V/H/S - Kickin' It Old School

As one ought to approach any film that can be considered a 'compilation', I began V/H/S with a certain trepidation - I'm not usually a fan of anthologies as they tend to place characterisation and atmosphere at the back of the priorities in favour of cheap pay-offs. But V/H/S transcends this with a group of talented young directors and a found footage flavour that accelerates familiarity with the characters.

There are five small horror films in this flick, with another framing film which explains why the audience is subjected to the remaining five. We meet a group of mates who generally get up to no good - they molest strangers, they smash up abandoned properties. Then one of them announces that he's got a job for them, and a very well-paid one at that - to retrieve a video tape from some old bloke's house. They have very few details, and when they rock up to the house, things go smoothly until they notice that there happens to be the body of the old dude sitting in front of a bank of TVs with VCRs attached and a number of tapes sitting around. They split up to find the tape in question, and a number of things happen. A couple of them opt to watch a couple of the videos. A couple of them start to disappear in suspicious circumstances. And the cadaver disappears to. As one could probably see coming, they're not in for a pleasant evening.

Given the unusual structure of this flick, I'm going to just tackle each individual short in V/H/S in a separate paragraph, ending with the wraparound tale of our youths. I'LL BE LIBERAL WITH SPOILERS HERE, SO LOOK OUT.

The first - Amateur Night - involves some college (loose) youths deciding to make an amateur porn film with a spy cam in a pair of glasses. The take some girls from a bar back to their room, but one of the gals - who's been acting odd - gets odder, ultimately killing a handful of them and transforming into a succubus and flying off with our protagonist in her talons. Directed by David Bruckner (who you may remember shot that shocker The Signal), this was actually my highlight of the film. It's tense throughout (perhaps down to the obviously foreign  nature of the devil-dame), decently acted, nicely edited, and the audience develops a strong empathy for the wearer of the glasses (probably because he looks like Mother Teresa when compared to his dickheaded and borderline rapist mates). Though the VFX at the finale drop the ball somewhat (it's très low budget...), the gradual practical transformation of Lisa into fully-fledged harpy is phenomenal, with the canyon splitting her head in two an absolutely haunting image. The gore isn't subtle, but the whole vibe of V/H/S is crowd-pleasing in this vein - a packed viewing of this film would be undoubtedly a engaging affair filled with cheering at spilt blood. So a strong start then...

We then get Second Honeymoon, a tale of a youngish married couple on a roadtrip in America looking for a little excitement. The wife has her future told, and a past loved one is predicted to re-enter the picture. Then someone begins filming the couple sleeping at night with their own handycam, and when their knife comes out, it moves beyond creepy to kinda threatening. Our secret filmer is female, and is revealed to be the past lover once their lesbian dalliance is rekindled after she murders the husband and they elope. Although the brainchild of Ti West - a bright star on the modern horror scene - this felt like the weakest of the lot. Honestly, it's a tad boring, and coming after the firecracker that was the first short, it's attempt at a long build-up falls flat. There aren't many scares, and while it's not an obvious pay-off, it's not a clever finish simply because the audience haven't invested enough in the leads to care that one's now a cadaver and the other's gay once more. The actors seem constantly bored, and I couldn't blame them. I regret to say it, but this was a real waste of talent.

Tuesday The 17th (the next piece in the puzzle) isn't much better. We follow Wendy leading her friends through the woods to a lake. Our cam malfunctions a little on the journey, flashing up visions of slain corpses. They share a spliff. They engage in shitty banter. Then a couple of them head away from the group and get murdered by a form blurred by a technical glitch. A couple more follow. We're left with Wendy, who tries to trap the killer with some MacGyver-like contraptions - turns out she knew about the killer and was trying to thwart him/her/it. The haze escapes the trap and mercifully takes Wendy out too. While the piece has potential, Glenn McQuaid's (I Sell The Dead) direction isn't quite up to the challenge - our actors are pretty shite, the plot feels illogical (even for handycam horror), the use of the camera feels the least organic out of the segments, and the characters lack any reasonable human response. At this point, viewers are justified in wondering how many more of these we have to endure, but then along comes:

The Sick Thing That Happened to Emily When She Was Younger, the brainchild of director Joe Swanberg and an original take on the whole haunting situation. Composed purely of Skype chats, we watch Emily and he BF discuss the haunting of her apartment long distance, and he naturally tries to help he out. She eventually gets attacked by two ghouls and knocked out, and we watch her BF come into the frame in her apartment and remove a foetus-like thing from her body. We cut to sometime later when they're chatting again and she seems convinced a car accident took place. Finally, we're treated to a quick snippet of Emily's BF talking to another gal on Skype, who starts to complain about a lump on her body too... It's very cool - a mixture of warped romance, strong chills, distinctive story-telling and a twisted government conspiracy. Swanberg maintains the fear once we get past the set-up, and the pay-off is a real sucker punch. The acting is pretty solid, and the chemistry between the lead couple feels tight but almost too stretched, which takes on  a special significance once the denouement takes place. This one really grabs you back into the film after a disappointing preceding couplet.

We finish with 10/31/98, a Halloween set tale directed by the quartet Radio Silence. We follow some friends to an October 31st party, but they rock up to the wrong house, and upon exploration, they think it's a haunted house set-up for the party. Then they find a brutal exorcism taking place in the attic, and being nice lads, they grab the girl and escape the house, besieged by supernatural forces. They drive off, but lo and behold, the car dies, the girl vanishes, the doors lock, and as they realise they're stranded on a railway crossing, a train begins to approach. Squelch. Radio Silence do an excellent job here. Our leads don't deserve to perish - they do everything right; save the girl, behave themselves, appreciate a nice haunted house gag - and yet they die. Our actors feel nicely chummy and like average, decent blokes. But the effects truly steal the show. Largely practical (I imagine), we get hands reaching out of walls, disappearing windows, levitating crockery (later utilised as missiles by angry spirits), unwilling bodies being hurled about and a squirm inducing train collision. It's a brilliant finish to the whole film, and the producers (or whoever dictated the placement of the shorts) made an excellent call in saving this for last.

Now, to discuss the framing piece, entitled Tape 56. Directed by Adam Wingard (whose film You're Next I'm incredibly toey to catch - please comment below if you have any idea where I can find it), Tape 56 does its job effectively. Our group of miscreants are effectively characterised as bad seeds, and their penchant for filming their anarchy feels justified given their unusual line of work (getting paid money to randomly assault strangers and get their breasts on celluloid). The editing is well-handled - chaotic to begin with but settling into a classic horror vibe once the house is breached. Though the plot seems obvious and you will see the 'twist' coming, the zombified dude does his whole stalking/murder-by-numbers thing in a remarkably creepy fashion which is just fine with me. If I had to poke holes in a strong package, the willingness of the group to split up at every opportunity feels too convenient, but the fact that they needed to design a framing plot for the other shorts almost totally justifies our protagonists' stupidity/bravery.

It's a mixed bag. 4 out of the 6 films are well worth watching, and I'd say that sitting through the 2 stinkers is little price to pay for enjoying their stronger companions. Is it the 'biggest horror release of 2012' like it was hyped up to be? I'd have to say no, but I'm sure it'll carve a niche at the box office regardless. Accordingly, I'm showering it with a rating of 4 out of 6 VHS tapes, and I think that there is definite potential for this raw format to have a stronger example in the coming years...

Enjoy a pretty fun red band trailer here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-uOISibzrUI