Movie Review: The Guest (2014)

 

Usually when I'm watching a new film that I plan to review for my blog, I like to take little notes that might help me with the review later. A funny line to remember here, a cool kill or special effect there. When I sat down to watch The Guest, I had my notebook out and ready to go - and I didn't write a single word. I could not force myself to take my eyes off the screen for that long.

A man named David arrives one day at the home of the Peterson family, claiming to be a military friend of their son who died overseas. David quickly befriends the family and includes himself in their lives, but something is obviously not right with him... and daughter Anna soon becomes very suspicious of this seemingly perfect houseguest.

Right from the beginning, the movie doesn't fuck around with the usual plot pleasantries. There are no opening credits, just a short starting shot, and then "The Guest" in large purple-bluish letters (odd color choice) with ominous music underneath. Two minutes into the movie, the doorbell rings and the audience is introduced to the guest in question, David. From then on, the movie burns at a sort of slow pace, with just enough humor and pops of action to keep the audience watching and waiting for what they know is probably going to be something really awesome at the climax. Of course I knew to expect something awesome because The Guest comes to us courtesy of my current favorite filmmaking duo, Adam Wingard and Simon Barrett. I promise to stop talking about how much I love them when they stop making awesome films. Which is hopefully never.

Actor Dan Steven expertly plays David. Stevens brings to David that brilliant combination of charming, chilling, and creepy. Some of this comes out from Barrett's dialogue, but it is also aided by Stevens' piercing blue eyes and chiseled good looks. He plays the role calmly but with immense control at the same time - able to completely change his demeanor with a simple tic of his mouth or flick of his eyes. In his action scenes he barely has to move, but still causes a lot of damage, which is what makes these scenes a lot of fun.

The Peterson family is also a nice combination of veterans and newcomers who all bring something to the table for their individual roles. Sheila Kelley and Leland Orser (both of whom I knew only by face and not name before this) are the parents, Laura and Spencer. Laura is grieving and therefore too trusting of David, and Spencer is the skeptical one - but only at first. After he finally trusts David, all of his lines seem to be about having a drink with him. Friendless son Luke is played by Brendan Meyer, and Maika Monroe as Anna is really the one who carries most of the film, and she does it well. The only problem is that the two siblings don't really have that much contact through most of the film, which becomes a slight flaw by the conclusion.

What really drives the movie, possibly even more than the performances, is the soundtrack. I admittedly don't have that great of an ear for music, but it would be hard for anyone to ignore the beats that wonderfully accompany many scenes in The Guest. Where other horror films would have creepy piano music, or where an action movie might have the latest popular radio tune, the music here is funky and electronic, with an 80s vibe that really shouldn't fit in with the story but somehow does. It was weird and different, and was strangely what pulled me more into some scenes that otherwise might have been boring.

The Guest is completely not what you think it is going to be. The plot is as simple as it presents itself to be, but with the film laid out much like a horror film (with plenty of action thrown in there) you'll probably be looking into reasons and motivations a lot more than you need to. I know I was. I dared to look on IMDb to see the consensus view on this film and almost all the posts seem to be of the "worst movie ever!!!" variety, so maybe The Guest is one of those movies that will not affect everyone in the same way. I found it to be a pretty slick and cool tale from two filmmakers who manage to once again take our expectations and turn them on their head.

Sidenote: Near the end of the film, in the Halloween maze, did it say "You're next" on the wall? I only saw "you're" and it seemed like it was written similarly to how it was in the movie You're Next, which is a nice nod to Wingard and Barrett's previous film, obviously. Very fun.

Movie Review: V/H/S 2 (2013)

I'm really starting to fall in love with anthologies, and I'm so glad that people haven't forgotten about this film sub-genre, especially when it comes to horror movies. As with pretty much all anthologies, though, things are going to be hit or miss when it comes to ranking the different segments. The same was true with 2012's V/H/S which had a few shorts that I loved and the rest... eh, not so much, but the overall film was pretty awesome. And obviously popular, because now here we are with V/H/S 2 (argh, they should've stuck with "S-VHS") and it has one returning director and four new ones helming five segments, one less than the previous film.

