So, what with Superman not being so great and the MCU having three mediocre-to-awful releases this year, and the other "summer blockbuster" type film so far was the seventh Jurassic Park movie, the movies I've actually liked lately have been a couple of horror movies, that seem to have been relatively low-budget. So get ready for a lot of shitty B-grade horror movies, if these make money and Hollywood decides to course-correct.

Together features Dave Franco & Alison Brie, as Tim & Millie, a thirty-something urban couple who move out to the country. He's a musician and she's a teacher taking a better job at the local school. After an opening scene featuring a couple of dogs involved in some sort of search party effort, drinking from a strange pool in a cave, and then having some horrible effect later on that night in their kennel, our leads get stuck in that same cave, raising hackles about what is going to happen to them. There's a bit of a mystery surrounding the pool, and the area, and exactly what are the intentions of their nearest neighbor, and Millie's overly-friendly school colleague, played by Damon Herriman.

The film is low on jump scares, and leans more into body horror, with a mildly comic flavor as well. All three major characters were pretty good playing against type. Herriman usually plays criminals, often creepy or dimwitted types, and in this role, he fits in really well as a quirky, friendly, nebbish type. Franco usually comes across as a dude-bro idiot, and that kind of immaturity in this case actually contributes to the characterization, of a man who has left a good bit of the adulting in the relationship to his partner, but he brings the gravitas when needed. Brie likewise is known for playing much younger than her age (on Community, her character was often directly contrasted in maturity and worldly experience with that of castmate Gillian Jacobs, who was playing a woman in her late-20s, to Brie's teen college freshman, despite Brie & Jacobs being the same age IRL), but I've also seen her play forceful and even domineering parts, and kind of does it here, too, being the more pants-wearing half of the couple, but also brings enough tenderness that she does not come across as a competent adult with a man-child ball-&-chain, and that quality is important to the resolution of their arcs.

Weapons tells about a small town, where over a dozen children from a single class in the school suddenly leave their houses at the exact same time on night, and promptly disappear, leaving the parents of the community in a panic and the police & school authorities baffled. The film is told and retold from the points of view of multiple characters. First and primarily, is Justine, played by Julia Garner, the teacher of the class whose children disappeared, who is subsequently terrorized by mysterious events or possibly just nightmares, and no small amount of harassment, as the one adult all the victims have in common. Second in importance is Archer, played by Josh Brolin, a contractor and the parent of one victim, who is so haunted by his son's disappearance that he sleeps in his kiddie bed, and becomes obsessed with trying to solve the mystery. Other characters include Alden Ehrenreich as a police officer with a connection to Justine, who stumbles over a piece of the puzzle, and Benedict Wong as the school's principal. Amy Madigan, the wife from "Field of Dreams" has a small but memorable role as the eccentric aunt of a classmate of the victims.

Most of the characters are seriously flawed and their actions and reactions to the disappearance and the mystery don't always come across well, but they are also kind of believable as regular people who find themselves in a nightmare, with very human reactions, for good, for ill, and sometimes, for humor. Like "Together" there is an occasionally comic element, but the story and mystery is gripping enough that you don't get whiplash from the tonal shifts, and the pacing is good enough to not get bored by the changes of PoV character. The camera does a really good job making you feel like you're reading a novel in which there is a single perspective PoV, too. In the first few minutes, it literally follows Garner around so that you see more of the back of her head than her face.

I don't think they're going to win any awards or break box office records, but they were a big relief after all the franchise dreck we've been getting this year.