V/H/S
I’d been planning to watch this back in October and ran into
scheduling/budget issues. It was recently released on DVD so I put it in the
Netflix queue.
It’s a found-footage horror anthology. The framing sequence
involves a group of criminal douchebags whose primary means of employment seems
to be assaulting random women, pulling up their tops and selling the resulting
footage as ‘reality porn.’ I pretty much hated all of them from the first
couple of seconds and only hung in through the initial segments because I hoped
someone would murder the whole group of proto-rapists as horribly as possible.
That whole opening sequence was so awful and annoying I
seriously wondered if I could stomach the whole movie. And I mean annoying in a
number of ways - crap characters, jumpy editing, slow pacing and why the hell
are they even shooting on VHS in the first place?
One of their number talks them into breaking into a house
and stealing a VHS tape for an undisclosed third party. Of course they agree,
because, as I mentioned, criminal douchebags. At the house they find the body
of an old man in a chair in front of several tvs. They split up with one group
going to check the basement (where they find a stack of video tapes) and one
staying behind to review the handful of tapes already there (in at least on
VCR).
The remaining segments are all (presumably – though the last
segment takes place AFTER the framing sequence is over) from tapes that are
viewed. In between each segment we come
back to the room where the tvs are and see that a) the dead man has disappeared
or returned behind whichever jackass is in the room at the moment and b) a new
guy comes in, finds the previous guy gone and proceeds to watch the next tape.
I guess they all did get horribly murdered – but most of it
happens off-screen.
“Amateur Night”
The first segment follows three friends who set about trying
to bed some women and tape it with some trick glasses for an amateur porn
video.
This is where I really started to worry that I was going to
have to sit through a couple of hours of rapey awfulness.
This segment is pretty uneven and the female protagonist is
really over the top with the creepy from minute one. None of this segment
scared me or even gave me the creeps (except for the basic premise of ‘let’s
lure a girl back to our hotel room and tape her’). The acting is okay and the
effects are fairly good, but the pacing and atmosphere just didn’t gel. I’m
easily jumped and even when things are telegraphed well ahead of time (hello Halloween II) I’ll still jump out of
reflex. Not the case for this segment – I was almost bored.
“Second Honeymoon”
In general I liked this segment better and, as it didn’t
feature obvious assholes doing obvious asshole things, I enjoyed watching it a
bit more. It follows a young couple on a trip out West. Guy has a little
douchebag in him, but compared to the guys in the previous segments he’s a
sweetheart. There were some nice creepy moments, I appreciated the ‘Remember
the movie Big?’ moment in the Wild
West town and the first moment when you realize that neither of the
protagonists is the one using the video camera in the hotel room that night.
All in all I think it falls apart in the end, though. The
‘fortune’ notwithstanding, the ending isn’t really built up to and it comes as
a shock in a bad way. It feels forced and not sustained by the previous action.
It completely ruined any goodwill the piece had previously built up.
“Tuesday the 17th”
Wendy brings a group of friends to serve as bait so she can
confront and kill a serial murderer that took another group of her friends the
previous year. I didn’t hate this piece
– and I liked some of the cinematography and ideas – but the story was bad and
the acting was not very good either.
“The Sick Thing That
Happened to Emily When She Was Younger”
This movie is just full of guys who are terrible to women.
This was the first segment I actually liked. It’s full of
pretty standard found-footage ghost fare, but the video chat aspect and acting
elevated it a notch and the twist was well done. Nothing was creepier to me
than when Emily raised her arm to show how she was trying to get the ‘bump’ out
of it, though. Yeesh.
“10/31/98”
This was far and away my favorite of the bunch. Likeable
characters, well shot, acted and edited. The house reminded me of the house in
House of the Devil and I like to imagine that it’s the same edifice, just ten
years later.
Four friends head to a Halloween party (the found footage is
provided by the person dressed in a teddy bear costume as a ‘nanny-cam’). When
they get to the house (although it’s possible they’ve got the directions messed
up) they find it empty. Some strange things happen and they begin to believe
that their friends have set it up as a haunted house. I loved this conceit of
having none of the creepy stuff really work on them or simply engender a
grudging admiration.
They stumble on a exorcism/summoning ritual (I wasn’t clear
which) and join in the chanting as they think this is part of the experience.
This doesn’t go well.
For me, this was the only story firing on all cylinders and
a strong finish to mixed bag of stories.
In general I thought things didn’t work as well as they
could have. I’d totally watch “10/31/98” again – but I think that’s the only
segment I truly enjoyed.
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