V/H/S is a horror film that does not follow the conventional plot progression of most films. It's one of those rare anthology horror movies wherein it is comprised of multiple smaller, "short" flicks put into one. It's much in tune with the drive-in sort of feel and reminds me strongly of a modernized Creepshow.
The story goes that a group of deviant, rapscallion twenty-year-olds carry out all sorts of high-profile law-breaking on camera for money. These sort of acts include breaking into a warehouse and destroying everything in sight, or attacking a random woman on the street and pulling her top off. So in short, they're real charmers.
One of the stunts they're tasked with, at the request of an anonymous source, is to break into a specific house to steal a video tape. Upon entry, they find that the only resident is a dead man sitting in front of a TV turned to static, who seems to have had a collection of hundreds of unmarked video tapes. So they start grabbing them all up in order to ensure that they get the right one. While this is happening, one of the criminals stays back to play whatever tape was in the VCR. The rest of the film is just the contents of this tape and a few other subsequent tapes that are inserted afterword.
It's unfortunate to note that the contents of these tapes, that is the selling point, are none too interesting. I found that they were all very much the same, i.e. "something is stalking me/us in the end it kills me".
The first is about some guys who are trying to record an amateur porn with a spy camera that's placed on the glasses of one of the perverts. As it happens one of the chicks turns out to be something other than human and she viciously murders two of them; and I mean fucking viciously, it actually shows her tearing off a dude's dick and balls. Why that's needed at all, I have no idea, it's obviously just in there for shock-value. Anyway, the third guy, who couldn't be worse at running away, makes it all the way outside before the demon-girl-thing sprouts bat-like wings and takes him away... so basically, what the fuck.
 |
| Demon-chick before demon-mode. |
It's unfortunate that this film seems to stray away from being genuinely creepy; it almost gets there several times. Rather, it's more partial to gross-out gore, which is fine in small doses. Say, for instance, if only one of the tapes contained anything graphic, that'd be effective. Cramming violence into all of them is boring, cliche and not scary at all.
The following tape is worse, not in it's gore-factor, but in it's necessity. It's just about newly married couple on a honeymoon doing normal things. However when they spend the night in a motel, someone wearing a hood breaks in and removes $100 from the guy's wallet, pulls out a switchblade and doesn't do anything with it and scariest of all, throws a toothbrush into the toilet. The next day, the couple does more normal shit and then the following night the hooded person breaks into their motel again, this time stabbing the dude in the throat with the switchblade. Then we see the hooded guy is actually some chick and she starts making out with the woman who's husband just died and then it ends.
So not only is this installment not even remotely scary, it serves no point. Why should I care about the going ons of some couple I know nothing about and am not invested in. Not to mention, it's the only tape without anything supernatural going on, which only furthers the notion that it's simply adding runtime which thusly stands just shy of two fucking hours which is just way too long.
It's almost as if they tried to make them as cliche and predictable as possible and in that they succeeded.
The next clip is nothing short of a Friday the 13th knockoff and is about four teenagers who head out to a remote lake in the woods because one of them goes there every year. Ten seconds into this episode and you'd have to be an idiot to think that any of them are going to survive. But that's not enough foreshadowing already because we then get to hear the girl tell a chilling story about how a bunch of people were killed at this very lake! I mean, it isn't like we've all heard this a million times before, right? Well, as it turns out, there's a killer afoot who is only partially visible and appears to be obscured by glitchy tracking-errors and the girl lured all of her friends here in order to try and kill this guy. She fails, he kills all four of them with ease and eviscerates the girl. Fucking exciting.
There's almost no point in continuing to summarize these, they're not very interesting or very different. It bugs me that they all ended up using the same tired gimmicks over and over again. The found footage genre is clearly on it's last legs and by the end of this film, I was sick of it.
Creepshow remains the time-tested best example of an anthology horror movie. In that film, you get five totally different flicks that play on cliches but just enough so that it's not predictable and it's mixed with inventiveness that you don't see anywhere else. What we have in V/H/S is unvaried sameness that is only made worse by the found footage aspect which, while convincing and well done, serves to make all of the films that much more identical.
I think V/H/S had a lot of potential. If the content of the tapes had been genuinely creepy and mysterious rather than just gory and predictable, it would've made for a much more chilling experience. Don't show us three guys getting killed by a monster, there are literally hundreds of movies where that exact thing happens. Show us something we can't explain, something that leaves us to fill in the blanks; at least, that's how I would make it.
V/H/S was an interesting idea that had terrible execution. It ended up as some awkward cross between The Blair Witch Project and Goosebumps and put the final nail in the coffin of the found-footage revival that's been going ever since the first Paranormal Activity. V/H/S had it's moments, but they were few and far between and not worth it enough to sit through. It's a fine example of how shock-value and jump-out horror only goes so far.
No comments:
Post a Comment