fly out of a window, fly off a building

An anthology film featuring four films that I assume are all award-winning because I have never once seen a horror short that hasn’t won like 50 awards. I find the shorts appear in order of quality from best to least good.

Since I liked this overall and it’s free to watch, I’m not spoiling all the stories for you. It’s like a 66 minute watch, too. Easy peasy. Pretty sure it was on Tubi.

Short 1 starts with a teenage girl walking down the highway, listening to the radio. The music she’s listening to abruptly turns into a news broadcast about heavy downpours causing a river to flood on the highway on that very day. The girl is understandably confused. Eventually a car drives by and agrees to take her a ways. The broadcast on the radio becomes increasing dire as the sky begins to darken…

This one was my favorite. It’s nice to have a “socially awkward girl hitchhiker” story where it doesn’t turn out anyone is a ghost. We’re dropped in the middle of SOMETHING happening – the girl is apparently a runaway, but we don’t know why – and we never get an explanation, and it’s fine. A+

Short 2 starts with a group of guys busting into a cabin, killing the inhabitants, and ransacking the place. We cut to a guy pretending to be Darth Vader until he trips a wire, alerting his companion that there’s something in the woods. He’s relieved when it turns out it’s just Darth Vader. The two of them live in a house with broken windows, missing doors, no electricity, no heat, and just cans of beans to eat. They won’t even light a fire. A young woman runs up the hill towards them, apparently bleeding, begging for help. The older man shoots her. Later that evening, a large crowd of people with torches approach the house, and the two men run.

While this one didn’t have supernatural vibes, I still liked it. We have literally zero clue as to what’s happening – is this a post-apocalypse scenario where people refuse to work together and instead fight each other and hide resources? Is it just people struggling to survive in the winter? There’s several groups of roving bandits, but who were the people with the torches and why did they go after the two guys? ZERO explanation, and it worked. A+

Short 3 is where the quality dips. I think this one would’ve made more sense if it was a movie – it was already pretty long for a short, but it was… weird. Our protagonist is a bully and a loner in a psych home. One day he gets a new roommate, Richard, who doesn’t speak at first, and stays up all night drawing. Protagonist tells the home psychiatrist about this weird dream he’s been having, where he’s looking for something in the woods but can’t find it because he has no eyes. For some reason this sparks him to look through Richard’s things, where he finds that Richard hasn’t been taking his meds and has lots of drawings of spooky things, including the forest that protagonist has been dreaming of. Richard finds him, strangles him, then lets him go, and then they’re apparently BFFs. It turns out Richard can’t sleep because he keeps seeing things when he sleeps, and for no apparent reason protagonist thinks Richard can just show him the things he sees when he sleeps… and it works?

This one had an interesting concept but I don’t think was executed super well. At the end I’m not sure if this was supposed to be a metaphor for sleep paralysis and repressed homosexual tendencies, or if it was just about two mentally ill dudes bonding over seeing night gremlins.

Not even joking.

Short 4 – easily the worst one. Protagonist is narrating, contemplating the meaning of life and death. In real time he spots a woman on the side of the road having car trouble. She’s obviously wearing a wig, is dodgy answering his questions, and has a gun in the trunk she was unaware of. She says the car is her brother’s and she’s trying to get to Mexico. She’s also Czech. Protagonist tells her the border crossing in Arizona is going to be super tough for her to get through – as a foreigner, with a gun, who doesn’t own the car, and who obviously has on a wig? Whaaaaaaaaat noooooooo. Well, he helps her and she goes on her way.

A bit after that, he runs into two dudes who have the same accent. The one dude claims the woman protagonist saw before is his sister, only he says they’re Russian when she said she’s Czech. So protagonist is like “yeah I saw her but that was a while ago, no idea where she is now.” He later discovers the trio are at a motel, and goes in to find one of the guys dead. The other gets killed shortly. Czech lady, who has a gunshot wound to the abdomen, is like “yay I got the money, now I’m free.” Protagonist drives her… somewhere… and points out that that’s money laundering money, and someone is going to come looking for it eventually. I don’t know if I was just totally checked out during this story because I sure don’t remember how on earth he could’ve possibly known that.

Anyway she dies, and he just like… leaves her in the desert. He goes back to narrating – he’s dying of cancer and hopes his estranged family will understand the meaning of life and death or whatever.

This one wasn’t very good. The acting was just terrible. I’m always going to give a bit of leeway to actors who are clearly not speaking their first language, but protagonist was definitely a native English speaker and he was awful in this. And the plot was just… some guy helps someone involved with a money laundering scheme, who then dies? Maybe I’m just totally missing something here.

But it was so weird that an anthology called “thriller shorts for adults” would end in a contemplative barely-mob story where nothing scary happens.

I think this movie is worth watching at least for the first two segments, maybe the third one. And watch the fourth one just to be nice.