Anthology movies are almost always a mixed bag. Found footage movies are more miss than hit. The V/H/S series dares to combine the two. With the fifth entry in the series, V/H/S/99, coming to Shudder later this week, it’s clear they must be doing something right. It’s time to look back at the original V/H/S and see where it all began.
Classic movie reviews will contain spoilers.
V/H/S
Directed by Adam Wingard, David Bruckner, Ti West, Glenn McQuaid, Joe Swanberg and Radio Silence
Written by Simon Barrett, David Bruckner, Nicholas, Tecosky, Ti West, Glenn McQuaid, Matt Bettinelli-Olpin, Tyler Gillett, Justin Martinez and Chad Villella
Starring Hannah Fierman, Joe Swanberg, Sophia Takal, Helen Rogers and Tyler Gillett
V/H/S Review
V/H/S presents five found footage short stories contained in one framing story. The framing story itself is nothing special. A group of criminals are paid to break into a house and steal a video tape. When they arrive, they find a corpse in a chair and a ton of VHS tapes. The five shorts we see in the film are the product of these characters watching the tapes in the framing story. The criminals are fittingly unlikable, as we see from their own debaucheries before they take the videotape heist job. The movie cuts back to the group between features as they are seemingly picked off one by one.
The framing story of V/H/S, titled Tape 56, has a decent payoff but mostly exists to be a loud, obnoxious entry point into what is going to be a largely chaotic film. That’s the price of found footage. You’ll have to endure a lot of shaky cam and amateur audio production. It isn’t without purpose though as it does draw you into the feel the filmmakers are striving for.
From here out we are going to look at the five shorts. Instead of reviewing them in the order they aired in the movie…we will rank them from worst to best.
5. Second Honeymoon (segment 2)
Second Honeymoon might contain the most actually frightening moment in V/H/S. Unfortunately, a few seconds is all it really has going for it. The story of a couple documenting their honeymoon, this Ti West directed short is just plain boring. There’s a twist ending…I guess. Without any background on these characters, it’s hard to see anything as a twist when you start with no information. There are much better Ti West movies out there.
4. Tuesday the 17th (segment 3)
Cleverer in concept than execution, Tuesday the 17th is a brief sequel to a slasher movie you didn’t get to see. Friends head out to a lake where one of them reveals that her friends had all died in the surrounding woods. She’s on a revenge mission to kill the thing that killed them. This is a dynamite concept that fails only because the killer in this case can only be seen in glitches when filming with a camcorder. It’s too cheesy to work with the story even though there are some pretty good moments of violence. You just can’t help but think it would have worked better with a standard serial killer standing in.
3. The Sick Thing That Happened to Emily When She Was Younger (segment 4)
The penultimate segment of V/H/S benefits greatly from being so different from the other stories. Predating movies like Unfriended and Host by years, this story is told over video messaging on a computer screen. Emily tells her boyfriend, who is out of town, that she is hearing and seeing strange things in the apartment, and she has a strange bump on her arm. We get glimpses of these happenings, and they are very effective. Some surprising gore and a good twist in the story make this one a winner.
2. Amateur Night (segment 1)
Amateur Night features a fantastic antagonist and turns into the kind of final act mayhem everyone should enjoy. It only falls to second because the characters in it are too annoying and it takes too long for them to get ripped apart. It probably suffers from placement inside the movie. We just spent the opening framing story unable to escape the loud unlikable group of characters and are now immediately thrust into another one. Aside from that…this is a good story with an excellent payoff.
1. 10/31/98 (segment 5)
The story of a group of friends heading to a Halloween party, 10/31/98 has a little bit of everything. They wind up in the wrong house and when weird things start happening, they roll with it thinking it’s a haunted house party. It turns out they’ve stumbled onto an exorcism. Things go from bad to worse when the guys decide they must save the girl they think is being tortured. This segment has comedy, horror and action all rolled into one great little story.
Scare Value
Four of the five segments in V/H/S are at least pretty good. Only the framing story and second short are disappointing. The biggest issue is really that V/H/S is too long. It asks you to watch a lot of purposely amateur feeling filmmaking and would be better off cutting fat and delivering a leaner, meaner experience. Still, that it succeeds as often as it does is a testament to the filmmakers working within the confines of the concept.
3/5
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