mistressofmuses (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
mistressofmuses) wrote2023-02-01 11:03 pm
mistressofmuses) wrote2023-02-01 11:03 pm
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Who wants an exhaustingly long review of the first three V/H/S films?
Last week we watched the first three of the V/H/S films. We had already seen the first two, though it had been a while, so didn't really remember them terribly well. (There are also a fourth, fifth, and upcoming sixth film, but unfortunately those are all Shudder exclusives. Maybe this will be the year I chuck an extra $6 per month at my TV for a couple months for more horror stuff, but I haven't yet.) We watched them out of order, but I'll review them in order, lol.
These are all anthology films, each featuring a frame story that chains the other short films together. As is fairly typical, this leads to a little bit of variable quality in the segments, but at the same time I really do like anthology films in the broad sense. There are some ideas that really ARE best expressed as short stories, and stretching them into a feature-length film makes them less punchy and more prone to filler, and it's relatively difficult to find an audience for short films outside of anthologies.
V/H/S
The frame story ("Tape 56"), directed by Adam Wingard, is... nothing to write home about, but it serves its purpose of giving the rest of it an excuse to happen.
A criminal gang is offered a lot of money to break into a house and steal a specific videotape. Inside the house, they find a corpse of a man seated in front of a set of televisions and the house full of VHS tapes. Attempting to find the correct tape, they watch several of them.
The ultimate twist is... not really a proper twist, but the corpse reanimates and attacks and kills most of the gang.
As I said, not really anything astounding on its own, but it does its job, and has a couple creepy bits - like the corpse vanishing from the background in between segments, unnoticed by the guy watching the films. It chains the other segments together well without overshadowing them, and it does a decent job of giving the rest of the stories a sort of "are these videos "real" in the context of the frame story's world? Fucked up if true!" air to them.
"Amateur Night" is pretty good. I like a lot of the feature films this director (David Bruckner) has gone on to do: The Ritual, The Night House, the new Hellraiser... he also did a segment in Southbound which is one of my favorite anthology horror films I've seen.
The general plot is simple: a group of friends decide to help one of them get laid, so they head out to barhop and pick up a girl for him. One of the guys, Clint, is wearing a pair of glasses with a hidden camera, intending to film the encounter when they bring her back to the hotel room.
They pick up two women. One of them, Lily, seems inordinately shy, though she's clearly interested in Clint. Getting the women back to the hotel room... nothing goes quite as planned.
(The twist is that Lily is a succubus on the hunt for a partner! She kills the other two men, but she has decided she really likes Clint, and winds up carrying him away.)
I enjoy this one! The twist is enjoyable, and I love turnabout revenge, so I love the "they had it comin'" aspect. The guys were being at least moderate creeps, so getting preyed on by a much bigger monster is a fitting end, if an extreme one.
This segment was expanded into a full-length film called Siren, but I haven't seen it!
"Second Honeymoon," (directed by Ti West) isn't too bad, but is probably my least favorite of the segments.
Sam and Stephanie are a just-married couple on a roadtrip for their honeymoon. An unseen stranger breaks into their motel rooms and films them while sleeping: the stranger touches Stephanie with a knife blade, steals money from Sam's wallet, and also dunks his toothbrush in the toilet. The next day, the couple fights over the missing money. The next night, the assailant breaks into their room again, with much worse intentions.
(The twist is that the assailant murders Sam... and then is revealed to be a woman he'd interacted with earlier... and it's revealed that she was secretly Stephanie's lover, and they presumably planned this all along!)
I'm not a big fan of the "deranged lesbian murdering innocent men" trope, to be honest, and that really is the bulk of what the twist relies on. The setup is decent enough, and by contrast I do enjoy the accurately predictive fortune trope, but... eh. It would become a completely different story if there was an implication that Sam somehow "deserved" his fate, but that would have been a more enjoyable story for me.
"Tuesday the 17th," directed by Glenn McQuaid is one I enjoyed. It's got a fun "unexplained" angle in my opinion.
A group of friends head out on a trip to a lake. One of the girls, Wendy, who picked the location, occasionally mentions offhand accidents that befell other friends of hers in the woods. As another friend films, occasional glitchy images appear onscreen of dead, mutilated people in the forest. Wendy eventually tells the group about a previous trip she took, where a murderer killed her friends, leaving her as the only survivor. She wasn't believed by the police when she reported the seemingly inhuman capabilities of the killer.
(The twist is that she lured this friend group to the lake in hopes of drawing the murderer out again, using them as bait so she can confront the killer. The killer does return, but it only shows up as a glitchy distortion on the video.)
I like the fact that the killer can't be seen in the footage, and it leaves it unexplained what it really is. I also found the random shots of the dead friends shown in contrast to the peaceful forest scenes to be effectively creepy! It feels like an effective use of the medium to me, that we *want* the video to be a record, so having it both show us something we can't see (the dead bodies from the past, though the characters seem to notice those just as malfunctions of the camera) AND fail to show us something we do see (the killer, who seems to be visible to the others, but is just distortion on camera) adds a layer of unease, in my opinion.
Also, I like the title's reference to Friday the 13th.
"The Sick Thing That Happened to Emily When She Was Younger", directed by Joe Swanberg, is one of the least gory, though it's the one that's most disturbing in my opinion, because despite the supernatural element to it, the "real" horror is gaslighting and abuse.
Emily video chats with her med-student boyfriend, James, telling him about a strange, sore bump on her arm. He insists she leave it alone, and that he'll take a look at it when he comes to visit. Later, she begins to see ghostly figures in her apartment. She asks James to record them as she attempts to catch them on her laptop camera, but he always claims he forgets to. Despite seeing the figures, he also minimizes the sightings, claiming they could be anything.