Tape 49

Directed by Simon Barrett

Tape 49 serves as the wraparound narrative for V/H/S 2. Two private investigators, Larry and Ayesha, break into a house to look for a women's missing son. They don't find him but they do find a house full old VHS tapes and a video that the young man made. Ayesha sits down to watch some of the tapes while Larry investigates. There's not a whole lot to this wraparound until the end, but even then it doesn't make much sense and fails to really explain what is going on. As Ayesha continues to watch the  tapes, it starts to affect her in a strange way, plus a figure keeps appearing in the background of the room in which she's watching them. The ending to this segment is delightfully gruesome but all the unanswered questions (what the hell was happening to Ayesha? Why did the mother send the PIs there?) bothered me a little bit. I did like the fucked up motivation of the son's to make his own insane VHS tape like the ones he's been watching and collecting, however, this could have been fleshed out a lot more.

Phase I Clinical Trials

Directed by Adam Wingard

Director Adam Wingard stars as his own main character in Phase I Clinical Trials as a man who suffered an eye injury in a car accident and is participating in the testing of a new kind of camera eye. Though he has his sight back, the patient soon finds out that his new eye also allows him to see other things - things he never wanted to see in the first place. This short plays out like a typical ghost story with a lot of "boo!" jump scares that you can see coming a mile away. Though some of the imagery is rightfully creepy, like the shape of a body under his covers and the look of the actual bionic eye whenever the man looks in the mirror, things get weird when a strange woman shows up. She has a cochlear implant and can hear or sense the ghosts instead of seeing him like our main character can, and other than to explain what is happening to him, she doesn't serve much of a purpose. After that there's a bit of a chase leading up to a supposedly shocking climax that doesn't really manage to shock at all. Phase I Clinical Trials gets the award for figuring out a way to do the found footage in a totally new way and for the ending, but I'm still a little "meh" about this one. I would say that this short could be better if given a longer time limit but the basic premise has pretty much already been done with The Eye (no, not you, Jessica Alba... go away).

Still love both Adam Wingard and Simon Barrett though because they are so my homeboys. Can't wait to see You're Next.

*UPDATE* Watched You're Next last night and really liked it! Review hopefully coming soon...

A Ride in the Park

Directed by Eduardo Sanchez and Gregg Hale

I have no idea who these two directors are but now I know that I like their style. Mike is a bicyclist going out for ride through the woods and for some reason he has a camera on his helmet and somewhere on the handlebars of his bike, pointing at him. Anywho, he comes across a woman who asks him for help but ends up attacking him and turning him into a zombie. So now we get a short from the point of view of a zombie, which turns out to be strangely gruesome, funny, and sad at the same time. This is one of the best looking shorts of the bunch with many shots that are framed perfectly (the accompanying picture is my favorite) and some nice gore work as Mike chomps down on some victims - and himself - even pulling out some intestines in one scene. The funny part comes when he tries to eat the guy's wallet and spits it out. That was cute. I'm not so sure about the whole zombie-still-remembers-love thing by the end of the short but it worked on me in the moment, and made for a better ending than just somebody else putting him down with a gun. All in all, a very good little tale that I quite enjoyed. Thumbs up!

Safe Haven

Directed by Timo Tjahjanto and Gareth Huw Evans

Okay, let's all just stand up right now and applaud these guys, because Safe Haven was beyond words awesome. Perhaps that is a little unfair seeing as how this is the longest segment of the five and therefore had a lot more room to develop and show us lots of cool stuff, but damn, did it ever deserve it. The story follows a news crew as they film and interview the "father" of a cult called Paradise Gates. After entering their compound and getting deeper into the community, things soon get seriously out of hand for our characters. I was definitely expecting something weird to happen with the whole cult thing, but not anything like this. There are so many amazing moments that happen here - the throat slashing (which I both love and hate at the same time), the body exploding, the room of guys who commit suicide, not to mention the full-grown fucking demon climbing out of a woman's stomach. Effects work is fantastic all the way through and looks so realistic that the VHS quality actually makes it look even more awesome, you know? Safe Haven is pretty much an all around amazing little bit of filmmaking right here. The acting, the story, the fantastic effects that just get more surprising with each new scene... all leading up another great conclusion that actually had me laughing my head off from pure enjoyment.

