by TheBaxter on Tue Oct 09, 2012 11:56 am
so i saw this movie V/H/S over the weekend that's been pretty heavily hyped on AICN. i'm generally a fan of the found footage horror genre and this movie was kind of touted as a found footage creepshow, so i was looking forward to it. unfortunately, all that hype was not earned.
it definitely is like a creepshow for the found footage genre. there's five separate stories, all connected by a sixth framing story. sadly, the anthology concept actually exposes alot more of the common flaws of this genre and the film can't overcome them. 3 things in particular that bothered me.
one, there's the whole "aesthetic" of these films. whether it's "shaky-cam", intentionally grainy or distorted video, jump cuts, etc. if you've seen more than one found footage film then you're familiar with them. this movie not only uses them all (sometimes using the same ones in different stories, and sometimes more creatively than other times) but it OVERUSES them to the point of distraction. how many times have you watched a digital cam, ipod or webcam video on youtube or facebook and seen digital distortion, interference, sudden cuts to old footage that somehow "peeks through" the new footage, or garbled audio. for me the answer is ALMOST NEVER. yet, every one of these films and almost all of the stories in this film have that crap all over them. they are beating you over the head to try to portray the footage as "real" but it actually just ends up being distracting and taking you out of the story because it's so unrealistic and so unlike how actual, average consumer-quality video recorders work. oh, and if you think the "V/H/S" title explains it by having all the stories take place a long time ago when stuff was recorded on video.... uhh, no. best i could tell, ALL the stories in this film take place in the modern era and were filmed digitally. (which raises another issue with why, in the framing story, all this stuff was transferred to VHS. the framing story is about guys breaking into a house to steal a particular VHS tape, and having to watch these other tapes to find it... so why were these obviously DIGITAL recordings transferred to VHS tapes? my guess is because having a bunch of guys sitting at a computer, sifting through some AVI files, would have been boring to watch. but really... VHS? why not DVD? i guess selling a movie called "DVD" might have produced some challenges, but the logic of it all is just mind-numbingly dumb. oh, and the payoff for that framing story is so lame and bad that the whole framing device is useless anyway. they could've just dispensed with it altogether.)
two, every one of these types of films starts off with a bunch of setup scenes at the beginning that introduces the characters, concept, and (usually) tries to explain why these people are filming whatever is going on. makes sense in the typical found footage film. problem is, when you have six separate stories, suddenly you now need six groups of setup scenes. these scenes are tedious and boring enough when you only have to sit through them once to get to the good stuff... when you've got to watch six of them, it really kills the momentum of the film. if the average film of this genre is like a rollercoaster ride, then this is like a really short rollercoaster ride that you have to keep getting off and then waiting in line another 10-15 minutes before you can get back on again. it also makes for a film that feels really long. i don't know exactly how long the film was, but it felt like at least a couple hours. they could have easily dropped one of the stories (and i have my idea of which one) and at least tightened it up some.
and finally, there's the whole business of explaining why they are filming, and why they KEEP filming when shit starts happening. this is always an issue for any film of this type, and some deal with it more cleverly than others. so it's no surprise that when you have 6 stories, some do a better job than others. i felt like only one of the films really cleverly deals with the issue (involving a guy wearing a pair of video-recording glasses). another one takes place entirely on webcam, which seems clever, until you get to a couple scenes where one character specifically mentions the fact that he wasn't recording their webcam chat. umm, then where did this video come from? in fairness, the way it ends up, it turns out he could have been lying... but then what was the purpose of him lying about it, and what is the purpose of him recording it after all? another one has a girl recording her road trip with her husband, and features the typical scenes of people filming shit they never actually film in real life, like her filming her husband pumping gas. who films their husband pumping gas for a road trip video? do they sit at home and watch it and say "ooh, remember that time at the exxon when you pumped gas? oh, what great memories!" and then some of the stories basically don't even bother trying to explain why they're filming.
as for the stories themselves, as you'd expect in an anthology film, it's hit and miss. i would say this one is more miss than hit. the first story, involving guys picking up chicks at a club to film them having sex, is pretty predictable, especially once you get your first scene of one of the "girls." it does have a pretty good ending scene though. the second one is the most different from the rest, as it's more of a violent torture-porn shock-based type story. it's got a couple pretty disturbing scenes (one that very cleverly plays on the whole "this is being filmed" idea that i don't want to give away cause it's a bit of a twist, the other just a really shocking violent gory scene) but it feels a bit out of place in the film, despite the fact that there's plenty of gore and violence to go around in a couple of the other stories. the 3rd story just made little sense to me, it involves some kids going to a lake on vacation and just seemed like a really lame stor, this is the one i would've dropped. the fourth is the webcam story with a girl calling her boyfriend during what seems to be a haunting. the ending "twist" of this one confused me, mostly in the failure to fully explain what it is that was "haunting" the girl. and the last one, i think, was probably the best story. actually, the story itself wasn't all that compelling, involving some guys going to a house where they think there's a halloween party and turns out, no, it's not. it's got the best visuals as they are running through the house with all kinds of crazy shit going on around them. finally, the framing story, like i mentioned, was lame and pointless and actually ends before the last tape even gets played, so they don't even really stick to the concept.
overall, if you're really a fan of this kind of film, it might be worth watching for a couple of the better stories, but don't expect much. if found footage films frustrate you, then you'd probably be 6 times as frustrated by this movie, so don't even bother.