(The twist is that the "ghostly figures" are aliens. They knock Emily unconscious, and James quickly enters her house, despite Emily believing he's at school in another state. He removes an alien fetus from Emily, and then breaks her arm "so they can explain it away as another accident" and asks how much longer the aliens will be doing this to her.
Later they speak on video again, Emily clearly battered and arm in a cast, talking about how she can't remember hurting herself. She tells James she visited the doctor that he recommended, and has been diagnosed as schizoaffective. She laments he deserves someone better and non-damaged, but he tells her that he wants to stay with her.
Then he takes another video call from a different woman, who points out a strange bump on her arm. He promises he'll take a look at it the next time he comes to visit her...)
This one definitely leans into the "exaggerated mundane" horror, and is definitely effective at that! While it's not terribly likely that you'll be used as an alien incubator, having a partner willing to seriously harm you and blame it on you being "crazy" IS an almost too-real fear. And James really does just get worse - minimizing her concerns about the figures is sort of typical "jerk of a partner in a horror movie" behavior, but then when it becomes clear he's in on it and has been doing this repeatedly, that seems to be the worst. THEN it's revealed that he's actively trying to convince her that she's crazy, and at fault for everything happening to her, and it seems like he's just the worst all over again. (While also making himself out to be the good guy from her perspective for wanting to stay with her despite it.) And then he's EVEN WORSE, because he's doing this to more than one woman! Effective ramping up of what a piece of shit he is, and it makes this segment the one that I find the creepiest, yet it's also hard to say that I *like* it.
"10/31/98", directed by the Radio Silence collective, is another one I like. It's probably in the middle of my list in terms of which ones I enjoyed the most. It's not a super complex story, but I feel like it did a simple premise well.
It's a pretty straightforward story: a group of friends goes out on Halloween night, heading for a party. They wind up at the wrong house, but initially assume it's a haunted house attraction. A few weird things happen, chalked up to haunted house effects, but when they find a group of men preaching and chanting, with a chained up girl begging for help, they start to suspect that something Else might be going on.
The group goes back to rescue the girl, and the house starts to go through some pretty serious poltergeist style activity. This is what sold me on this one, because I thought the effects of having doors seal themselves off, and hands reaching out of the walls was nicely creepy. I love architectural horror.
(The twist is that the girl appears to be a ghost or spirit of some kind - as they drive away, the car stalls, and the girl vanishes. She appears outside the vehicle, but the car remains stalled and the doors won't open... and it turns out they're stalled on the train tracks, about to get creamed by an oncoming train.)
While I think that Amateur Night and The Sick Thing That Happened to Emily When She Was Younger are probably "better" segments, I found this one fun. It plays into urban legend type stuff (being trapped by a ghost on the train tracks) and as mentioned, I like architectural horror. I know how a lot of those types of effects are done, but like the premise, it did them well, which I appreciate. I also like the question of "hey, was the abusive, creepy cult doing the right thing, actually?"
V/H/S/2
I feel pretty similarly about the first and second films. I think both have some great segments that stand out pretty well, and overall I enjoyed both of them.
The frame story in V/H/S/2, "Tape 49", directed by Simon Barrett, has more of a twist to it than the frame story in the first movie, and is similarly decent in its utility as an excuse to chain the other segments together.
A pair of private investigators are hired to look into a college students' disappearance. They break into his home and discover a stack of tapes, and a laptop. The laptop contains video of the missing student discussing the contents of the tapes, so while one investigator explores the house, the other decides to start watching the tapes for clues.
(The twist is that the student and his mother (who hired the investigators) were trying to film their own tape in the style of all the rest, and the student - disfigured after an apparent failed suicide attempt - attacks and kills the investigators, the first of whom reanimates, like the guy in the first film.)
It's a less subtle spooky than the first film's frame story starts out with, but it does its job!
It's a bit interesting to me that the frame story has more of a twist to it this time around, because the various segments actually rely far LESS on having twists to them as compared to the first film. In general, I feel pretty neutral about that? It was sort of a nice throughline for all the stories in the first set, though as a whole I don't think these feel like they're missing something by comparison.
"Phase I Clinical Trials", directed by Adam Wingard, feels a bit like a Black Mirror episode, and it's one that I could see being a pretty decent longer-form film. Or at least an hour-long Black Mirror episode, ha.
A man, Herman, is fitted with an ocular implant, having lost his eye in a car accident. He's informed that the technology is experimental, and that this may lead to some "glitches". Some strange things happen in his home - objects being moved around - and then he begins to see apparent undead figures in his home, who threaten to attack him. The next day, a woman named Clarissa visits him, claiming that she's been able to hear ghosts ever since she got an experimental cochlear implant. Removing the implants is not a solution - the ghosts themselves will still be there.
(The ghosts ultimately attack and kill Clarissa, and while Herman tears out the implant, the ghosts then attack and kill him as well.)
It's not an utterly unique premise - technology giving us access to an unseen world populated by the dead - but it's done fairly well! While it moves at a pretty fast clip, the initial creepy happenings are suitably unsettling, and escalate quickly. I'm... not utterly sold on the sex scene needing to be there? I realize that it's in keeping with the tone of the franchise, but it didn't seem to serve its alleged interior purpose (keeping him from paying attention to the ghosts, therefore keeping them from getting stronger.)
