Movie Review: V/H/S (2012)
V/H/S is an anthology horror film put together by a good number of pretty talented people, including Adam Wingard, Simon Barrett, Joe Swanberg, and Ti West.
As an anthology movie, it’s naturally inconsistent. I’ll be perfectly honest here and say I didn’t care about the frame story. Sure, I get the need the filmmakers felt to have something like this to tie each story together, and the idea of these all being random VHS tapes that they find is sort of interesting. But I still didn’t get anything out of the frame, which the film would cut to between each story.
The first actual short film outside of the frame story was a pretty good one. It’s titled “Amateur Night,” and it centers around a group of young men that try and pick up women to make an amateur porn film — through the use of a hidden camera in one of the men’s glasses. It has some really nice buildup, and it’s pretty creepy. As with most of these, I feel like the payoff isn’t that great.
The second short film outisde of the frame is called “Second Honeymoon,” and it’s written and directed by Ti West. I’ll be honest again here when I say that I got nothing out of this. Nothing was too creepy, and the found footage element didn’t make a lot of sense.
The next short is titled “Tuesday the 17th,” and I was entertained by this one, but I am not sure I’d call it good. It’s at least somewhat creative in its depiction of a supernatural slasher killer, but it’s not visually very interesting. I mean, you never get a good look at the killer, and that’s the point, but even outside of that. The lake as it were looks like a small pond. And the digital effects to make it look like video looked pretty bad here. Still, I had a good time watching it.
“The Sick Thing That Happened to Emily When She Was Younger” is interesting, but I’m still not sure if I like it or not. It’s all told through video chat on a computer, and it’s directed by mumblecore master Joe Swanberg, and written by Simon Barrett (The Guest, You’re Next). It concerns a boyfriend and girlfriend communicating to each other, when the girlfriend thinks her house is haunted.
The twist is so silly, but also pretty interesting, that I’m not sure how to feel about it. It feels like a Twilight Zone episode the way the twist comes into it, but at the same time, it’s not a twist that feels as if there was any kind of buildup to it. It just happened. I suppose the real twist is surrounding the boyfriend character, to be fair, and I did consider that pretty effectively creepy.
Anyways, this short sort of makes an attempt at body horror, with some cringe-inducing moments of gore. It’s not too extreme, but it’s pretty disturbing regardless.
One thing that sort of bothered me about this episode is the sound design. It seemed to border almost on having a musical score, and I don’t like that in a found footage style.
The concluding short, “10/31/98,” was probably the most consistently entertaining. Sure, the ending to it is a little over the top and ridiculous, but this short was a good deal of fun. It follows four young men on the way to a Halloween party that end up at the wrong house, and find a bunch of paranormal stuff going on, and eventually find a bunch of men performing a ritual with a tied up young woman.
It’s reasonably scary, but I did see the ending coming from a mile away. Some of the scares were surprisingly subtle — just little things that you had to be paying close attention to even notice. The effects in this episode were really good, though, and maybe they look better because it’s made to look like ’90s video, but whatever works, man.
Overall, the only parts I really didn’t like were all the stuff with Adam Wingard’s frame narrative and Ti West’s “Second Honeymoon.” Everything else was pretty entertaining, but still unremarkable. There are definitely some effective moments, but this doesn’t do a whole lot to stand out overall.
Rating: 5/10
