Once again I went back to the horror anthology as I've knows about the V/H/S movie franchise for awhile now and decided to give it a go. Now for the Millennials, a V/H/S is the thing we used to watch movies on. From Blockbuster. Before laser discs came out. And long before DVDs. The main idea of the film is someone hires some guys to break into a house to steal a V/H/S tape. Once they break in they find a dead guy in a chair and a crap ton of V/H/S tapes. Which one is the right tape? One of the guys decides to start watching the tapes and that's where the short stories come into play. Unfortunately this horror anthology is also a found footage anthology. Talk about tearing me in two. My favorite horror type and my least favorite mashed up together. Well let's bite the bullet and jump in.
Some found footage films have less annoying camera work than others. For the most part this has the more annoying type. Real jerky and bouncy with lots of shots of walls, the sky, and the ground when people are walking or running around. The wraparound story of the guys in the house looking for the tape is OK at best. I've seen better and I've seen worse. Mostly it's too dark to really enjoy it. The first story is about a bunch of guys trying to have sex with girls in a hotel room. One of the guys has glasses equipped with a camera so he can film the sexual encounters. One of the girls they bring back isn't what she seems to be. She turns out to be a succubus and she is kinda hotter as the succubus than when she is just normal girl. Is that typical? Are succubusses, succubusi? Whatever. Are they usually hot? Guess it helps if they are. Anyway guy gets his junk ripped off. Average. Second story is directed by Ti West and my track record with his films have not been great. For this story we have a couple on their honeymoon in Arizona where a weird girl won't leave the couple alone. She actually breaks into their hotel room while they are sleeping on more than one occasion and while there she takes their camera and films herself caressing the wife's butt with a knife and cleaning the toilet with the husbands toothbrush. Don't want to give anything away but Arizona looks real pretty. Might have to go visit some day. Preferably not when the temperature is over a hundred and ten degrees. I have to say this one is decent for something Ti West created.
The third tale involves a group of friends going on a camping trip. One of the girls is really weird and tells all of them they are all going to die. The video camera they are using to film their trip catches glimpses of dead bodies that are not there if not looking through the camera lens. The campers begin to get bumped off one by one and the catch is the killer doesn't show up on camera. Well, it does but it looks pixelated like the cameras tracking is off. If you don't know what tracking is don't worry about it it just means you can never really see who the killer is. Definitely some good kills in this one but it feels incomplete to me since there is no real ending to the story. One of the dangers of anthology stories is that more often than not there isn't enough time for a lot of plot design. The fourth story is done all on video chats and concerns a woman who has a bump on her arm and can't figure out what it is. She asks her boyfriend, who is almost a doctor, what he thinks she should do about it. She has bigger problems when she discovers ghosts in her house. To make matters worse her boyfriend thinks she is loosing it as he watches her take a knife to the bump on her arm trying to get it out. He gets her to stop and tells her when he comes home in a week he will look at it. More ghosts start to show up and when they knock her unconscious things get ever weirder because it becomes clear they are not ghosts but aliens. Might be my favorite of the bunch.
Fifth and final story is about a group of guys going to a Halloween party who are not aware that they are at the wrong house. The house they go to is creepy though but not in a Halloween decorated way just in an old school creepy house kind of way. The guys hear voices coming from the attic and head up there thinking that is where the party is. When they get there they find a group of men performing what seems like an exorcism on a girl they have tied to the rafters. When the young guys realize this isn't part of a Halloween party and the older men discover them a struggle ensues and the younger guys release the girl and take her with them. As soon as the girl is released some serious paranormal stuff starts happening. They finally get the girl back to their car and leave. The girl has a surprise for them though as she isn't possessed, she's actually a witch and she isn't grateful to the guys who just saved her. It wasn't terrible but if you're going to do a Halloween themed story in a horror anthology it needs to be better than this.
Overall I didn't hate the film. None of the stories are terrible. Just none if them are great either. My biggest issue with these found footage films, shorts or features, is there has to be a list of rules that the films have to abide by. I mean how did all these stories get on V/H/S tape? How did the tapes all get collected together as they are? It all seems far fetched at best. Another issue is there is a scene when someone is being murdered and the murderer is filming it. In between knife stabs we see footage of the shoulder of the road passing by a passenger side car window. Then one of the killers asked the other if they erased the footage and they say they did. Then how do we have it now? I don't get it. Well this isn't my first found footage film and it won't be my last. So with that being said I will dust off two and a half old west gold prospectors out of five for this one.
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