I feel like it's implied that the ghosts Herman sees - a man and a young girl - are after him specifically (since Clarissa is being haunted by her uncle, who she calls "not a nice man".) I can't recall anything in the movie itself saying as much, but I came away thinking they were possibly people killed in the car crash he was in? If so, I like the connection and understand their apparent hatred of him... but it could be something I'm essentially making up.
"A Ride in the Park" was directed by Eduardo Sanchez and Gregg Hale (of The Blair Witch Project fame.) I enjoy this one for being a bit blackly funny.
Cyclist Mike uses a go-pro style camera to film a bike ride through a state park. Part way through his ride, he comes across an injured woman begging for help. He stops, and sees several zombies approaching them, before the woman turns into a zombie as well and attacks him. Mike runs away, but eventually collapses. Another pair of cyclists stop to help him... only for him to reanimate and attack them as well. He and the other zombies stumble to a child's birthday party, which goes about as well as any "this is how the zombie apocalypse started" scene goes.
(This one has a minor twist, in that having accidentally used his phone to call his girlfriend, zombie-Mike hears her voice and that does bring him back to himself just enough to take a shotgun and kill himself.)
The first-person zombie cam is pretty fun, imo, though definitely one of those things that's better for a short film than a feature length movie. The segment itself is definitely not structured as a comedy, but there are parts that are pretty funny.
"Safe Haven", directed by Timo Tjahjanto and Gareth Evans, is another one that I would watch as a longer film, and is definitely my favorite of the segments.
A film crew decides to infiltrate a secretive Indonesian cult, known as Paradise Gates. They want to make a documentary, though they promise to present a fair and balanced look at the cult, which typically allows no outsiders. The cult's compound is full of strange symbols and uniformly dressed men and women, as well as many young schoolchildren. They interview the cult leader, referred to as "Father", who insists he has the key to paradise and will bring all his followers through its gates.
One member of the film crew, Lena, gets sick during the interview and has to temporarily leave. Lena's fiance, Malik, overhears her speaking to another crew member, Adam, revealing she's pregnant, and believes Adam to be the father.
Shortly after, the cult begins a ritualistic mass suicide, drinking poison or shooting themselves. The film crew is all either killed or in Lena's case, abducted, by the cult members.
(This one also has something of a twist, in that Lena gives birth to the demon the cult was worshipping, and the dead cult members come back to "life" as zombies. As Adam flees after failing to save Lena, the demon calls him "papa", revealing that she was right about him being the father.)
I really like this one. Cults are fascinating and horrific anyway, and adding in a cult succeeding in some fashion to raise the supernatural entity they were worshiping... excellently creepy. It does a good job of portraying two types of horror. Initially it's about the "mundane" horror of a cult leader who is implied to have done some pretty terrible things to his followers, the ways in which it was intentionally designed to mirror things like Jonestown and Heaven's Gate. Then it tips over into the demonic and supernatural horror, which is also played well. Definitely some similarities to the cult plots in Silent Hill (which remains my favorite horror property.)
"Slumber Party Alien Abduction", directed by Jason Eisener, is by far my least favorite segment, which makes it a little sad to me that it was the one that DID get turned into a feature film.
Filmed from the perspective of a camera attached to a family dog, it mainly captures one sibling's unlikeable friend group getting picked on by an older sibling's unlikeable friend group, and both groups just continuing to try and harass the other as revenge. But then there are aliens trying to kill them and they have to escape!
I did not like or sympathize much with any of the characters (except maybe the poor dog, who presumably dies at the end), and I just in general don't enjoy movies that are just shitty people being shitty to each other.
V/H/S:Viral
This one sucked. Lol, I did discover that was not an unpopular opinion: it is by far the worst-reviewed of any of the franchise. But yeah, I did not like it. That was a bit of a bummer, because I did enjoy the first two, and particularly found segments out of both the first two films that really stuck with me. The third one? Nah.
The frame story this time is "Various Circles", directed by Marcel Sarmiento.
Amateur videographer, Kevin, continually films his girlfriend, seeming nearly obsessed with doing so. From snippets we see, it's also obvious that he has a lousy home life, including coping with his abusive grandmother.
There's a breaking local news story of a high-speed police chase involving an ice cream truck; Kevin tries to get video of it in the hopes of having said video go viral. His girlfriend wanders into the road and seems to vanish. The truck begins circling the neighborhood, looping past them over and over. As it passes, videos are transmitted to the cell phones of the people nearby... our video segments for this film. Viewing the videos effect people badly, causing illness and violent outbreaks.
(In the end, after much mayhem and murder caused in pursuit of the truck, and a couple additional internal micro-stories that didn't leave much of an impression on me, Kevin finally catches up to the truck, which has televisions stacked in back. His girlfriend appears on one of the screens, demanding Kevin upload video footage to to be broadcast. He resists but eventually gives in. Afterwards, he discovers her body (despite the video, she's been dead for some time,) as smoke billows over the skyline, implying the broader release of the videos has had widespread impacts.)
I do not enjoy the introduction of the "bigger" frame story. It's more prominent and takes up a lot more of the runtime... but the little micro stories (truncated revenge against a guy who made non-consensual porn, except the victim dies too! a guy fresh out of prison decides his girlfriend has turned him in for something!) really... didn't interest me much and could have been left out entirely with no real loss. For me it also removed the appeal of the found-footage nature of the series. The smaller frames gave the earlier anthologies that "hmm... fucked up if true!" vibe of good found footage. No, none of these are purporting to be real or seem believable, but in-universe there's an element of feeling that they are, that the people viewing these tapes are viewing actual footage, and being drawn into horror that had no place in the real world they otherwise occupied. With this one, leading to a pseudo-apocalypse scenario, the "bigger" scope is paradoxically less impactful. I know that LA didn't actually burn in the madness caused by viral videos provoking violence, and I'm not going to suspend my disbelief and pretend it did. When the scope was smaller, contained to just a few people witnessing horrific events, that's the sort of thing that for the sake of the film I can "buy into" for the duration of the movie.
