V/H/S

It's that time of the year again. As we near All Hallow's Eve, we should take time to enjoy  some of the creepier and more disturbing items in our backlog inventory. What I have here will kick things off. 

Although I technically don't own V/H/S, this is a horror movie that's available On Demand before it hits theaters this weekend. Originally premiering at Sundance, a couple of friends who attended this year explained that I needed to see this when I got the chance. So I did... and was extremely disappointed.

What we have here is a throwback to the older horror anthology series - basically a series of scary vignettes designed to give you a hauntingly good time. Does anyone remember watching the Creepshow movies? If not, they are a blast. Nothing actually scary, but it's great to see what two horror legends (George A. Romero and Stephen King) can do when  given the opportunity to cultivate some fantastic, campfire-like, scary stories.

King playing a hick-farmer who discovers a meteorite that's crashed on his farm - acting at its finest!

But I'm not going to focus on this precious item from my childhood. Let's get back to the steaming pile of garbage that I just finished watching. 

Like I said, V/H/S is a series of short horror films all based on the concept of watching amateur footage before something goes horribly wrong (think Blair Witch Project or Paranormal Activity). The film starts out with a couple of jackasses who film themselves running up to a girl in a parking garage who they jump and pull her top down to expose her breasts on camera. They later explain that they sell this footage like this to porn-snuff sites for a little bit of cash - clearly, we'll be rooting for these gents throughout the film. Anyways, we later cut to these hoodlums on route to break into some house as they're getting paid to find a specific video tape for some unknown purchaser. These guys get to the house to find it completely empty until enter the one bedroom with some dead man sitting in a recliner facing a wall of stacked TVs all playing static. From here, the team breaks up to look for the specific tape they're on the hunt for. While they do so, we get the opportunity to check out five tapes they've randomly pulled to watch. I'll break them down quickly below:

Tape 1: Amateur Night

A couple of young guys look to pick up some chicks a make an amateur porn in their motel room using glasses with a spy-cam mount in the brim. Turns out one of the girls (creepy and stand-offish to begin with) is a some sort of demon. She changes into a monster and murder two of the three guys. The last guys (clearly the one with the glasses on) runs out of the room and tries to get help from some people in the parking lot before being pluck up by this demon-girl who has now sprouted wings and flies off into the night with him.

Tape 2: Second Honeymoon

A young married couple travel out to the west to enjoy a little vacation time, filming the whole thing. In the middle of the night an intruder breaks in and films the B&E with the couple's own camera. Although walking around with a switchblade knife, the intruder does nothing but steal some money and dunk the husband's toothbrush in the toilet. Cut to next night. The intruder has once again enter the couple's hotel room. This time the intruder stabs the husband's neck killing him. As the intruder runs into the bathroom it's revealed to be a woman, and... oh, shocker, the wife appears behind her and the two suddenly start to make out. Cut to the wife in the car with assailant asking her to delete the tape. 

Tape 3: Tuesday the 17th

Four kids go to the woods for a camping trip. Turns out there's a killer that can only be seen through their camera - otherwise he's invisible. Ends up killing three kids before you learn that the fourth girl just brought everyone up there to bring out the killer to exact her revenge for when her friends were killed last year. She sets up all these Rambo-like booby traps in the woods, but apparently the monster can teleport or something and eventually gets her too. Question: Why the hell would you ever want to go back to pick a fight with an invisible monster who brutally slayed your friends???

Tape 4: The Sick Thing That Happen to Emily When She Was Younger

Easily the most confusing story of the bunch. Shot from the point of view of a boyfriend video-chatting with his girlfriend - you're told this is a long-distance relationship. The girl claims she is seeing the ghosts of young children in her apartment while complaining about a large lump under the skin in her arm. One night the boyfriend convinces her to confront the ghosts. When she sees them she goes unconscious or something. Then, shocker, the boyfriend steps out from the doorway and begins talking with the ghosts (you can't understand them). He then cuts open the girl's stomach to expose a fetus-like thing and explains that he doesn't know why this keeps happening. Then smacks the girl around so the next day he can frame it that she was hit by a car and that the ghosts are just delusions in her mind. Cut to the boyfriend video-chatting with a completely different girl (claiming to be his girlfriend as well) who's complaining about some bump on her arm. What's the deal with the ghosts? What was that thing that he pulled out of her stomach? How the fuck did the girl not know this guy was next door this whole time? I tried researching about this clip to see if there was something I was missing, but, unfortunately, I still have no clue what this was about.

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Alright, let's touch base with the main story arc before getting to the last tape. As of now all but one of the criminals have disappeared. One guy, the leader, is left - seeming not too distraught that, one-by-one, each of his cohorts have inexplicably vanished. You notice that the dead man is also no longer laying in his chair. As the remaining guy goes around the house looking for everyone, he finds one of his friend's decapitated body sitting in the stairwell. That's when he notices the dead man is up and walking around, covered in blood. The thug then trips down the stairwell where the dead-man jumps down and kills him. 

At this point the final video tape kicks in a starts playing - don't ask me why or how? - it just does.

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Tape 5: 10/31/98

A couple of young guys in LA set out to go to a haunted house for a Halloween party. When they arrive at the house, they find it entirely empty. Searching everywhere, they make their way up to the attic where they see a couple of guys torturing some girl in a satanic manner. Once party group is spotted, the assailants go crazy and tell the kids to leave just as the house begins to shake and go all nuts. The assailants somehow get sucked up to the ceiling. With the coast clear the guys rescue the girl and try and make a break to escape the house. As they run out, plates are floating, windows are disappearing, hands are coming out of the walls... it's nuts! They end up escaping out of the basement and making it back to their car as they frantically drive away. Suddenly, their car breaks down and the girl miraculously disappears from the backseat and reappears in front of the car screaming like a banshee. Turns out the car has stalled on railroad tracks as a bright light grows from the distance. You can probably guess how this story ends... Question: How the fuck did they recover the video casette from a car smash by a speeding train?

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There... that's it for the movie. To sum up my thoughts on the film: Great idea; poor execution.  To bring back the anthology horror films is brilliant. Then to have a main storyline weave each vignette together, great! But this film fails to do that. There's no conclusion that explains what type those guys were looking for. Who was in the house. Why all those fucked up video tapes were there to begin with. It's all nonsense. I was truly hoping that the last tape (however random it was that it gets played after everyone has died) would explain the whole situation, but it doesn't. Sorry. That's really urks me. 

On top of that, the acting is terrible. Normally, that's perfectly acceptable for a horror film - maybe even encouraged. But in these amateur-shot films you're not suppose to be watching actors; you're suppose to be watching real people. So when you see someone clearly reading off a script, poorly pantomiming and reading their lines, it becomes painful to watch. 

So there you have it. Stories that make absolutely no sense. Terrible acting. And little to no scary moments - a handful of gore scenes to gross you out, but the effects fall flat. If there's anything to recommend with this film, it might be to watch the final tape. It was half-way decent. Other than that, I would give it a pass.

Sorry for the lengthy post. Frustration tends to make me ramble.