what a fuckin' year. Is it over yet? Christmas was a nice respite from thinking too hard about it, but it's still just keeps on churning whether we want it to or not. Time to drown out the horror of reality with some...other horror. Maybe just entrenching myself in dark, disgusting, ugliness, and maybe when 2021 ticks over things will seem that much brighter.
8
7 from Etheria
2017, d. Heidi Lee Douglas, Arantxa Echevarria, Martha Goddard, Anna Elizabeth James, Karen Lam, Barbara Stepansky, Rebecca Thomson - Tubi
The Story (in 2 paragraphs or less):
Wikipedia defines Etheria Film Night as "an annual Los Angeles-based genre film festival for new short films by women directors." This is a collection of some of those short films maybe.
(The stories in two sentences or less)
"Substance" - a research scientist's weather balloon returns with some black goopy substance (the Venom symbiote?). For some reason she's just keeping it around the house in a dropper bottle which her daughter mistakes for melatonin and takes it with her to a wintery EDM festival with minorly evil results.
"The Jelly Wrestler" (Thompson) - a middle aged bartender is getting her shifts cut, because the bar is attempting to draw a younger crowd with jelly wrestling. Turns out she used to be a champion Jelly Wrestler, so she fights to keep her job.
"Zone 2" - a woman and her wheelchair bound, vision impaired "son" are in a fallout shelter. There's a twist.
"De Noche y de Pronto" (Echevarria) - a woman lets an unknown neighbour in distress into her house. But what is his true motivation?
"Gödel, Incomplete" (Goddard) - a scientist stumbles upon time travel. She continues to travel back in time, encountering Kurt Gödel and falling in love.
"Little Lamb" - a woman sent to a British women's penal colony in the mid-1800's finds a horrifying new life on the island.
"Stalled" - a man, having a very bad day, has a bad encounter in a parking garage.
Why This?
I normally find anthologies annoying (and this was too) but I was lured in with the promise of a story starring Elizabeth Debicki (I still need to get my Widows review up). And I wanted to watch something that I could bail on if I needed to.
What's Good?
"De Noche..." is very effective examination of the paranoia and wariness of being a single woman. She's faced with the dilemma of trusting a strange man, and the short offers no easy answers about whether he's to be trusted or not.
"Little Lamb" in its short run time builds an distressing new reality for Louisa (Georgia Lucy). It's a grainy, dirty world where it's hard to trust anyone but the animals. It's very well told.
"The Jelly Wrestler" is a bit of a mess of a story (no pun intended) but there's the core of a message about how people see and treat middle-aged women.
Not So Good...
"The Jelly Wrestler" undermines its core message with a really unnecessary and stupid twist.
"Zone 2" thinks it's more clever than it is. It doesn't hang around very long, which is good. If I spent any longer with the set-up just to get to that twist, I would have been really, really mad.
"Substance" doesn't really go anywhere.
"Gödel, Incomplete" actually isn't long enough to effectively tell its story. I didn't connect with it.
The Bad Thing
In this anthology the bad things are:
- alien goop
- a backstabbing younger coworker
- a mom
- men/paranoia
- time...?
- men
- a bad attitude/language barrier
Franchise Potential
Looking at that wikipedia entry, it looks like there's certainly possibility to collect more shorts into a series of anthologies.
Did I Like Watching This?
No. I didn't hate it, but, again, anthologies are such a mixed bag, especially when there's no more a cohesive glue than "women directors". [This was sold to me as a horror (the way the streaming service catagorized it), and there's more than a few that are suspenseful, or tiptoeing towards horror... but I'm not sure if anything here is outright horror]
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