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How entertaining? ★★★☆☆
Thought provoking? ★☆☆☆☆ 15 January 2013
This article is a review of V/H/S. |
“Gary, let’s check out the basement.”
The pleasure and frustration of anthology movies are their inconsistent quality, think FOUR ROOMS to PARIS JE T’AIME. The pleasure comes from finding the segments that you connect with or enjoy, and frustration in not having the entire runtime satisfy. There is also the chance to experience another project from directors you’re a fan off, but whose output might not be as frequent as you desire.
It was surprising how much of a blast V/H/S was – it was tightly put together, and every segment seemed to attempt to be as scary as the filmmakers could make them in a confined time allotment. The reason that it drops a star for entertainment is the gratuitous female nudity. One appreciates a beautiful woman, but in this day and age, surely exploiting women in the horror genre is passé? The directors may defend themselves saying it was meta or a commentary, but if that’s so, it is not sophisticated enough.
The pleasure and frustration of anthology movies are their inconsistent quality, think FOUR ROOMS to PARIS JE T’AIME. The pleasure comes from finding the segments that you connect with or enjoy, and frustration in not having the entire runtime satisfy. There is also the chance to experience another project from directors you’re a fan off, but whose output might not be as frequent as you desire.
It was surprising how much of a blast V/H/S was – it was tightly put together, and every segment seemed to attempt to be as scary as the filmmakers could make them in a confined time allotment. The reason that it drops a star for entertainment is the gratuitous female nudity. One appreciates a beautiful woman, but in this day and age, surely exploiting women in the horror genre is passé? The directors may defend themselves saying it was meta or a commentary, but if that’s so, it is not sophisticated enough.
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The structure is something to admire in its simplicity. Four utter douche bags go around assaulting and vandalising, which they record on camcorders and sell to websites who host such grim vids. But they only get $50 for their graft. Then a relatively lucrative opportunity is presented: Burglarise a house in order to steal a v/h/s tape – they’ll know the one when they see it. On breaking and entering, the small group find a corpse in front of a plethora of TV screens with tapes lying around. While the gang split up to search the rest of the house, one watches through the vids. These provide our anthology. As each is finished we go back to the creepy house with the dead guy sitting behind the television viewer. (As you may have guessed, I do love watching movies, but even my adoration would stretch to doing so in a room with the recently deceased. But when a job has to be done, it has to be done, right?)
What all the segments have in common is they are of the found footage, BLAIR WITCH-esque first person perspective, variety. Depending on how tough you are with these things, there is huge tension in places, utilised to the utmost when whatever is outside the frame is about to wreak havoc. We get some inventive visual effects, vampires, and an impressive haunted house. It’s either groups of four or couples, and surprisingly they don’t feel samey, thanks to the storytelling, which is of a strong quality. If I was to give a prize for the winner, it’d be the Halloween rescue, while the weakest is Ti West’s SECOND HONEYMOON – unfortunate as I enjoyed THE INNKEEPERS, though here, there isn’t enough to get one’s fangs into.
Horror aficionados may get a kick out of this, horror toe-dippers almost certainly will.
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We have selected movies below that we think will be of interest to you based on this review.
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