Geekscape Movie Reviews: V/H/S
I attempted to be raised on Tales From the Crypt when I was a wee fledgling. It didn’t work—my father was too obsessed with subjecting me to terrifying doll movies and Wings. Since that time, I’ve always had this soft, very unfulfilled, spot for anthologies that I attempted to placate with terrible, terrible marketing ploys put on by the SyFy Channel and others. It was a sad time in my life, full of suffering.
Then, one magic day, I was invited to see V/H/S.
V/H/S is a found-footage horror anthology put together by a list of rising horror directors: Adam Wingard, David Bruckner, Ti West, Glenn McQuaid, Joe Swanberg, and Radio Silence. That last one isn’t a person –it’s a group of people—in case you were concerned that Frank Zappa had a fifth child.
What makes V/H/S unusual when it comes to both the found-footage and anthology subgenres is that it doesn’t suck. Sure, some of the shorts are better than others, but none of them are terrible and the collection as a whole doesn’t have that typical “Well, one out of three isn’t entirely bad…” ratio.
V/H/S’s tales are encompassed by a larger tale in Wingard’s Tape 56, which tells the story of a small posse (and it is a posse) of young hoodlums who are paid to break into an old man’s house and steal a particular video tape. This might prompt you to ask two questions:
1. What makes this video tape so special?
2. Who the hell still uses video when DVDs are available?
What the boys are told about this video tape is “they’ll know it when they see it”—which is waaaaay too elusive and mysterious for me. But they go along with it and start digging through the hordes of tapes this old man has in his house, with each of them retreating to watch a tape on their solo, and it is in this clever way we get to watch the rest of the anthology, retreating back to the Tape 56 story between each short.
My favorite, hands down, was Amateur Night. Directed by Bruckner, this short follows a trio of young men hitting the town… with a catch. One of the men has a miniature video camera installed in the center of his heavy black hipster frames, with the hope of snagging some naughty, back-at-the-hotel-room-post-trolling-for-hussies-at-the-bar footage. Needless to say, as this is an anthology of horror and not of porn, their night is less than stellar.
Ti West’s Second Honeymoon is next, and follows the tale of a young couple via their hand-held video camera as they drive around the middle of nowhere (Arizona) on their honeymoon. While I love West’s other work, this one was the weakest of the set for me—lacking the supernatural element the others all contain. It wasn’t that it was bad –not at all–, it just didn’t fit properly, a jarring note.
In Tuesday the 17th (Glenn McQuaid) a daytrip goes awry when one of the oddest (and freakiest: half Bigfoot, half Silent Hill radio static, half Jason Vorhees for 150% freak factor) monsters begins quickly killing off a group of teens one by one. My amusement in this short is that the male lead, “Spider”, is played by Jason Yachanin—the star of Troma’s Poultrygeist: Night of the Chicken Dead. His counterpart in both movies is a girl named Wendy.
Another strong piece is Swanberg’s The Sick Thing That Happened to Emily When She Was Younger. Talk about a mind trip. The found-footage angle on this is interesting as well—it’s a recording of video chats between Emily and her long-distance boyfriend, James. Emily is a bit of an oddball, while James appears to be the steady one in their relationship, trying to care for her through the internet as ghosts begin visiting her apartment.
The last in the set is 10/31/98 (Radio Silence), which is a recording of the Halloween adventures of a group of four friends as they explore a festive “haunted” house that turns out to actually be haunted. The effects in this were stellar and the house concept was gorgeous, but my main beef with this short is that it should have been a movie on its own. So much was jammed into a brief span of time that it felt more like a plot-spoiling trailer of something that could be really awesome.
So if, like me, you’ve spent most of your life in a gaping void wishing for a decent horror anthology, check V/H/S out. Pro tip: if you don’t fall into that category, you should probably see it anyhow so when your cooler friends bring it up at parties, you can actually contribute to the conversation.
You can catch V/H/S in theaters on October 5th, or you can watch this awesomefest on Video On Demand on August 30th.
