XX

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It's week two of the guys' October Horror Anthologies, and they sat down to watch XX, an anthology of stories directed and (mostly) written by women. Each of the stories is connected by animated interstitials by Sofia Carrillo.

Nothing creepy here AT ALL.

The first segment, "The Box", is directed by Jovanka Vuckovic and based on a story written by Jack Ketchum.

A few days before Christmas, Susan Jacobs (Natalie Brown) is riding the subway with her children, Danny (Peter DaCunha) and Jenny (Peyton Kennedy), when Danny, who is apparently half-magpie, notices a brightly wrapped present being held by a man (Michael Dyson) sitting near him. Danny asks if he can see what's inside the box, and the man shows him, causing Danny to clam right up and sit quietly.

Step one: Cut a hole in the box...

Later that night, at dinner, Danny's father, Robert (Jonathan Watton), notices that Danny isn't eating his food. When he asks Danny why he isn't eating, Danny just says that he's not hungry, and he asks if he can just go to bed.

This continues for five days, until Robert finally snaps and starts screaming at Danny, bringing the boy, and himself, to tears. Susan is pretty upset about all of this, and she goes to bed angry at Robert for yelling at him.

The next day, they take Danny to the doctor (Ron Lea), who tells them that Danny appears fine, aside from not eating anything at all. He suggests not pressuring the boy and letting him decide to eat when he wants to.

That night, Susan sees danny whispering something to Jenny, but when she asks what it was, Danny refuses to tell her. She sends them to bed and then spends some time seething at her husband. At dinner the next night, Jenny is also missing from the table. Robert asks Susan where she is, and Susan tells him that Jenny wasn't hungry. This causes another argument between the two of them, and Robert accuses her of not taking this seriously.

On her way to bed, Susan sees Robert talking to Danny in his room. Once in bed, she falls asleep, only to have a horrifying dream where she is being sliced up by Robert and served as dinner to the kids, who enthusiastically eat her flesh.

The next night, she is eating dinner by herself.

Christmas finally comes, and she receives a present that looks suspiciously like the one the man on the train had, which prompts her to ask Danny if he remembers what was in the box when the man showed him. Danny tells her it was nothing, and they continue on with their Christmas celebration, despite the fact that Robert, Danny, and Jenny have all lost a disturbing amount of weight.

When all three of them end up in the hospital, slowly dying of starvation, Susan visits everyday, searching for the man while she rides the subway, hoping he can tell her or show her what Danny saw...

The next segment, "The Birthday Cake", is written by Roxanne Benjamin and Annie Clark (also known as St. Vincent), and directed by Clark.

In this funny piece, Mary (Melanie Vincent) is getting ready for her daughter Lucy's (Sanai Victoria) seventh birthday. Her husband, David (Seth Duhame), is out of town, but expected back the next day, so she is stuck with David's assistant(?), Carla (Sheila Vand), to help her get things ready. Carla is not the friendliest person in the world, and it's pretty clear that Mary doesn't care for her.

One of these characters is the cause of everybody's troubles.

While bringing Mary coffee, Carla tells her that David's car is in the driveway, but she has not seen him yet. Mary takes her cup, as well as one for David, and goes looking for him in his office, where she finds him dead in his chair.

Now Mary has to decide what to do. Does she let everyone know that David is dead? Or does she try to hide David's body for the time being and go on with Lucy's party? We think you know where this is going.

What follows is a series of increasingly ridiculous situations where Mary tries to salvage the day without letting Lucy, Carla, or any of the neighbors know that David is dead.

First, there's Carla, who make sit clear that she does not like Mary, either, and is also stealing booze from David's drinks cart in his office. Then there's Madeleine (Lindsay Burdge), Mary's neighbor who weasels her way into a party invitation, despite her children being out-of-town.

When a rapping panda (Joe Swanberg) arrives at the door to rap a birthday song to Lucy, Mary bribes the guy to give up his costume, and she stuffs David's lifeless corpse into it, propping him at the dining room table just as the party guests arrive. Now all she has to do is make it through the party without anything else going wrong, which will totally happen. Right? RIGHT?