Slumber Party Alien Abduction

Directed by Jason Eisener

As the last segment in this anthology, Slumber Party Alien Abduction is severely misplaced. Knowing the title before I saw it kind of ruined the surprise for me but there's still a lot wrong with this segment. A group of kids are making mischief and filming it while their parents are gone, when, duh, aliens land and come after them. Yawn. Despite being young and innocent kids, the characters are all unlikable and annoying. The camera mounted on the family dog is no doubt inventive and a good way to explain how they are still filming while being chased by aliens, but it's still weird. The aliens themselves are your typical grey boys with bald heads and long limbs, so there's nothing new or fun there. The short is also too short! There's a little bit of a set up and then most of the exciting stuff is just a quick chase sequence where not much else happens. I'm bored. Order is definitely important in an anthology, people, and this one did not deserve to be last.

V/H/S 2 is a step up from its predecessor in a few ways, with more likable characters and bringing the number of segments down by one so that some of the better shorts have more room to breathe. Two of the shorts are fairly weak (Tape 49 and Slumber Party Alien Abduction) while the other three are much more successful. Is V/H/S 3 coming soon then? Well, technically this series could go on forever because they are only linked by format instead of story, and I'd be more than happy to see more of this kind of stuff in the future.

Movie Review: The ABCs of Death (2012)

Oh dear goodness, this was a test of perseverance. As I often like to take notes while I'm watching a new movie - just random thoughts that help me write my reviews later - The ABCs of Death nearly kicked my ass because a movie that was already over 2 hours long took me around 3 hours to watch because I had to keep pausing and writing. And like I predicted, I was sometimes writing very positive things and sometimes writing very, very negative things. The ABCs of Death is just like any anthology wherein you have hits and misses, but this one had far too many misses to make me recommend the whole thing.

So you probably know the deal here: Twenty-six filmmakers from around the world were each given a letter of the alphabet, and they had to come up with a word that started with that letter to make a short film about death. Out of the 26, I count 9 that I put stars by, meaning that I really liked it, and 3 that I put half stars by, meaning that I sorta liked it. I guess that's not so bad but a lot of these dudes could have done so much better. And a lot of them needed to stay away from anything having to do with the bathroom.

"A is for Apocalypse"

Directed by Nacho Vigalando

This was an excellent way to start things out. This is the kind of short film that I really like - they get the main point across but the story has so much room to grow if it was given more time. The lighting is beautiful and the effects work is absolutely killer. This one definitely gets a star.

"B is for Bigfoot"

Directed by Adrian Garcia Bogliano

Could have been so much better if two things had happened: one, if there had actually been a freaking Bigfoot in the short, and two, if the director hadn't wasted so much of the minimal time on the two characters telling the story rather than showing us something interesting. Weak. The main actress was good, though.

"C is for Cycle"

Directed by Diaz Espinoza

A mysterious hole in the bushes of a man's backyard are the center of a strange "cycle" of events in this short. The production quality leaves a little to be desired, but again this was semi-interesting because I can see it being a part of a much larger story. 

"D is for Dogfight"

Directed by Marcel Sarmiento

Easily my favorite one of all! "Dogfight" shows a boxer in some kind of underground Fight Club type thing were he has to fight a vicious dog. The whole thing is in slow motion and it looks so freaking pretty, you guys! The angles are perfect, and I'll be damned if the dog isn't one really good actor. It's a simple story with a simple little twist to it that had me totally LOLing and falling in love with this thing at the same time. Two thumbs up!

"E is for Exterminate"

Directed by Angela Bettis

I'm so sorry, my dear Angela, but this was lame. The CGI spider was bad enough but then the whole ending was completely ruined because it's so similar to an urban legend that's been around for years. I guess I was expecting something a bit more imaginative. Still love you, girlfriend.

"F is for Fart"

Directed by Noboru Iguchi

I have nothing nice to say about this. That is all.

"G is for Gravity"

Directed by Andrew Traucki

The death of a surfer is so... boring. All this consisted of was a POV shot of a guy getting his stuff out of the back of his car, running onto the beach and into the water, paddling around for a little bit, and then somehow falling in the water and drowning or something. The last shot is the surfboard standing on end in the water. Guess I don't get it, or it's just not all that impressive. Boo.

"H is for Hydro-Electric Diffusion"

Directed by Thomas Cappelen Malling

Thus begins one of the many "What in the holy fuck is this" shorts. Or maybe it began with the fart one. A Nazi cat stripteasing for a dogfighter dog and then trying to kill him with some electric machine thing? Was this a reference to something else that I totally didn't get? Whatever. Hated it.

