Not to go all Forrest Gump on you, but anthology movies are kind of like a box of chocolates, insofar that you never know what you’re going to get. Of course, that’s not quite true, after all, boxes of chocolates usually comes with cards explaining exactly what you’re going to get – but the saying still holds true with movies that decide to fling four or five stories at you at rapid succession on the hope that most of them sticks. Anthology movies have come and gone but only one has truly managed to forge an honest to god franchise out of possibly the most inconsistent type of film you can get and believe it or not… it ain’t Creepshow.
Sure, Creepshow got whole two movies (we don’t mention the third) and a long running show on Shudder, but after pressing play on itself back in 2012, V/H/S has become a melting pot for modern horror filmmakers such as Ti West, Adam Wingard, David Bruckner and Radio Silence to strut their stuff in the realms of found footage.
Kicking off with the wraparound story “Tape 54”, we find a gang of skeezy, small time burglars breaking into a large house in order to locate a particular VHS videotape that’s apparently worth a lot of money. However, after finding a dead body slumped in a room with countless videotapes stacked up, each member of the gang watches one in order to locate the one they need.
All seem to contain startling, handheld records of messed up experiences with the first being “Amateur Night”, which sees a couple of drunk alpha males rigging up a pair of glasses with a micro camera and mic to record a night of drunken sex, however, their night of morally bankrupt conquests hits a snag when they encounter Lily, a strange, wide-eyed, waif, who takes a liking to one of their group rhat proves to be on the ferral side.
The next tape is entitled “Second Honeymoon” which features a married couple videotaping their trip to Arizona to document their honeymoon, however, after a portentous forture from a mechanical fortune teller, we find that they are being stalked by a mysterious person who films themself stroking their oblivious, sleeping forms with a switch blade. As the trip goes on, the stalker soon let’s their presence be known in the most violent of ways to reveal a surprising motive.
As the burglars continue to search the house, we see that the dead body in the chair has gone missing, but no one notices as we delve into the next tapes entitled “Tuesday The 17th” which plays as a strange, found footage riff on slasher movies where the typical array of teens are stalked by a murderer who glitches out their camera and “The Sick Thing That Happened To Emily” a story told entirely through a series of video chats that sees a young woman try to convince her boyfriend that her apartment is a host for strange disturbances.
In the final story, “10/31/98”, a bunch of Halloween revelers find that the haunted house attraction they’ve rocked up to might actually be a genuine, haunted house.
You have to gjve the makers of V/H/S credit because by merging the tropes of the anthology movie with the constantly jiggling camera work of the found footage genre, it’s positively begging you to not take any of it seriously. Multi-storied movies tend to find it hard to engage with their audience fully before the next story starts and demands that you reset your expectations and then coupled with the fact that movies shot entirely from a first person perspective aren’t exactly known for their sterlibg character work as they hurl the camera around with reckless abandon. At the time, V/H/S seemed less like a fully functioning horror film and more like a series of cinematic experiments from a bunch of young, up and comers from the ranks of genre filmmaking and taken as such, it’s actually rather fun to see such names who have since gone onto bigger budgeted fare – fuck, one of them even went on to direct a Godzilla film.
However, at the time, watching V/H/S was something of a predictably frustrating affair as the restrictions of the chosen format proved to be exactly that: restrictive – and even now, the hit/miss ratio of the stories prove to be way out of balance.
For a start, Adam (The Guest, Godzilla Vs. Kong) Wingard’s wraparound segment, “Tape 54” involves a band of thugs who film all their crimes (bunch o’ geniuses here, yeah?), wander around an old funky mansion, trying to find a particular videotape in order to make a big score – and literally that’s all that practically happens with the tension of disappearing bodies all but being torpedoed by the fact that we keep cutting away for 20 minutes at a time to tell other tales that, the majority of which, are fairly forgettable.
Of the lame ducks, Ti (May) West’s “Second Honeymoon” proves to be the most accomplished as a shadowy stalker with a penchant of dipping people’s toothbrushes into toilets circles a young married couple like a shark. But the short nature of the story doesn’t give the take time to breathe and the neck, stabbing twist comes way too quick and misses the impact it should have had. Elsewhere, Glen (I Sell The Dead) McQuaid’s slasher riff “Tuesday The 17th” and Joe (LOL) Swanberg’s muddled alien insemination story “The Sick Thing That Happened To Emily” are awkwardly staged and utterly bland respectively and while they admittedly have the odd, jarring moment, they prove to have little to no effect whatsoever.
However, what stops V/H/S from being a complete wipeout is that its bookended by two great stories that managed to lift the entire enterprise out of the depths of mediocrity and into must-see territory. Closing out the film is “10/31/98”, an energetic haunted house tale from Radio Silence, the guys behind Ready Or Not and the new Scream sequels who deliver a high-energy dash through a house that features grasping hands coming from the walls after a bunch of partygoers come to the wrong house and interrupt the sacrificing/exorcism of an honest to god witch. However, as fun and creepy as that is, it’s David (The Ritual, the Hellrasier Remake) Bruckner who claims gold with the utterly magnificent, and completely spine chilling “Amateur Night” that sees a bunch of prospective date rapists fall foul of Hannah Fierman’s Lily, a prospective target who turns out to be a fanged, groin-mutilating succubus who takes a shine to one of the guys. Not only is the segment concise and well plotted, but the sight of Lily, giant eyes framing the gargantuan split running down the centre of her forehead, is so completely freakish, it even scored a spin-off movie in the form of 2016’s SiREN. In fact, “Amateur Night” is so strong, it’s almost the sole reason to watch V/H/S in the first place as the movie showcases the best and worst aspects of its format along with horror’s best and brightest.
However, for the most part, V/H/S is more of a case of fast forward…
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