 1

The title is a portmanteau of "New York" and "Tokyo," and both names and describes the futuristic city this all takes place in.

The art style is this not-quite-anime form that still looks and feels cheap as hell.

The main character is voiced by Jaden Smith and feels more or less inspired by his Twitter account - all existential nonsense and philosophical mumbo jumbo mixed with being totally "on brand."

The premise is some sort of half-spoof-half-celebration of vapid materialistic culture run amok in a techno-utopia.

The length is six episodes, and thank goodness for that.

The platform? Oh baby, you know this is Netflix. But apparently it was a leftover show from Fox and FX's ADHD block.

It's not very good, but it's an interesting kind of not very good - occasionally funny, fully self-confident, proudly and boldly about whatever it is it's about. This isn't something worth seeking out by any stretch, but if you're looking for something absurd, give it a go.

The Babysitter

A fun enough throw-away 80-minute horror-comedy thing from - who else - Netflix. Y'all remember McG? Like, opening credits of The OC, "created by McG?" Yeah, he made this. It's really stupid and eye-roll inducing, but if you're looking for some silly Halloween fodder, you could do worse than this slasher.

Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them

Marissa turned this on somewhere around the ten-minute mark last night, then turned it off again about an hour in, and I was paying half-attention at most, so take this with all the salt you want, but, yeah, I wasn't into this. I know I often repost my own Letterboxd reviews here, but let's let David Ehrlich weigh in instead:

there are all sorts of issues with this movie, which pales in comparison to even the first two Harry Potter films, but rather than grouse about the clumsy knotting of the various plot threads or how Newt Scamander is a nothing character or how the fantastic beasts are all like the dullest of Digimons (except for the kleptomaniac platypus), i just want to whine about the devastatingly poor use of CG. we've become so concerned about how this stuff looks that we tend not to think about the value of what it *does,* and its application here is gruesome. this old timey new york city is a sterile, hollow hellhole of copied-and-pasted buildings... every scene feels empty, even when the streets are crowded with life. and is the villain a generic floating CG cloud? *of course* the villain is a generic floating CG cloud. there is no sense of tactile physical reality to this movie... Hogwarts felt like a real place, this feels like a half-sketched memory. and that feeling is hardly contained to the visuals.

Yeah, co-sign. This is why the pros are the pros.

Four more of these, by the way. Four more magical whippersnapper gobbledygook bullshit fests. Hollywood, baby!

Baywatch

Yeah, so this was bad. It's the type of tonally inconsistent comedy that never should have been made, which seems like Zac Efron's bread and butter at this point. I'm not a big star apologist by any stretch but truly, the Rock is the only decent part of any of this. It's two hours long and felt like close to three. It just fucking drags, man. Also, here's a thought - maybe if you are making a comedy movie, it would help to use any actors with a comedic background whatsoever. I get that comic actors and fuck-me beach bodies can't often be found in the same package, but holy shit this was rough.

Big Mouth: Season 1

I didn't have a lot of interest in this offering from Netflix, but enough people online said enough good things about it for me to check out. And I liked it! It's an animated show about puberty. Yep, let that sink in. It's nothing obscenely clever and feels a lot like if Family Guy had Nick Kroll and Jason Mantzoukas and Jenny Slate. That's a start, sure, but what makes Big Mouth actually work is that it's unlike anything else I've ever seen. On the surface it's just a show about a bunch of tweens dealing with their weird-ass gross bodies and hormones. (Who wants to see that? No one wants to see that. Ugh. And yet!) But really, of course, it's a show about tweens going through puberty, made by and for adults like you and me. Jason Mantzoukas said in a podcast that it was like "the Geeks part of Freaks and Geeks," which is a great way to think of it. It's also, notably, about girl tweens almost as much as it's about boy tweens; male puberty has been done to death in pop culture by now, but how many shows and movies out there are cracking jokes about first periods and girls having desires of their own? I mean you've got Tina Belcher, I guess, being perpetually horny in her own specific and weird way, but this is like that on steroids, with one of the young women even "meeting her vagina" for the first time in a very literal sense. (The vagina is voiced by a bubbly Kristen Wiig.) If all of this sounds just too weird for you, and like borderline child pornography, hey - I get it! But it's really not that, at all. It's about what a weird time middle school is - something we can all relate to, even if it makes us cringe!

