Well, another year and another installment of V/H/S pops up on Shudder as regular as clockwork. However, if any of you are reading any kind of sarcastic or negative tome into that opening sentence, I can assure you that the appearance of yet another installment on the streaming platform is always something of a highlight of my year. While I’ll readily admit that the long running anthology franchise may not have the tightest quality control when it comes to its instalments (in fact, the good/bad ratio is usually all over the place at the best of times), it’s always fun to break open a new batch of crazed stories to see what random-ass stuff we get this year.
However, with V/H/S/Beyond, the franchise has taken something of a slight shift in focus – in the rare times something in a V/H/S segment is in focus, that is – and turned its lens into the realms of science fiction.
However, don’t expect a slew of stories that simultaneously gazes at its navel while it stares at the stars – oh no, because this is V/H/S and that means we get all the gore, body horror and fucked up scenarios we’ve come to expect from horror’s most hard working anthology franchise.
While the wraparound segment, “Abduction/Adduction” sees a bunch of Mythbuster types deliver talking heads segments for a documentary as they prepare to watch footage of an alien encounter, the movie kicks off properly with “Stork”, an Aliens inspired, first person shooter that sees a special monster hunting squad of police fight an alien threat that’s been abducting babies for some predicable nefarious purpose.
Once the smoke clears, we head into “Dream Girl” that sees a somewhat darker side of the film industry of Mumbai as two paparazzi attempt to get footage of the newest Bollywood sensation, Tara. However, after sneaking into her dressing room between musical numbers, one of the paparazzi makes a horrifying discovery about what this new star is actually made of.
From here we hop on a plane to join a bunch of enthusiastic skydivers as they prepare to celebrate the birthday of one of their own with a mass jump in “Live And Let Dive”. But before they’re ready to make the leap, the arrival of a massive mothership means that they’ll all have to bail out earlier than they planned – but even if they survive the fall, there’s some gnarly shit waiting for them on the ground.
We zip over into body horror next as a bunch of animal rights activists are looking into a woman who runs a dog day care centre while having a rather curious taste for taxidermy, but once two of their members infiltrate her home under the guise of a couple, they discover that her love of dogs of all kinds go to horrific lengths as she adores all of her “Fur Babies”. Even the ones she makes herself.
Finally, “The Stowaway” introduces us to Halley a woman who has taken the Richard Dreyfuss route to alien investigation and has abandoned her husband and child in order to follow her obsession with UFOs, however, when she gets her wish and manages to steal on board, she finds that the ship’s tech may not be properly synched up to human biology when she’s injured on take off…
If I’m being honest, if Shudder wanted to put out another V/H/S every year for another decade, I’d be more than happy to settle down to watch them because even though the franchise is often the very epitome of how uneven anthology shows can be, I still get a kick out of their lucky dip style output. However, with this year’s offering, there’s actually no real clear loser of the bunch as virtually all the installments (a whopping six in total this year) are of equal standard. The down in that technically there’s no real winner her either, but I guess that’s the price you pay when all the different segments are actually well balanced.
First, we’ll get the annual task out the way of dismissing the wraparound – surely the reigning achilles heel of V/H/S – and while “Abduction/Adduction” is better than most, it’s still mostly filler to space out the individual stories. However, with Jordan Downey’s “Stork”, we get right to the meat of things, literally, with an all action short that sees a hard bitten group of cops shoot their way through a house absolutely crawling with alien zombies that contains all the chainsawed bodies and shotgun blasted torsos you could ever ask for. Yes it feels more like a video game, yes it contains as much depth as a drop of blood, and yes it suffers on comparison to the similarly frenetic and utterly brilliant “Safe Haven” from V/H/S/2, but for sheer guts, guns and bizarre monsters (the titular Stork creature ranks super-high as one of the most original monster designs you’ll see all year), it’s one hell of an enjoyable opener.
Faring not quite as well is Virat Pal’s “Dream Girl” which turns V/H/S/Beyond’s particular brand of splatterly sci-fi/horror onto Bollywood by weaving a tail of a bitter paparazzi discovering that the latest cinematic sensation has a rather extreme secret lurking under her skin. However, while the reveal that she’s actually a demon/cyborg with an unnerving habit of ripping off arms is certainly novel, the chaos isn’t quite as satisfying as you’d hope from a segment that even delivers a Bollywood dance number before things go nutzoid.
Reclaiming that sense of high energy is Justin Martinez’s wonderfully titled “Live And Let Dive” that delivers the same sort of high-energy thrills that “Stork” did with the impressively unique setting of a bunch of skydivers encounting an Independence Day style invasion while still in the air. Once again, we have an installment that barely has tome for nuance inbetween the spurts of extreme gore and all the first person running and screaming that the story entails, but that doesn’t matter much when you have cool, freaky-limbed extraterrestrials scuttling about (inspired by Xtro perhaps?) and the sight of a man missing a leg trailing blood as he plummets towards the earth.
However, while the opening trio of shorts score high on screamy thrills, it’s the final two installments that not only bring the greatness, but also inject a little star power into the film too starting with the thoroughly fucked up “Fur Babies” that has been gifted to us by Justin Long and his brother Christian. While V/H/S/Beyond certainly has more than it’s fair share of messed up images, the revelation that the installments antagonist has been kidnapping people and switching animal parts onto them to make the people/dog hybrids proves to be the cream of the deranged crop and possibly means that Justin has some lingering therapy issues after the shit Kevin Smith put him through in Tusk. There’s an argument that maybe brain washing random people into thinking they’re dogs and grafting animal bits onto them in order to maul the guy that’s been stealing Amazon deliveries may not be quite as sci-fi orientated as an alien invasion, but this Dog Day Care Of Dr. Moreau proves to be a high point.
Finally we have “Stowaway” which unleashes some horror royalty onto the series as Kate Siegel directs from a script from Mike Flanagan that sees an obsessive mother go above and beyond the call of reason to get proof of alien life only to get trapped on a gooey, UFO as it takes off after it’s pilot has collected all the animal samples that it’s come for. The twist is that every time the rigours of space travel essentially kill Halley, the nanotechnology on board resurrects her – however, it hasn’t actually been programmed with human biology in mind and only knows the ins and outs of the animals already collected thus leaving our lead constantly mutating but essentially unable to die. To be fair, Siegel’s effort is the only one of the group that truly goes for creeps over screams and running and if that typically murky, first person camerawork wasn’t so tough to make out at times, “Stowaway” wouldn’t just be a high point of V/H/S/Beyond, it would be a high point of the franchise in general.
Yet another bumper crop of grainy, glitchy shenanigans proved that the V/H/S producers have pretty much got their shit down by this point, the sci-fi shift is huge fun and hopefully we’ll still have more installments to come. Fast forward to next October, then.
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