Dante the Great, directed by Gregg Bishop was... kind of mediocre.
The film is partially set up as a fictional documentary, interviewing experts and such to get their perspective on the events the story looks at. Other parts aren't that, and show the characters and events as they happen.
John, a young man who is an unconvincing stage magician, finds a cloak once owned by Harry Houdini. It turns out that the cloak grants him the ability to do real magic, and he quickly gains all the fame and adulation he could have ever desired, setting himself up as "Dante the Great" and headlining extremely exclusive shows. Eventually he discovers that the cloak requires sacrifices in order to maintain its power, so in service to that, he begins to sacrifice a string of lovely female assistants.
(Eventually, there's an assistant he falls for and doesn't want to sacrifice, but she finds evidence of his murders, and turns him in. As she makes a report at the police station, he summons her back, and the two fight. She later attempts to get rid of the cloak, but it apparently takes her instead.)
Meh? I think it would have been more interesting and a stronger story if it had stuck fully to the documentary format. I enjoy the type of meta fiction that is fake documentaries and epistolary storytelling, so that would have been interesting to me! While the whole thing remains found-footage, there are parts of it that don't feel like they suit that documentary format, and are only there to clarify the storyline... which makes the faux documentary style feel unnecessary. (Perhaps the whole thing IS supposed to be the documentary, but it loses that feel imo.) Otherwise... eh? It's not *not* horror or anything, but it felt like it lacked any real seriousness or buildup to make the central "deciding to sacrifice people for your own success" premise feel strong or compelling.
Parallel Monsters, directed by Nacho Vigalondo was a more interesting idea, but it came across as a bit sillier than I think may have been intended.
A man, Alfonso, invents a portal that connects to another world. It opens, and he meets "himself" on the other side - the two seem to be completely identical, including being married to identical women both named Marta. The two decide to switch places and explore these new worlds they've connected to. Things initially seem fairly similar - the houses are laid out as mirror images of each other, Marta is familiar... until it starts to become clear that there are some key differences between the worlds after all.
(Parallel universe Marta encourages Alfonso to participate in some sort of event or ritual with a pair of men visiting the house, while a bloody bag sits in the middle of the room and a pornographic snuff film plays in the background. Alfonso goes outside, and sees a blimp with a bright neon inverted cross on the side. It gets a bit silly for me when the most obvious physical difference between the worlds is that the people in this parallel universe have monstrous things instead of genitalia. Alfonso flees back to his world, throwing his parallel universe self back through the portal (where he's devoured by parallel universe Marta)... though ultimately his wife, regular universe Marta, stabs him, having been attacked by the parallel universe Alfonso (or at least his monster penis) and believing her real husband to have been the culprit.)
Again. Meh? The "hey, this world is apparently under demonic or satanic control" could be an interesting point of divergence to explore, and the hints at repeated ritual sound suitably creepy. By contrast... monster fanged penises and gaping, sharp-toothed vaginas just felt silly to me? But let's also be real that I don't think anyone is watching this for the worldbuilding, and it's maybe intending to lean into the silliness a bit. It's certainly not like "aaa, weird sex things!" isn't a common source of fear or discomfort, either. This one just didn't do anything for me.
Bonestorm, directed by Justin Benson and Aaron Scott Moorhead is definitely my favorite of the segments, but that's a bit of a low bar this time around.
A couple friends are on a quest to film an epic skateboard video. The videographer they hired to help goads them into more dangerous stunts, secretly hoping they get seriously hurt or killed in the hopes of selling that footage as a snuff film.
They decide to cross the border and go into Tijuana to finish their video, ultimately finding an old flood channel to perform stunts in. Strange symbols are drawn on the concrete, initially looking like graffiti, but when one of the skaters falls and bleeds on a pentagram, the blood starts boiling. It goes downhill from there.
(A woman they ran into earlier shows up, and tears one of the boy's arms off. Turns out, there was a cult worshiping in the area. The skateboarders use any weapon they can find to try and fight their way out, complicated by the dead cultists reanimating as skeletons, as well as the ultimate arrival of the demon they worshiped.)
This one hits a lot of the same plot beats as Safe Haven in the second movie: group filming comes across a cult, the cult has been trying to summon a demon, the cultists reanimate after being killed and continue attacking the protagonists, in the end the demon turns out to have been successfully summoned... It's a very different story, but it shows *how* different a seemingly similar plotline can be, which is interesting from a meta perspective. But Safe Haven is a FAR better story and short film, so in some ways this feels like an inferior imitation. (Which is maybe unfair; I don't think it's actually trying to mimic the earlier film.) Even so, this was my favorite out of this set - the skeletal cultists were pretty fun looking, and "videographer secretly hopes his clients die on camera" is also a funny bit.
As a whole, I think this one lacked the at least sort of cohesive feel that the other two did. As mentioned above, the larger scale frame story felt to me like it changed the tone of the series, and not in a good way.
Well that shit got long and kept getting longer.
I would recommend the first two films, on the strength of their best segments, if nothing else. I would not recommend the third, ha. Be advised that there is absolutely a lot of gore and nudity (including multiple instances of full-frontal female nudity), definitely sometimes falling into the “gratuitous” camp.
