What turns out to be the opening short film of Doors is so good that I hate to mark down the movie as a whole… but I have to. Doors is four short films glued together with a single science fiction premise, with the remaining three stories average to below average. So what can you do when only a quarter of a movie is great and the rest meh?

So the flick glues together four short films based on mysterious alien “doors” that suddenly open up across the world. The first (and best) short is about high school kids in detention when the doors suddenly appear and how they react to the sudden chaos. The second story takes such a stark right-turn in tone that I was taken directly out of the film. It’s about three explorers who enter the doors and experience a bunch of random nonsense. The third is about a scientist who makes contact with one of the doors. And the filler fourth episode is a talk show host interviewing a person who has clearly been taken over by… whatever. Hand wave most of the stuff in this movie away – if it makes any sense, it’s largely only in the mind of the screenwriter.

I guess none of these short films are terrible… they just pale in comparison to the first segment. And they kind of don’t go anywhere and, yeah, have a lot of hand waving weirdness that I guess we’re supposed to go with because: aliens. I guess good for them for making an alien invasion movie be so alien… goodbye bug-eyed monsters, generic greys, or Star Trek creatures with bumps on their heads.

But I can’t recommend the whole movie… but I will still go to bat for the first segment. A perfect Twilight Zone, Outer Limits, or Black Mirror episode. Creepy, disturbing, and cryptic… and the other shorts have their moments of suspense too, to be fair.

Score: 74