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: 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.