V/H/S
So
the horror community is going gaga over this movie and I decided I
needed to see at least one of the vignettes in this anthology film. So I
went home on Saturday night and popped this up on my Netflix streaming
video. Settling down… giving it an opportunity… and let’s start the ball
rolling.
First, each
of the vignettes have two things very much in common… first, they are
all shot with a sort of hand-held camera, providing a “first person”
view of events. Second, the underlying theme beneath each of these
stories is “betrayal”… every story tends to cope with a betrayal of some
sort, either direct or something beneath the surface of every
situation. The shaky cam effect is a little hard to get used to, but the
underlying theme is kind of neat when looking back on the film as a
whole.
The first
story deals with a trio of men out for a night on the town… the lead
character is, essentially, the audience. The shy, somewhat good hearted
guy is fitted with a pair of video glasses so the group can look back on
the night. He isn’t entirely comfortable with the activities or the
glasses, but the voyeuristic streak keeps us in line throughout the
story where he meets “Lilly” and the three men bring her and another
girl back to their hotel room. Lilly seems a sweet, uncomfortable, and
slightly uncertain young girl who constantly looks to the lead character
and stares into his eyes with a whisper, “I like you.” She tells him
this one statement a number of times… and things turn out far
differently than is expected for all three men.
Director
Ti West brings us the second and weakest story of the bunch when we
follow a young couple out for their Second Honeymoon. The wife records
most of their activity and there’s plenty to foreshadow what’s to come,
but the ending fell far flat for me and I am personally kind of irked
that Ti West is seen as some sort of a savior to the Horror Genre by so
many “fans”.
Some
kids head out for a weekend in the woods in the next vignette. They are
stalked by a slasher-killer of some manner. It’s an interesting if
ultimately eventless piece with an cool monster sort of caught on film. I
get the feeling I’ve seen one of the young actors some place before,
but I honestly can’t remember where from… it’s going to haunt me, I’m
fairly sure. I’ll have to look it up. Ah well.
Next
we have a film that sort of breaks the theme of shooting on first
person when we watch a video chat between a guy and his girlfriend over
the course of a number of weeks. It’s a fairly creepy story, though… I
enjoyed the ending and thought this story, at least, did more with the
time it had than most of the other pieces so far.
The
fourth film in the anthology was probably my favorite… it wasn’t
anything amazing, but more the story of a group of buddies who may have
taken a wrong turn somewhere and wound up in a haunted house on
Halloween night. This one is definitely twisted and had one of the
better reasons for someone to be shooting the whole thing from the first
person point of view… specifically, he’s wearing a “nanny-cam” bear
suit. I found it funny and a little more plausible than some of the
people who were running around with cameras.
Bookending
each of the stories is a vignette that runs through the whole of the
piece… a group of thuggish friends are hired to break in and steal a
v/h/s from an old dilapidated house. When they get there they find the
elderly tenant dead in front of a number of monitors and VCR players
with a pile of VHS movies on the floor. Each vignette comes from one of
these tapes, watched by one member of the group after another.
Over
all, I thought the premise was interesting and the execution delivered
well enough. The film was an interesting experiment where some of the
shorts worked far better than others, but the over-all effect made for a
decent enough film. Some of the stories lacked a concrete ending,
leaving things up in the air for a number of the stories. “Amateur
Night” and “Lake in the Woods” both seemed to have far more story to
them than was allowed with the time constraints, but the bookend and the
“Skype”-ish story seemed complete enough on their own. I still don’t
see what all the hype is behind Ti West and I thought his vignette was
the weakest of the bunch. I’m kind of looking forward to the films
sequel currently in the works.
4.5 out of 5.
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