Take me back to the 90’s, the days of VHS tapes, the days of static at the end of a movie, the days of skipping film and scratchy picture. Ah, yes, the glorious days of the nineties….
I know that this movie isn’t new, and a sequel has since been released, but I’ll offer up my view on V/H/S, unpopular though it may make me.
VHS (2012) is a ‘found footage anthology’. Yeah, more ‘found footage’, cause we don’t have enough nauseatingly shaky camera work in horror films yet. I’m not opposed to ‘found footage’, hand held recording with an attempt at a reality feel, but when fifty percent of your entire film is intentional screen glitches and cameramen who are flailing the recorder around like a kite, it gets old awfully fast.
This films centers around a group of delinquents who film basically their every movements, their various exploits of vandalism and sexual assault. These weirdos are being hired to break into someone’s house to retrieve a VHS tape. I don’t have to give you any more than that, because in the course of this ‘film’ we are made to watch five more entire short horror recordings, and if I give any more away, I’ve basically told an entire story.
So, we’ve got the base story, which is sliced up into pieces framing the other films. It’s characters are all terribly unlikeable, and I don’t mean unrelatable, hard to connect with in 20minutes, I mean downright grating. Come to think of it, many of the characters are just awful, and I found myself rooting for their demise. Anyway, the base story is basically just a lot of wandering around with the occasional hint at some type of scare lurking in the dark, it doesn’t really move forward throughout the film so much as occasionally stuff happens, and then stuff doesn’t happen.
I do not get the hype behind this film. Maybe these stories are just not solid enough to be told in such a short time. The first tape we watch is sort of an attempt at a sex tape gone wrong, and it did have it’s moments of gore and ‘what the FUCK’ am I seeing?’, and maybe this is they way all the stories should be, short, sweet, and in need of no explanation. Trying to cram too many elements in a ten to twenty minute skit is asking too much.
The second story, the ‘road trip’ tale, just felt a little boring to me. The third was sort of a twist on the classic kids-in-the-woods horror cliche, and though it was unusual, it was pretty nonsensical and somehow, for such a short story, the pacing was way off, and I sure didn’t get the motives of the most important characters. The fourth, I admit I was unnerved by from time to time, particularly by the webcam aspect, where the scares that make you jump are solid. Sadly, the pay off is lacking and the characters seem really idiotic, but I felt this one had some potential. The fifth, a Halloween haunted house feature had a few really eerie moments that had me smirking and expecting a huge scare as those corner of your eye figures appear. The characters in this picture were the least moronic, which I give some credit to. Much of this tale made absolutely no sense to me, but it had a few pretty cool effects that I though were kind of neat.
Essentially, I don’t think this film is worth all the hype that is coming along with it. The stories were all just too short to be fleshed out, or otherwise just didn’t have the potential to carry an audience anyway. I did get bored from time to time, any footage that doesn’t propel the story forward certainly seems useless in a film like this, where every moment counts to try and pack a punch. It just didn’t do much for me, and I am not entirely certain it deserves all the acclaim I’ve been reading. I can appreciate a bad film, but not an annoying one, which is what the bulk of VHS was to me. Maybe if I liked boobs more I would have appreciated VHS, cause what it lacks in scares, it makes up for in boobs. But, boobs, who needs ’em when you get to see them every day.
The Dark and Stormy Night 