If the first V/H/S taught us anything is that an anthology movie is chiefly going to be judged on it’s best and worst segments with everything else in the middle ending up as some sort of mid-level blur. While David Bruckner’s cracking “Amateur Night” was as good as any anthology installment you’re ever likely to see, a host of far weaker installments managed to bring the movie’s overall average down to something far less than that single entry deserved.
Well, V/H/S brainchild Brad Miska is at it again with another batch of found footage frighteners helmed by the cream of indie genre talent of the time which sees such visionaries as Adam (The Guest) Wingard, Eduardo (The Blair Witch Project) Sanchez, Garath (The Raid) Evans, Timo (May The Devil Take You) Tjahjanto and Jason (Hobo With A Shotgun) Eisener help raise some important queries. Will the quality rate be higher? Who’s segment will emerge as the best? And, most of all, how much motion sickness can I expect to get?
Press play, viewers.
In a replay of the first film’s wraparound segment, unscrupulous private investigators Larry and Ayesha break into the apartment of a young man whose mother has reported his disappearance, but as they wander around his deserted apartment, they find a set up of tv screens and stacks of old VHS tapes scattered around. Hoping to find clues, Ayesha starts watching the tapes while Larry explores the house – but as before, the more tapes that are watched, the weirder things become.
First up is “Phase I Clincial Trials”, a story told entirely from the POV of Herman Middleton’s brand new, bionic eye implant which, for trial purposes, is recording at all times. However, any reservations Herman has about having a camera implanted in his ocular socket are exaggerated by the fact that it starts allowing him to see marauding ghosts lurking about his apartment. After being visited by Clarissa, a woman who gained the ability to hear the dead due to a cochlear implant clues him in to the fact that the longer he notices the, the more power they have to harm him.
The next tape turns out to be “A Ride In The Park” which sees David cyclist Mike peddle into the early stages of a zombie epidemic and promptly get bitten, but as he turns and joins the growing numbers of the dead, the camera affixed to his helmet captures the whole, tragic journey.
The third tape, sinisterly entitled “Safe Haven”, proves to have something of a knockout punch as a film crew strap themselves up with as many hidden cameras as they can in order to investigate the compound of a cult in Indonesia known as Paradise Gates. However, their internal drama seems strangely entangled with the fact that they’ve inadvertently pick the exact day to visit when the cults leader announces that it’s time for his followers to ascend – in the bloodiest ways possible.
Finally, the last tape, “Slumber Party Alien Abduction” finds a group of foul-mouthed kids on a trip to a log cabin beset by alien invaders as strange, extra terrestrial beings gate crash their vacation.
While the overall quality of the segments has risen since the first movie, V/H/S/2 still suffers noticably from an ailment that plagued its predecessor – namely that one of its entries turns out to be far superior than all the others and thus makes you wish you were just watching a feature length version of that movie. The segment in question is unsurprisingly Gareth Evan’s and Timo Tjahjanto’s barn storming Safe Haven that proves to be the equivalent of David Bruckner’s fantasic “Amateur Night”, but before I lavish praise on this gore streaked, mini-masterpiece, it’s only fair that I attend to the other stories first.
Simon Barrett’s wraparound segment is essentially a reworking of the first movie’s, but instead has a much better ending that tries to claim that watching these weird tapes can effect your mind and that is even possible to make one with some careful planning and a couple of greedy private investigators. It’s hardly groundbreaking, but it’s eerie, it has a freakish, spider-walking ghoul in it, not to mention a harsh, self-inflicted gunshot wound that ups the gore content nicely. So that’s nice…
However, one of the more blander entries is Adam Wingard’s “Phase I Clinical Trials”, which takes an interesting premise and proceeds not to do anything with it apart from add a bunch of jump scares and put Wingard himself in front of the camera, despite the fact that he is the camera, so to speak. The result is a whole mess of jump scares aimed directly at the camera and a bunch of garbled lore that doesn’t really pay off; for example, it’s established that the ghosts are pissed about something but it’s never fully explored thanks to the restrictive timeframe and as a result, feels less than a well rounded, taunt, short story than it does an experimental student film.
Fairing far better is “A Ride In The Park” which is a tidy little zombie romp directed by one of the people who kick started the modern trend of found footage in the first place – The Blair Witch Project’s Eduardo Sanchez – who teams up with his Blair Witch producer, Gregg Hale, to helm one of the visually brighter installments of this very gloomy franchise. Essentially a first person experience that takes from an attack, infection, resurrection and annihilation of the hapless Mike, it may not carry many suprises and, at times, ends up being a little awkwardly staged, but it’s a fun, breezy instalment in a franchise that usually takes itself quite seriously.
Skipping the third story for now, Jason Eisener’s “Slumber Party Alien Abduction” proves to be nowhere as fun as its title suggests, but it’s one of the rare entries that got reworked as a movie (2022’s Kids Vs. Aliens). However, while a lot of the segment mixes things up in an interesting way – the camera being mounted almost exclusively on the family dog is a new one on me – all the flashing strobe lights in the world can’t disguise that the aliens are just guys in bodysuits and floppy hands.
However, carrying the entire movie on its broad, bloodsoaked shoulders is Evans’ and Tjahjanto’s magnificent “Safe Haven” that takes the bestial brutality from The Raid and turns it loose onto a nightmarish tale of suicide cults and demons. The energy of the thing is fucking relentless and the directors get an insane amount of detail into such a short space of time as the calm facade of the cult erupts with shotgun blasts to the head, box cutters to the throat and a supernaturally sped up pregnancy that brings forth a winged, goat-headed abomination into the world to probably destroy it. As good, if not better, than “Amateur Night”.
Once again, the V/H/S gang provides a perfectly acceptable anthology movie that’s boosted through the roof thanks to sticking a five-star banger among a bunch of three-star hopefuls.
Come for the cult, the rest is a bonus.
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