"I is for Ingrown"

Directed by Jorge Michel Grau

Gorgeous. A woman tied up in a bathtub is being murdered by her husband, with some really beautiful and meaningful dialogue playing in the background. The actress is also beautiful and so committed to the role that it is painful to watch the way she scratches at her throat and arms, and the way whatever her husband injected her with makes her vomit through her gag. Ew. Really nice job here, Mr. Grau!

"J is for Jidai-Geki (Samurai Movie)"

Directed by Yudai Yamaguchi

There's not a lot of substance or meaning to this short, but it's good for a bit of a laugh. The effects aren't bad, however, I'm still wondering about those wigs or whatever it was those guys had on the tops of their heads. Was there a point to that?

"K is for Klutz"

Directed by Anders Morganthaler

"K is for Klutz" is one of a few animated shorts in the bunch. Though the animation is nice, poo and toilet humor has, was, and always will be incredibly juvenile and unfunny so this one lost points with me for the subject matter.

"L is for Libido"

Directed by Timo Tjahjanto

This is one that started out like it could be half-funny, half-serious but then turned into all kinds of serious. It actually turns out to be pretty fucking fucked up, as it deals with the depths of sexual perversion and gratification. The gore is excellent with the spikes that come up through the chairs, and the images just get worse and worse as this short invades your mind. You all know I love the dark stuff so I was all over this one - even though there is a quick scene involving a child that... I can't even go there. The set is amazing, the acting is good, this looks like a real movie. Loved it.

"M is for Miscarriage"

Directed by Ti West

A shorter than short, lazy piece of "filmmaking." I expected so much more from Ti West because though this short does deliver an effective punch, it is by far the weakest of all the shorts and even worse than the fart one. So, so disappointing.

"N is for Nuptials"

Directed by Banjong Pisanthanakun

Surprisingly a very cute and entertaining piece about a man who buys a parrot to help him propose to his girlfriend and the parrot ends up revealing one of the man's secrets which turns out to be deadly for him! This one got a half star just for being funny even though there's not much else to the story. The actors are also beyond adorable.

"O is for Orgasm"

Directed by Bruno Forzani and Helene Cattet

Not so much a short film as an experimental film, and a well done one at that. I couldn't give it a star because it just didn't do anything for me on a personal level, but I can admit that it is beautifully shot and is very good at keeping your attention. I would appreciate if someone would explain the bubbles to me, though.

"P is for Pressure"

Directed by Simon Rumley

Really nice story that is told with no dialogue and a succession of quick shots and short scenes to show the hard life of a young single woman with three kids. There's no horror element to the story, and it instead reaches you on a real emotional level that hits hard. I'll never condone the killing of a kitten for a bicycle but at least there's a happy ending. This one gets a star for sure.

"Q is for Quack"

Directed by Adam Wingard

OMG, this was genius. Director Adam Wingard and writer Simon Barrett (love both of these dudes) play themselves in the short, lamenting over the fact that they were assigned the letter "Q" for their ABCs of Death segment. Needless to say, they come up with a clever way to solve their problem - even if it doesn't have very good consequences for them. Too funny. I love these dudes even more now!

"R is for Removed"

Directed by Srdjan Spasojevic

From the director of the controversial A Serbian Film (which I still need to write about...) comes another hardcore - no pun intended - story about... something. Yeah, it was another one I didn't get at all. Some kind of medical experiment on a guy who's got pieces of film strip in his flesh or something? Is that right? Then he escapes and kills everyone in pretty gross ways. A lot of these shorts are starting to make me feel really, really stupid and like I should have paid more attention in English lit class about symbolism and all that crap. I need to read up on this one some more.

"S is for Speed"

Directed by Jake West

Hated this at first because it was incredibly amateurish and hokey looking, but it ended up getting a half star for turning into a more serious story about death chasing a pair of junkie girls. Nice turnaround!

"T is for Toilet"

Directed by Lee Hardcastle

After Dogfight, this is definitely my second favorite of all the segments. It's a pretty crude (effects-wise) claymation short about a boy's fear of the toilet. He has a dream where the toilet turns into a monster and hideously devours his parents, with some great stuff that is all the more entertaining because it's claymation. The ending is funny in a really, really horrible way - but you will completely love it. "Danny Glover had nothing to be afraid of in Lethal Weapon 2." So true.

"U is for Unearthed"

Directed by Ben Wheatley

Unearthed is the only short to take on a true horror trope - vampires! It's another one that avoids the cost of effects by doing it in POV but it works here, as a vampire first escapes from the earth, attacks people in the woods, and then is ceremoniously put down. Simple, but effective. That's all you need to do, people. Good work.