Ten episodes, half an hour each. Give it a go. The first episode has a bit where a bunch of anthropomorphic dicks are dunking basketballs. You'll know probably right then and there if this is for you or not.

Room 104: Season 1

Anthology series! They're all the rage, right? So, here's one from HBO that isn't even an "every season is different" type of show, but rather an "every week is different" show. It's set in a hotel room and every week features a different person or couple staying in the room. (Yes, it had, weirdly, the exact same premise as the TBS show The Guest Book and they debuted within a week of one another. But this one's a highfalutin theater thing, telling a bunch of little one act plays. Two or three of them were straight up horror stories. One was a 25-minute dance performance. One had an all-too-relatable college student in the '90s trying to walk his mother through the harrowing process of saving his work on his computer over the phone. One was a weird pizza guy porn thing gone awry. One featured a terrorist preparing to go to the RNC (or DNC?) with a homemade bomb only to be thwarted by a conversational repairman. There were weeks where I really enjoyed the show, and weeks where it was completely forgettable and disposable. In that sense it felt a lot like a lesser Black Mirror. But it ended with a good run, I thought, and I see no reason why i won't be back for more next year. So, good on Room 104.

To Have and Have Not

This is my fourth go-round with Hemingway, and it's just not his best effort. That said, it's an experimental, short book, sort of a compilation of short stories about this boat captain smuggling contraband between Key West and Cuba. Or at least it starts out that way. What it ends up being is some sort of viewpoint-shifting slice of life story about life in the Keys during the Great Depression. It's a bit of an interesting mess. Credit to Hemingway for experimenting, you know? Nowadays a perspective-shifting novel is nothing new, but back in the 1930s maybe he was trying something really different. It doesn't quite work, doesn't really make a thematically consistent or tonally satisfying story, but I still enjoyed the highlights and the book wasn't really long enough for the mistakes to drag out much.

The Beguiled

Plane movie! This was a really quick and easy watch, a bunch of medium-to-big-name actors you're familiar with remaking an old Clint Eastwood movie under the direction of Sofia Coppola. I like Coppola, and she's really grown on me through the years - owe Lost in Translation a rewatch and need to finally get around to seeing that much-maligned Marie Antoinette movie.

Anyway, this is good. Solid stuff. Late in the Civil War, Union soldier Colin Farrell is injured and left to die in the woods outside a schoolhouse for ladies in Virginia. Nicole Kidman runs the joint, and immediately sees Farrell as a threat and treats him like a prisoner. Second-in-command Kirsten Dunst has all sorts of compassion for the guy, perhaps feeling a little trapped herself. And Elle Fanning, the oldest of the young girls, she's a femme fatale of sorts, happily playing jailbait, openly lusting for Farrell when she's alone with him and then telling the other women he's forcing himself on her. Four younger girls round out the house, and a few of them have some significant moments, but this is really mostly a story about the four adults in the room, so to speak, collectively unwilling or unable to just keep it in their pants.

Also, props to the production design here, which between the costumes and the set and the sound (mostly the sound) really conveyed what a hot, dank, sweltering summer it was in them Virginia country woods. 

What We Talk About When We Talk About Love

I found this collection of short stories, coming in at just over 150 pages in total, very natural to "get," tonally, and yet almost impossible to describe. This is, of course, a testament to the difference between Raymond Carver's ability to express and emote through sparse language and subtext and my own inability to cram three sentences of meaningful reflection together. This is about loss and sadness, but the very quiet and understated kind, not the big dumb tearjerking melodrama and tragedy so many lesser authors might have attempted. There's a melancholy here, but a subtle one. A handful of these stories end in overt tragedy or at least heavily imply an impending loss, but most of them are just quick little slices of late nineteenth Americana. The whole thing feels like late afternoon, late summer. Not evening, not fall, but, you know. Close.