These are all anthology films, each featuring a frame story that chains the other short films together. As is fairly typical, this leads to a little bit of variable quality in the segments, but at the same time I really do like anthology films in the broad sense. There are some ideas that really ARE best expressed as short stories, and stretching them into a feature-length film makes them less punchy and more prone to filler, and it's relatively difficult to find an audience for short films outside of anthologies.
V/H/S
The frame story ("Tape 56"), directed by Adam Wingard, is... nothing to write home about, but it serves its purpose of giving the rest of it an excuse to happen.
A criminal gang is offered a lot of money to break into a house and steal a specific videotape. Inside the house, they find a corpse of a man seated in front of a set of televisions and the house full of VHS tapes. Attempting to find the correct tape, they watch several of them.
The ultimate twist is... not really a proper twist, but the corpse reanimates and attacks and kills most of the gang.
As I said, not really anything astounding on its own, but it does its job, and has a couple creepy bits - like the corpse vanishing from the background in between segments, unnoticed by the guy watching the films. It chains the other segments together well without overshadowing them, and it does a decent job of giving the rest of the stories a sort of "are these videos "real" in the context of the frame story's world? Fucked up if true!" air to them.
"Amateur Night" is pretty good. I like a lot of the feature films this director (David Bruckner) has gone on to do: The Ritual, The Night House, the new Hellraiser... he also did a segment in Southbound which is one of my favorite anthology horror films I've seen.
The general plot is simple: a group of friends decide to help one of them get laid, so they head out to barhop and pick up a girl for him. One of the guys, Clint, is wearing a pair of glasses with a hidden camera, intending to film the encounter when they bring her back to the hotel room.
They pick up two women. One of them, Lily, seems inordinately shy, though she's clearly interested in Clint. Getting the women back to the hotel room... nothing goes quite as planned.
(The twist is that Lily is a succubus on the hunt for a partner! She kills the other two men, but she has decided she really likes Clint, and winds up carrying him away.)
I enjoy this one! The twist is enjoyable, and I love turnabout revenge, so I love the "they had it comin'" aspect. The guys were being at least moderate creeps, so getting preyed on by a much bigger monster is a fitting end, if an extreme one.
This segment was expanded into a full-length film called Siren, but I haven't seen it!
"Second Honeymoon," (directed by Ti West) isn't too bad, but is probably my least favorite of the segments.
Sam and Stephanie are a just-married couple on a roadtrip for their honeymoon. An unseen stranger breaks into their motel rooms and films them while sleeping: the stranger touches Stephanie with a knife blade, steals money from Sam's wallet, and also dunks his toothbrush in the toilet. The next day, the couple fights over the missing money. The next night, the assailant breaks into their room again, with much worse intentions.
(The twist is that the assailant murders Sam... and then is revealed to be a woman he'd interacted with earlier... and it's revealed that she was secretly Stephanie's lover, and they presumably planned this all along!)
I'm not a big fan of the "deranged lesbian murdering innocent men" trope, to be honest, and that really is the bulk of what the twist relies on. The setup is decent enough, and by contrast I do enjoy the accurately predictive fortune trope, but... eh. It would become a completely different story if there was an implication that Sam somehow "deserved" his fate, but that would have been a more enjoyable story for me.
"Tuesday the 17th," directed by Glenn McQuaid is one I enjoyed. It's got a fun "unexplained" angle in my opinion.
A group of friends head out on a trip to a lake. One of the girls, Wendy, who picked the location, occasionally mentions offhand accidents that befell other friends of hers in the woods. As another friend films, occasional glitchy images appear onscreen of dead, mutilated people in the forest. Wendy eventually tells the group about a previous trip she took, where a murderer killed her friends, leaving her as the only survivor. She wasn't believed by the police when she reported the seemingly inhuman capabilities of the killer.
(The twist is that she lured this friend group to the lake in hopes of drawing the murderer out again, using them as bait so she can confront the killer. The killer does return, but it only shows up as a glitchy distortion on the video.)
I like the fact that the killer can't be seen in the footage, and it leaves it unexplained what it really is. I also found the random shots of the dead friends shown in contrast to the peaceful forest scenes to be effectively creepy! It feels like an effective use of the medium to me, that we *want* the video to be a record, so having it both show us something we can't see (the dead bodies from the past, though the characters seem to notice those just as malfunctions of the camera) AND fail to show us something we do see (the killer, who seems to be visible to the others, but is just distortion on camera) adds a layer of unease, in my opinion.
Also, I like the title's reference to Friday the 13th.
"The Sick Thing That Happened to Emily When She Was Younger", directed by Joe Swanberg, is one of the least gory, though it's the one that's most disturbing in my opinion, because despite the supernatural element to it, the "real" horror is gaslighting and abuse.
Emily video chats with her med-student boyfriend, James, telling him about a strange, sore bump on her arm. He insists she leave it alone, and that he'll take a look at it when he comes to visit. Later, she begins to see ghostly figures in her apartment. She asks James to record them as she attempts to catch them on her laptop camera, but he always claims he forgets to. Despite seeing the figures, he also minimizes the sightings, claiming they could be anything.
(The twist is that the "ghostly figures" are aliens. They knock Emily unconscious, and James quickly enters her house, despite Emily believing he's at school in another state. He removes an alien fetus from Emily, and then breaks her arm "so they can explain it away as another accident" and asks how much longer the aliens will be doing this to her.
Later they speak on video again, Emily clearly battered and arm in a cast, talking about how she can't remember hurting herself. She tells James she visited the doctor that he recommended, and has been diagnosed as schizoaffective. She laments he deserves someone better and non-damaged, but he tells her that he wants to stay with her.