"V is for Vagitus (The Cry of a Newborn Baby)"

Directed by Kaare Andrews

Okay, um... wow! So put Vagitus up next to Miscarriage, and you'll understand my frustration with Mr. Ti West. Vagitus has this whole crazy sci-fi story about the future and prophets and babies - I don't care! There was wonderful action, acting, and effects work in such a short time that it felt like someone had cut together the best parts of a full length movie. Excellent!

"W is for WTF!"

Directed by Jon Schnepp

WTF indeed. It starts out as a real story, similar to what they did in Quack actually, but then just turns into a series of random shots of stuff I don't remember. The title pops onto screen at the end and you go, Oh. So none of that was supposed to make any sense or anything. Just a lot of WTF shots. Boring. Not creative.

"X is for XXL"

Directed Xavier Gens

Fucking YES, you guys. This was beyond perfect in so many ways. It's a social commentary, a moral commentary, and so incredibly gruesome and disturbing in an incredibly meaningful, heartbreaking way. Love, love, love it.

"Y is for Youngbuck"

Directed Jason Eisener

So, no one likes a perverted old guy and Eisener goes about the subject of revenge in a very interesting way. Still, I didn't like it. Not enough explanation or exploration, and it really needed to flesh out the story just a bit more.

"Z is for Zetsumetsu (Extinction)"

Directed by Yoshihiro Nishimura

Very much the biggest WTF short of all - it out-WTFs the previous WTF segment, and I didn't know that was possible. I have no idea what this was about or what the point of it was so therefore I don't care and I don't like it. There's naked chicks and big penises, and way more ridiculousness than I can handle. An ADULT made this thing, right? Oi vey.

FINALLY, THE END. Okay, so I'm naming my top three favorites as Dogfight, Toilet, and XXL. Least favorite and most disappointing was Miscarriage, and also Hydro-Electric Diffusion, Gravity... and about 10 other ones. I was hoping for a better balance of hits and misses with all these shorts but I guess that might have been impossible with all these different personalities and styles. We'll see what a new crop of directors can come up with in the next ABCs of Death!

Movie Review: V/H/S (2012)

You know what the cool thing about V/H/S is? It's an anthology film, so you technically don't really have to say whether you love or hate ALL of the movie. Maybe you can only like some of it, and pretty much hate the rest of it - which was sadly my reaction to the film. I really wanted to like V/H/S so much, and had such high hopes for it, but ultimately a good portion of it disappointed me. I will say that the stories got better as the movie went on - just the overall execution on everything was not my favorite.

Tape 56

Directed by Adam Wingard

(A Horrible Way to Die, You're Next)

Tape 56 is the wraparound story (ah, so that's what that is called) of the anthology and there's really not a lot to it. Pretty much right away, you hate all the characters and therefore couldn't give a shit what happens to them. They are a group of petty thieves and crooks who think that a hard day's work includes smashing up windows, stealing stuff, and grabbing innocent women in parking buildings and exposing their breasts for a video camera. Classy. They break into a house to steal a rare VHS tape and come up a dead guy in a room with a bunch of tapes and they start watching them and those tapes are the rest of the movie, get it? Was especially disappointed with this one after I found out that the director was Adam Wingard, the man behind the wonderful movie A Horrible Way to Die. I don't really get what happened at the end of this segment

Also, I need to point out that like all of Wingard's other projects, most of Tape 56 was shot in Columbia, Missouri - very near where I am sitting right now. Hit me up for your next project, dawg. I'll get your coffee. 

Amateur Night

Directed by David Bruckner

(The Signal)

Fuck you. Seriously? With Amateur Night, we just go from one group of assholes to another group of assholes. If I were in the same room as the main characters in Amateur Night, I guarantee they would have been dead a lot fucking sooner. So again, I hate all the characters and don't give a shit about what happens to them. They're just some douchebags who make the token "nice guy" of their group wear glasses with a camera on them so he can film the guys having sex with girls in their hotel room. They go bar hopping and bring back two chicks - one passes out almost immediately, and the other is... well, not what you would call normal. There's a bit of awkward suspense with how weird the girl is and how she keeps whispering to Token Nice Guy "I like you". It's pretty obvious that she's going to turn on the guys and kill the guys. The gore work when it finally happens is very good, which is a nice balance to the fact that I don't give a shit that these guys are getting ripped apart, and the makeup on the girl is also very cool. Dug the ending as well. Definitely unexpected, and something I haven't seen before.

