2017 Films: #8. XX

A Netflix viewing on July 3rd in Chicago, IL. This is an anthology horror film with four different stories all directed and written by females with a female perspective.

The first segment, "The Box" is directed by Jovanka Vuckovic. The story starts off with a mother and her two grade school age children, let's say 9 and 11 years old, on a train heading home. The young son pesters an old man with the old, "what's in the box" routine. The man assure the mother that it's cool and shows the boy. Based on the boy's reaction, he immediately regrets it. At dinner the boy doesn't have an appetite. This persists for several nights to the point where the parents take him to a doctor but the boy just isn't hungry. Eventually it spreads to the daughter and the father. This leads to the mother having a dream that she's the main course. Come Xmas, the father, daughter and son are emaciated but no one minds. Eventually everyone dies and the mother is left scouring the train for the man who showed her son the contents of the box.

The 2nd story "The Birthday Party," directed by St. Vincent, involves a family on the day of their young daughter's birthday. The mother i s bit of an OCD freak and she wants to things to go perfectly. Yet she has to deal with one problem after another. Weird nanny (?), daughter ruins her costume and her husband turns up dead. She does everything possible to keep her husband's death from their daughter but something always turns up. The mother will not allow her daughter's birthday be synonymous with her husband's death. It wasn't meant to be.

 The 3rd story, "Don't Fall" was directed by Roxanne Benjamin and finds four friends hiking and camping in the desert. One of the friends is afraid of heights. The group comes across an ancient cave painting that looks a little creepy. At their secluded campsite (again, nothing good happens in a film when people are secluded in the wilderness) Gretchen, the one who's afraid of heights, get's possessed by an entity that looks a lot like one of the cave paintings. Things don't go well for the other three friends.

The final story, "Her Only Living Son," is directed by Karyn Kusama and it deals with Cora and her son Andy's 18th birthday. You see, Andy has never met his father and Cora has moved them around trying to keep away from the father. Things are a little weird as they get close to Andy's birthday. The mailman is weird, Andy is really acting out and there's a violent incident at school between Andy and another student (Andy would have been suspended and possibly arrested in the real world, it was nothing short of aggravated assault). School officials tell Cora what special kid Andy is but they say it in a weird way. Like, Andy's father is Satan weird. Cora does everything she can to make sure that Andy does not go away with his father, she even says that he "was never there" for Andy and is only coming after Cora did all the hard work.

All the segments were good, the film received a 72% Rotten Tomatoes rating . "Don't Fall" was probably the weakest of the four but had the most horror of them. "The Birthday Party" was more a dark comedy than anything resembling horror. It showed the lengths a mother will take to make a child's birthday special. "The Box" is probably the segment that would make the best feature length film and the most creepy. "Her Only Living Son" could be a feature length film but when supernatural horror can go off the rails. It's hard to get it right. To me, they all seem to devolve into some sh*tty Exorcist knock-off.  I thought some of the best dialogue was delivered at the end of the segment.

All four directors are worth keeping an eye on to see what they come up with next. This is a film worth watching, it goes by quickly at 80 minutes and is something different. A nice change of pace.