Then he takes another video call from a different woman, who points out a strange bump on her arm. He promises he'll take a look at it the next time he comes to visit her...)
This one definitely leans into the "exaggerated mundane" horror, and is definitely effective at that! While it's not terribly likely that you'll be used as an alien incubator, having a partner willing to seriously harm you and blame it on you being "crazy" IS an almost too-real fear. And James really does just get worse - minimizing her concerns about the figures is sort of typical "jerk of a partner in a horror movie" behavior, but then when it becomes clear he's in on it and has been doing this repeatedly, that seems to be the worst. THEN it's revealed that he's actively trying to convince her that she's crazy, and at fault for everything happening to her, and it seems like he's just the worst all over again. (While also making himself out to be the good guy from her perspective for wanting to stay with her despite it.) And then he's EVEN WORSE, because he's doing this to more than one woman! Effective ramping up of what a piece of shit he is, and it makes this segment the one that I find the creepiest, yet it's also hard to say that I *like* it.
"10/31/98", directed by the Radio Silence collective, is another one I like. It's probably in the middle of my list in terms of which ones I enjoyed the most. It's not a super complex story, but I feel like it did a simple premise well.
It's a pretty straightforward story: a group of friends goes out on Halloween night, heading for a party. They wind up at the wrong house, but initially assume it's a haunted house attraction. A few weird things happen, chalked up to haunted house effects, but when they find a group of men preaching and chanting, with a chained up girl begging for help, they start to suspect that something Else might be going on.
The group goes back to rescue the girl, and the house starts to go through some pretty serious poltergeist style activity. This is what sold me on this one, because I thought the effects of having doors seal themselves off, and hands reaching out of the walls was nicely creepy. I love architectural horror.
(The twist is that the girl appears to be a ghost or spirit of some kind - as they drive away, the car stalls, and the girl vanishes. She appears outside the vehicle, but the car remains stalled and the doors won't open... and it turns out they're stalled on the train tracks, about to get creamed by an oncoming train.)
While I think that Amateur Night and The Sick Thing That Happened to Emily When She Was Younger are probably "better" segments, I found this one fun. It plays into urban legend type stuff (being trapped by a ghost on the train tracks) and as mentioned, I like architectural horror. I know how a lot of those types of effects are done, but like the premise, it did them well, which I appreciate. I also like the question of "hey, was the abusive, creepy cult doing the right thing, actually?"
V/H/S/2
I feel pretty similarly about the first and second films. I think both have some great segments that stand out pretty well, and overall I enjoyed both of them.
The frame story in V/H/S/2, "Tape 49", directed by Simon Barrett, has more of a twist to it than the frame story in the first movie, and is similarly decent in its utility as an excuse to chain the other segments together.
A pair of private investigators are hired to look into a college students' disappearance. They break into his home and discover a stack of tapes, and a laptop. The laptop contains video of the missing student discussing the contents of the tapes, so while one investigator explores the house, the other decides to start watching the tapes for clues.
(The twist is that the student and his mother (who hired the investigators) were trying to film their own tape in the style of all the rest, and the student - disfigured after an apparent failed suicide attempt - attacks and kills the investigators, the first of whom reanimates, like the guy in the first film.)
It's a less subtle spooky than the first film's frame story starts out with, but it does its job!
It's a bit interesting to me that the frame story has more of a twist to it this time around, because the various segments actually rely far LESS on having twists to them as compared to the first film. In general, I feel pretty neutral about that? It was sort of a nice throughline for all the stories in the first set, though as a whole I don't think these feel like they're missing something by comparison.
"Phase I Clinical Trials", directed by Adam Wingard, feels a bit like a Black Mirror episode, and it's one that I could see being a pretty decent longer-form film. Or at least an hour-long Black Mirror episode, ha.
A man, Herman, is fitted with an ocular implant, having lost his eye in a car accident. He's informed that the technology is experimental, and that this may lead to some "glitches". Some strange things happen in his home - objects being moved around - and then he begins to see apparent undead figures in his home, who threaten to attack him. The next day, a woman named Clarissa visits him, claiming that she's been able to hear ghosts ever since she got an experimental cochlear implant. Removing the implants is not a solution - the ghosts themselves will still be there.
(The ghosts ultimately attack and kill Clarissa, and while Herman tears out the implant, the ghosts then attack and kill him as well.)
It's not an utterly unique premise - technology giving us access to an unseen world populated by the dead - but it's done fairly well! While it moves at a pretty fast clip, the initial creepy happenings are suitably unsettling, and escalate quickly. I'm... not utterly sold on the sex scene needing to be there? I realize that it's in keeping with the tone of the franchise, but it didn't seem to serve its alleged interior purpose (keeping him from paying attention to the ghosts, therefore keeping them from getting stronger.)
I feel like it's implied that the ghosts Herman sees - a man and a young girl - are after him specifically (since Clarissa is being haunted by her uncle, who she calls "not a nice man".) I can't recall anything in the movie itself saying as much, but I came away thinking they were possibly people killed in the car crash he was in? If so, I like the connection and understand their apparent hatred of him... but it could be something I'm essentially making up.
"A Ride in the Park" was directed by Eduardo Sanchez and Gregg Hale (of The Blair Witch Project fame.) I enjoy this one for being a bit blackly funny.