In the next segment, "Don't Fall", four friends--Paul (Casey Adams), Gretchen (Breeda Wool), Jess (Angela Trimbur), and Jay (Morgan Krantz)--are out camping in the desert, at Paul's insistence.

While checking out the view on top of what is very clearly Vasquez Rocks in Santa Clarita, Jess scares Gretchen, who storms off to pout against some rocks. However, something stings or bites her, and when they, as well as Paul and Jay, look at the rock surface, they see some petroglyphs that make absolutely no sense to them.

Is...is that an original Banksy piece?

Later, they are sitting around the RV they are staying in, and Paul is smoking a whooooole bunch of weed. Gretchen is angry again because Paul scared her by pretending to fall or get attacked by something, and the cut on her hand still hurts, so she sulks inside to put something on it and maybe go to bed.

Later that night, Gretchen awakens in a cave, where she hears a noise and turns to see some kind of creature running toward her. Shortly after that, Paul, Jay, and Jess awaken to a terrible noise, and when they look outside, they see Gretchen, who looks like she is either in pain, or in some kind of trouble. When Paul rushes to see what is wrong, he gets killed and thrown through the window of the RV for his effort. It turns out Gretchen is now whatever the creature was, and she wants to have a word with these folks who were so keep to scare her earlier.

Jess and Jay try to escape, but Jay gets locked inside the RV, and Gretchen quickly makes a messy meal of him. Jess makes it outside, but almost immediately falls down a hill, breaking her leg. And there is a growling noise coming from above her...

In the final segment, "Her Only Living Son", Cora (Christina Kirk) is getting ready to celebrate her son Andy's (Kyle Allen) 18th birthday. Unfortunately, Andy is too busy being a horrible kid who treats his mother like garbage and nails the occasional squirrel to a tree.

He also likes to go elbow-deep when mining for nose goblins.

It seems that Andy is a bit of a problem child, and it extends to his school. When Cora goes there to speak to Principal Jenks (Brenda Wehle) at Andy's school, and we find out that he was caught pulling out another student's fingernails. However, the principal and Andy's teacher, Mr. Dayton (Morgan Peter Brown), seem pretty cavalier about the whole situation, despite both the other student's mother (Lisa Renee Pitts) and Cora thinking that maybe something ought to be done about this. Rather than punish Andy, whom they insist is "special", they choose to let the other student stay home for a few days.

Later, the mailman, Chet (Mike Doyle), hits on Cora and then goes on a weird little tangent about how he, too, as well as the rest of the town, thinks that Andy is "special", although it is becoming clearer and clearer that they don't mean "special" in the standard "nice-but-maybe-a-bit-slow" sort of way. They mean something more along the lines of "possibly-the-spawn-of-Satan", but Cora is not buying into it.

After a quick search of Andy's room, where she discovers a shoebox full of what appear to be creepy-long toenails, she sort of confronts him. First, he says he'd like to live with his father, but Cora refuses, insisting that she has dragged the two of them around the country in order to avoid his father, whom she claims was a dirtbag playboy from Hollywood. Andy, now convinced that his father is in no way the man his mother says he is, exposes his creepy Hobbit feet to his mother, and then makes her kneel and crawl to him. It's super uncomfortable to watch.

As a last-ditch effort to stop Andy from trying to find his real father, Cora tells him about when he was born and how she took him away into hiding, and she hugs him tightly. And when Andy returns the hug, something sinister crosses the screen...

Will any of these stories have a happy ending? Or will they all end horribly for everybody involved? You'll have to listen to find out!

Larry found this on Netflix, and immediately decided it had to be on the show. He really enjoyed all the stories, but was particularly fond of "The Birthday Cake" because it was funny, as wqell as kind of dark. He also liked the bloodiness and make-up effects in "Don't Fall".

Derek was pleasantly surprised, despite the unanswered questions of "The Box" and the general unlikability of the characters in "Don't Fall". He agrees that "The Birthday Cake" was hilarious, and "Her Only Living Son" was as creepy as all get out. He also loved the animated opening credits and interstitials. They were AWESOME.

So turn down the lights, hunker down, and tune in to this week's episode! And definitely see this movie.