V/H/S is about a group of ruffians who video tape their many exploits, ranging from burglarizing houses to violating women in parking lots. Hoping to up the ante of their criminal activity, the group eagerly takes a job offered by a mysterious third party to break into what is believed to be an abandoned house and steal one rare VHS tape. Once there, they find a room full of televisions turned on to white noise, a dead man in a chair in front of the TVs, and hundreds upon hundreds of dated VHS tapes. The rest of the movie is followed by a series of VHS tapes that are played on the TV while the criminals watch. After every tape is done, it cuts back to the efforts of the criminals trying to find the one tape, all the while being terrorized themselves by a mysterious force.
Pros:
1. Each VHS tape segment is directed by a different modern horror director. You can see the full list of directors here. That makes the movie a hundred times more terrifying, because even though each tape is a found footage style tape, each segment has a different horror type, ranging from creepy little kids to demons to psycho killers. The fact that they are all found footage style but so different helps intensify the scares without seeming like a recycled trick.
2. Once again, the found footage style is an absolutely effective and terrifying way to go when filming a horror movie. I absolutely buy into the found footage style because people document EVERYTHING nowadays. It's completely believable for someone to capture something terrifying on tape - especially in an intimate setting - because it's just human nature these days to document every experience you ever have.
3. Once the guys get into the house, they find hundreds of VHS tapes, about 10 TVs all stacked up in one room that are all turned on, and a random dead guy sitting in a chair in front of the TVs. It's immediately set up to be completely opposite of what they're expecting. And it's set up to automatically make the VHS tapes scary as cuss. Are the VHS tapes there to distract them so something else can get them? Who put them there? Why? It's truly unsettling.
4. Any gore that was in the movie was completely appropriate and served the story well. Not that gratuitous violence and gore isn't fun to watch sometimes, but I'd rather leave that to the horror comedies and teen slashers of the world. When it comes to a legitimate scary movie, the less gore the better. Your imagination is the most terrifying thing in the world, and when a film maker can leave just enough to your imagination, I bet it can come up with something way more horrifying than anything a film maker can put on the screen.
5. Most horror stories are most effective when they are short stories, so each mini-movie was stronger than its flaws. Most of the flaws they had were the same kinds of flaws you would see in a full length horror movie, but they didn't have to put in a bunch of filler to stretch things out, so you don't have a lot of down-time to pick apart the story.
*Special mention: The bad guy in the "Tuesday the 17th" short. One of the most original versions of a "pure evil" character I have seen. He has human characteristics but can not be caught on film (except as a blur of pixels and TV snow) and can not be killed even though he can be touched and trapped.
Cons:
1. The main story was a little confusing. I get that the group of guys went there to search for a tape, but I was confused as to why there were so many VHS tapes in the house, which is never explained. And by the end of the movie, the audience discovers that the dead guy in the chair isn't actually dead. He's basically a zombie that is controlled by a creature living in the basement. He uses the zombified guy to kill the guys that are watching the tapes, and then the creature...eats the remains? I still don't really know. Some important stuff about main story is definitely not clear enough. It would have been a lot more terrifying if they just cleared up those one or two things.
2. Before the group gets hired to find the tape, they film themselves breaking into houses, forcing girls to flash themselves for the camera, and various other things that are just immature and dumb. These guys look like they're in their late 20's, early 30's, and they're filming themselves throwing rocks at houses and smashing windows? Dumb. Just. Dumb.
3. Once they get into the house where the rare tape is supposed to be located, no one - and I mean NO ONE - ever once says "hey, there's a dead guy in this room; we should probably leave." I'm sorry, but if I was hired to go somewhere, and I found a dead body at said location, you'd better believe I'd be out of there quicker than The Flash on crack. Along those same lines, I don't think anyone has any reaction to the tapes that are played. They just keep watching creepy tape after creepy tape without showing any signs of uneasiness or fear. Sorry guys, NO ONE is that fearless.
4. The fourth short is called "The Sick Thing That Happened to Emily When She Was Younger," and it's a series of online chat videos between a woman named Emily and her boyfriend James, who's a medical student that lives a few states away from Emily. It starts off with Emily telling James about a mysterious bump on her arm that she can't get rid of, and it reminds her of a wound she received when she was a young girl. James tells her not to mess with it until he comes to visit her so he can check it out. Then strange things start to happen in Emily's apartment in the middle of the night, like mysterious footsteps outside of her room, and seeing a childlike figure running out of her room and slamming the door. She believes that her house is haunted, but her landlord says that no children had ever lived in her apartment before. Later, she tries to make contact with the childlike ghost thing with the help of James, but it knocks her out. Then James leaves his screen and actually appears in Emily's room. He takes a scalpel, cuts her open, and pulls out what looks like a fetus. Then we find out that James was harvesting human-alien hybrid babies using Emily as its incubator. The bump on her arm? A tracking device for the aliens. The end of the tape is another video chat with James talking to a different girl who is telling him about a strange bump on her arm, so it's assumed that James is at it again.
Okay...what?
First off, the ghost things are never explained to the audience. They're pale faced, black haired, weird little kids (there are multiple) and they don't belong anywhere in the story, at all. But they knock her out and watch as James cuts her open and takes the human-alien baby, so it's assumed that they're helpers of some sort. Or something. I really have no idea; I watched it twice and I still don't know what that whole thing was about. Were they used by the aliens to distract Emily and make her think she was going crazy? Were they really ghosts? Were they human-alien hybrid babies all grown up?! I don't know. Whatever the case, that story was just too confusing for it to be really scary. Don't get me wrong, there are truly scary parts in this short, but the whole time I was closing my eyes and thinking "I'm scared but I don't know what's going on!"
Those things aside, the rest of the movie was absolutely cussing frightening, and so worth watching. When you have multiple directors working on one movie like this (especially when they're making their own mini movie) you're bound to get a story you don't like. I know there are just as many pros as cons, but I'm still going to say that I liked it. If a scarecrow falls out of a closet and makes you jump or gets your heart racing, complaining that it's made of cheap materials doesn't change anything. You can like the whole project without liking the small details that make it up, you know? So for that reason, I give this movie 3 out of 5 stars! There you have it; "V/H/S," one of the most terrifying found footage films I've seen recently. And I hope you think so, too! Thanks for reading!
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