Cyclist Mike uses a go-pro style camera to film a bike ride through a state park. Part way through his ride, he comes across an injured woman begging for help. He stops, and sees several zombies approaching them, before the woman turns into a zombie as well and attacks him. Mike runs away, but eventually collapses. Another pair of cyclists stop to help him... only for him to reanimate and attack them as well. He and the other zombies stumble to a child's birthday party, which goes about as well as any "this is how the zombie apocalypse started" scene goes.
(This one has a minor twist, in that having accidentally used his phone to call his girlfriend, zombie-Mike hears her voice and that does bring him back to himself just enough to take a shotgun and kill himself.)
The first-person zombie cam is pretty fun, imo, though definitely one of those things that's better for a short film than a feature length movie. The segment itself is definitely not structured as a comedy, but there are parts that are pretty funny.
"Safe Haven", directed by Timo Tjahjanto and Gareth Evans, is another one that I would watch as a longer film, and is definitely my favorite of the segments.
A film crew decides to infiltrate a secretive Indonesian cult, known as Paradise Gates. They want to make a documentary, though they promise to present a fair and balanced look at the cult, which typically allows no outsiders. The cult's compound is full of strange symbols and uniformly dressed men and women, as well as many young schoolchildren. They interview the cult leader, referred to as "Father", who insists he has the key to paradise and will bring all his followers through its gates.
One member of the film crew, Lena, gets sick during the interview and has to temporarily leave. Lena's fiance, Malik, overhears her speaking to another crew member, Adam, revealing she's pregnant, and believes Adam to be the father.
Shortly after, the cult begins a ritualistic mass suicide, drinking poison or shooting themselves. The film crew is all either killed or in Lena's case, abducted, by the cult members.
(This one also has something of a twist, in that Lena gives birth to the demon the cult was worshipping, and the dead cult members come back to "life" as zombies. As Adam flees after failing to save Lena, the demon calls him "papa", revealing that she was right about him being the father.)
I really like this one. Cults are fascinating and horrific anyway, and adding in a cult succeeding in some fashion to raise the supernatural entity they were worshiping... excellently creepy. It does a good job of portraying two types of horror. Initially it's about the "mundane" horror of a cult leader who is implied to have done some pretty terrible things to his followers, the ways in which it was intentionally designed to mirror things like Jonestown and Heaven's Gate. Then it tips over into the demonic and supernatural horror, which is also played well. Definitely some similarities to the cult plots in Silent Hill (which remains my favorite horror property.)
"Slumber Party Alien Abduction", directed by Jason Eisener, is by far my least favorite segment, which makes it a little sad to me that it was the one that DID get turned into a feature film.
Filmed from the perspective of a camera attached to a family dog, it mainly captures one sibling's unlikeable friend group getting picked on by an older sibling's unlikeable friend group, and both groups just continuing to try and harass the other as revenge. But then there are aliens trying to kill them and they have to escape!
I did not like or sympathize much with any of the characters (except maybe the poor dog, who presumably dies at the end), and I just in general don't enjoy movies that are just shitty people being shitty to each other.
V/H/S:Viral
This one sucked. Lol, I did discover that was not an unpopular opinion: it is by far the worst-reviewed of any of the franchise. But yeah, I did not like it. That was a bit of a bummer, because I did enjoy the first two, and particularly found segments out of both the first two films that really stuck with me. The third one? Nah.
The frame story this time is "Various Circles", directed by Marcel Sarmiento.
Amateur videographer, Kevin, continually films his girlfriend, seeming nearly obsessed with doing so. From snippets we see, it's also obvious that he has a lousy home life, including coping with his abusive grandmother.
There's a breaking local news story of a high-speed police chase involving an ice cream truck; Kevin tries to get video of it in the hopes of having said video go viral. His girlfriend wanders into the road and seems to vanish. The truck begins circling the neighborhood, looping past them over and over. As it passes, videos are transmitted to the cell phones of the people nearby... our video segments for this film. Viewing the videos effect people badly, causing illness and violent outbreaks.
(In the end, after much mayhem and murder caused in pursuit of the truck, and a couple additional internal micro-stories that didn't leave much of an impression on me, Kevin finally catches up to the truck, which has televisions stacked in back. His girlfriend appears on one of the screens, demanding Kevin upload video footage to to be broadcast. He resists but eventually gives in. Afterwards, he discovers her body (despite the video, she's been dead for some time,) as smoke billows over the skyline, implying the broader release of the videos has had widespread impacts.)
I do not enjoy the introduction of the "bigger" frame story. It's more prominent and takes up a lot more of the runtime... but the little micro stories (truncated revenge against a guy who made non-consensual porn, except the victim dies too! a guy fresh out of prison decides his girlfriend has turned him in for something!) really... didn't interest me much and could have been left out entirely with no real loss. For me it also removed the appeal of the found-footage nature of the series. The smaller frames gave the earlier anthologies that "hmm... fucked up if true!" vibe of good found footage. No, none of these are purporting to be real or seem believable, but in-universe there's an element of feeling that they are, that the people viewing these tapes are viewing actual footage, and being drawn into horror that had no place in the real world they otherwise occupied. With this one, leading to a pseudo-apocalypse scenario, the "bigger" scope is paradoxically less impactful. I know that LA didn't actually burn in the madness caused by viral videos provoking violence, and I'm not going to suspend my disbelief and pretend it did. When the scope was smaller, contained to just a few people witnessing horrific events, that's the sort of thing that for the sake of the film I can "buy into" for the duration of the movie.
Dante the Great, directed by Gregg Bishop was... kind of mediocre.
The film is partially set up as a fictional documentary, interviewing experts and such to get their perspective on the events the story looks at. Other parts aren't that, and show the characters and events as they happen.