Second Honeymoon

Directed by Ti West

(The House of the Devil, The Innkeepers)

So with Ti West's previous projects, I was betting that we could expect a bit more of the slow burn (well, not too slow - he only had about 20 minutes to work with here) with not a lot of payoff at the end. But for some reason, this one still worked on some level for me. Most of it is rather boring as it follows the road trip of a young couple apparently having their second honeymoon, I guess. There are a couple of creepy parts when a girl comes to their door and asks for a ride and when an unknown person comes into their hotel room while they are sleeping, and West does a good job of frustrating the audience by not letting us know what this means for the characters. Was it just a burglar? Or somebody with more sinister intentions? I'm really starting to like Joe Swanberg as an actor. He was great in A Horrible Way to Die and I love just how real and normal he is in this. He's also the third asshole of V/H/S as he makes a few suspiciously asshole-y remarks to his girl. For me, this made the payoff at the end actually be a very nice payoff.

Word of advice, guys: Do not act like a dick when your girlfriend will not strip and/or have sex with you on camera. That's a good way to... well, just watch the segment and find out.

   

Tuesday the 17th

Directed by Glenn McQuaid

(I Sell the Dead)

Hm. Not really too much to say about this one. As the title might imply, this short is your typical kids-getting-killed-in-the-woods story, even though it does have a bit of a twist. The girl, Wendy, that brings all her friends to these woods acts very creepy and the woods themselves seem to have a strange effect on the camera. There are some subliminal shots of dead bodies around the woods and when the requisite killer-in-the-woods shows up, he is always distorted on the camera so you can't really see him. That part was a cool idea, but the rest of this segment was just meh. Again, the gore work was great looking, I just wished that there was a bit more to the story. Tuesday the 17th might make a good feature-length film to help explain just who/what the killer is.

The Sick Thing That Happened to Emily When She Was Younger

Directed by Joe Swanberg

So now Mr. Swanberg goes behind the camera with short whose title is longer than the film itself. This segment makes a nice break from the video camera footage of the other segments by now using Skype footage of a girl with an apparently haunted apartment talking to her surgeon boyfriend who is away. They try to jump-scare the audience with images of ghostly little kids running around Emily's apartment but that doesn't work out too well. I like the twist where it's revealed that her boyfriend is not really in Michigan but rather in one of the apartments right next door, and the reason for him being there is... well, here's a spoiler: the kids are not actually kids but aliens, I guess, who have been using Emily to make their little alien babies since she was twelve. I'm not quite sure how I feel about this, as there are so many unanswered questions with this scenario. This segment is a nice attempt, but ultimately falls short of being scary or interesting and instead is just confusing.

10/31/98

Directed by Radio Silence

Okay, this was by far my favorite of the bunch. Awesome way to end the movie. Four guys trying to go to a Halloween party end up at the wrong house, where they get a lot more Halloween-type craziness than they bargained for. One point for this segment comes from the main dudes actually not being assholes. Another point is given for the cameraperson's costume - a nanny cam. Very cute. The most points are given for the awesome freaking climax. For a while the guys just wander around this empty house (why they stay there when there is clearly not a Halloween party going on is anybody's guess but we can overlook that for now) but when they find their way up to attic and come upon some dudes yelling all Evangelical priest-like and have a girl tied up, that's when the fun starts. The crazy guys get mysteriously pulled up by some force and disappear into the ceiling, and the main characters get the girl and run out. The house has now become alive - objects flying around, hands and arms coming out of the walls and floors, doors disappearing - and that shit was AWESOME. I was seriously freaked out the whole time and absolutely loving it. My kind of haunted house, seriously. Or possessed house, or whatever it was. 

So all in all, V/H/S turns out to be hit and miss. The concept is nice because it gave the directors the opportunity to put a bunch of totally different stories together; it's just that only two of them were great and the rest barely mediocre. I liked that the look of film really was in VHS style, but the many, many times throughout the piece that the video and audio went all distorted got very annoying after a while. V/H/S was not the biggest disappointment of 2012 but a lot of the film left something to be desired. Repeated viewing will probably have me skipping over most of the segments to get to the actual good ones, especially the last one. A sequel is (of course) in the works already with a new crop of directors, but I'm still interested to see what they come up with.