V/H/S is doing two things I think are really interesting.
First of all, it is an anthology horror movie, which are always fun, if often hit or miss. V/H/S has no overall director, rather it is a compilation of six
short films all made by different people. Most of those directors were up and
comers in the indie horror scene such as Adam Winguard or David Bruckner. The
other big concept is that V/H/S is purposefully cheap and small. With V/H/S
the directors chose to work with small budgets, crappy cameras, and improvised dialog. We have professional filmmakers working like amateurs, it's cool to see what might get made.
I love the idea of working within restrictions, it forces a
kind of creativity on you. You have to work around your limitations or even better,
use them to your advantage. Why not dig up an old shitty VHS
camera and try to make a movie out of that?
The thing with V/H/S is that it isn’t actually shot that
much with VHS camcorders, which surprised me. I think only two of the four shorts are using those kinds of cameras. None of them are in a 4:3 aspect ratio. The rest
are all using various kinds of SD digital cameras, or in one case, recorded off
of webcam. This is all gimmicky found footage stuff, often without an
explanation as to how the footage survived in the first place. One short is imitating
a Skype call. Another is shot entirely with trick "video glasses".
Part of me wishes they stuck closer to actually shooting on
video. Back in the day, plenty of amateur movies were made using consumer-grade cameras, with same stuff you made home-videos on. These shot-on-video (AKA "Shot-on-Shitteo") movies were always a terrible disappointment if you rented them by accident from the video store, they're godawful. I do not much recommend people dig up movies like Black Devil Doll from
Hell or Las Vegas Massacre, but there is something fascinating about them. These
are objectively some of the worst filmmaking in human history, but they are kind of inspiring as outsider art. These are stories of
people with no knowledge of how to make a movie still completing their weird, often depraved visions.
Speaking of depravity, the content is the bigger problem with V/H/S. The first thing you see is the frame story, Tape 56, directed by Adam Wingard. That opens on a group of pranksters molesting a woman to pull up her shirt and show her breaths to the camera. We then intercut with a woman secretly filmed while having sex, quite disgusted to realize the camera is on. V/H/S keeps going in this tone. Our first short film, Amateur Night, directed by David Bruckner, is about drunk jackoffs using video glasses to secretly tape women they picked up from the bar. It is this awful, sleazy Girls Gone Wild bullshit that was not cool even in 2012. Oh V/H/S also plays the initial molestation scene over and over in the end credits. The Howling II did the same thing too with Sybil Danning’s nude scene in its end credits, which was recklessly stupid even in 1985, but at least that was consensual. Why do we keep coming back to this place, V/H/S?
Worse, most of the segments involve actors that either are drunk or
pretending to be drunk. They're all being horny douchebags. None of the improvised
dialog is funny. Many segments give me the impression of being the poor sober designated driver in a car full of
people who think they’re hilarious because they’re six beers deep.
I think once you get past the dude-bro tone and just awful exploitation of women, there’s some very clever and decently scary shorts in V/H/S. Mostly the fratty idiots get what is coming to them. The prankers in the frame story get killed one by one in a haunted house. The video glasses guys in Amateur Night pick up a cute demon girl who feasts on them, ripping one guy’s dick off. (Trust me, he had it coming.) My favorite segment is Tuesday the Seventeenth, which turns out to be a self-aware play on Eighties slashers. That is self-aware of its horniness dumbness and has a brilliant twist on it.
Most of the V/H/S segments have a lot going on, often too many ideas. One imagines that most of these were feature-length ideas at one point that were heavily cut down. I could not quite make out what had happened at the end of Joe Swanberg's The Sick Thing That Happened to Emily When She Was Younger, the Skype segment. 10/31/98 by Radio Silence has a great haunted house with arms reaching out of the walls, a Satanic Cult, and I guess, a ghost girl? That’s too many hats for a twenty-minute short film to wear. Meanwhile, Tuesday the Seventeenth, directed by Glenn McQuaid, is actually better for not explaining anything. It turns a slasher formula into a SCP Foundation short story with disturbing implications for its victims.
V/H/S is an anthology horror movie, and those are always hit or miss. The frame story is easily the worst part of the movie, which is a shame. But I think most of these segments have fun ideas. At the very least, even one completely fails, they're short enough that none overstay their welcome.
There have been three sequels to V/H/S, including V/H/S
94, which just released this month. I recommend V/H/S 94 more, especially the
Indonesian segment made by Timo Tjahjanto. That rules hard. I guess I can respect the original V/H/S a bit more for being a stepping stone to better movies that improve on its obnoxious vibes.
Next time we travel to 2013, the year of where even Kindergartens
getting slaughtered turned out to mean all of fuck all to Republicans, BioShock Infinite trying
to both-sides its way through American history, and our next movie, A Field in England.
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