John, a young man who is an unconvincing stage magician, finds a cloak once owned by Harry Houdini. It turns out that the cloak grants him the ability to do real magic, and he quickly gains all the fame and adulation he could have ever desired, setting himself up as "Dante the Great" and headlining extremely exclusive shows. Eventually he discovers that the cloak requires sacrifices in order to maintain its power, so in service to that, he begins to sacrifice a string of lovely female assistants.
(Eventually, there's an assistant he falls for and doesn't want to sacrifice, but she finds evidence of his murders, and turns him in. As she makes a report at the police station, he summons her back, and the two fight. She later attempts to get rid of the cloak, but it apparently takes her instead.)
Meh? I think it would have been more interesting and a stronger story if it had stuck fully to the documentary format. I enjoy the type of meta fiction that is fake documentaries and epistolary storytelling, so that would have been interesting to me! While the whole thing remains found-footage, there are parts of it that don't feel like they suit that documentary format, and are only there to clarify the storyline... which makes the faux documentary style feel unnecessary. (Perhaps the whole thing IS supposed to be the documentary, but it loses that feel imo.) Otherwise... eh? It's not *not* horror or anything, but it felt like it lacked any real seriousness or buildup to make the central "deciding to sacrifice people for your own success" premise feel strong or compelling.
Parallel Monsters, directed by Nacho Vigalondo was a more interesting idea, but it came across as a bit sillier than I think may have been intended.
A man, Alfonso, invents a portal that connects to another world. It opens, and he meets "himself" on the other side - the two seem to be completely identical, including being married to identical women both named Marta. The two decide to switch places and explore these new worlds they've connected to. Things initially seem fairly similar - the houses are laid out as mirror images of each other, Marta is familiar... until it starts to become clear that there are some key differences between the worlds after all.
(Parallel universe Marta encourages Alfonso to participate in some sort of event or ritual with a pair of men visiting the house, while a bloody bag sits in the middle of the room and a pornographic snuff film plays in the background. Alfonso goes outside, and sees a blimp with a bright neon inverted cross on the side. It gets a bit silly for me when the most obvious physical difference between the worlds is that the people in this parallel universe have monstrous things instead of genitalia. Alfonso flees back to his world, throwing his parallel universe self back through the portal (where he's devoured by parallel universe Marta)... though ultimately his wife, regular universe Marta, stabs him, having been attacked by the parallel universe Alfonso (or at least his monster penis) and believing her real husband to have been the culprit.)
Again. Meh? The "hey, this world is apparently under demonic or satanic control" could be an interesting point of divergence to explore, and the hints at repeated ritual sound suitably creepy. By contrast... monster fanged penises and gaping, sharp-toothed vaginas just felt silly to me? But let's also be real that I don't think anyone is watching this for the worldbuilding, and it's maybe intending to lean into the silliness a bit. It's certainly not like "aaa, weird sex things!" isn't a common source of fear or discomfort, either. This one just didn't do anything for me.
Bonestorm, directed by Justin Benson and Aaron Scott Moorhead is definitely my favorite of the segments, but that's a bit of a low bar this time around.
A couple friends are on a quest to film an epic skateboard video. The videographer they hired to help goads them into more dangerous stunts, secretly hoping they get seriously hurt or killed in the hopes of selling that footage as a snuff film.
They decide to cross the border and go into Tijuana to finish their video, ultimately finding an old flood channel to perform stunts in. Strange symbols are drawn on the concrete, initially looking like graffiti, but when one of the skaters falls and bleeds on a pentagram, the blood starts boiling. It goes downhill from there.
(A woman they ran into earlier shows up, and tears one of the boy's arms off. Turns out, there was a cult worshiping in the area. The skateboarders use any weapon they can find to try and fight their way out, complicated by the dead cultists reanimating as skeletons, as well as the ultimate arrival of the demon they worshiped.)
This one hits a lot of the same plot beats as Safe Haven in the second movie: group filming comes across a cult, the cult has been trying to summon a demon, the cultists reanimate after being killed and continue attacking the protagonists, in the end the demon turns out to have been successfully summoned... It's a very different story, but it shows *how* different a seemingly similar plotline can be, which is interesting from a meta perspective. But Safe Haven is a FAR better story and short film, so in some ways this feels like an inferior imitation. (Which is maybe unfair; I don't think it's actually trying to mimic the earlier film.) Even so, this was my favorite out of this set - the skeletal cultists were pretty fun looking, and "videographer secretly hopes his clients die on camera" is also a funny bit.
As a whole, I think this one lacked the at least sort of cohesive feel that the other two did. As mentioned above, the larger scale frame story felt to me like it changed the tone of the series, and not in a good way.
Well that shit got long and kept getting longer.
I would recommend the first two films, on the strength of their best segments, if nothing else. I would not recommend the third, ha. Be advised that there is absolutely a lot of gore and nudity (including multiple instances of full-frontal female nudity), definitely sometimes falling into the “gratuitous” camp.
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V/H/S/85 is supposed to come out later this year, and has segments by both David Bruckner and Scott Derrickson, so I'll definitely be interested to see it!
At least with the first three, and I think with the others, there's no real overarching connection between them, so there's no reason to worry about a watch order or anything. The third one is deeply skippable.
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Like I mentioned toward the end of the post - some segments are pretty heavy on the gore (of the blood *and* guts kind), and they lean a little harder on the gratuitous sex scenes than I prefer, even if it's a standard for the genre.
The first three are available on Prime right now.
I'm definitely interested in the forthcoming one! I'm sure it's inevitable that I'll chuck money at Shudder for at least a month or two.
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