Rating summary

Movie		2.5
Video		4.0
Audio		4.0
Extras		3.0
Overall		2.5

V/H/S Blu-ray Movie Review

Be kind, rewind.

Reviewed by Casey Broadwater December 5, 2012

Can we all just agree—or maybe get a petition going?—that found-footage horror films need to stop? At least for a half-decade or so? I'm not necessarily against the idea of POV shaky-cam movies, it's just that the sub-genre that The Blair Witch Project birthed has been inundated over the last few years with increasingly derivative, increasingly boring, increasingly soulless cash-ins, each less novel than the last. There was some hope in the much-hyped horror anthology V/H/S—mostly because of the names involved, like The House of the Devil director Ti West—but the individual episodes in the film are hit-or-miss, with more misses than hits. To some extent, this is to be expected from an omnibus film, but the fact that V/H/S runs for nearly a full two hours means that at least one of the poorer sections could've been easily chopped out, perhaps relegated to a special feature on the home video release. As it stands, the movie is too long, with too few scares and a dearth of original—or, at the very least, interesting—ideas.

Like most anthology films, V/H/S has a frame story—this one's called Tape 56—that ties the individual episodes together. Directed by Adam Wingard (A Horrible Way to Die), the set-up follows a group of idiot redneck criminals/pornographers who usually make their dough by forcing women to expose themselves for their VHS camera. (Why are they using old-school 1980s-era video if the film is set in the present day? Dunno.) One of the members has a more lucrative offer; some unnamed client has hired him to break into a rural home and steal/recover a mysterious VHS tape. They bust into the house to find it nearly empty, except for a basement that might as well be on the show Hoarders and an upstairs room where several staticky tube TVs are hissing in front of an old bearded dead man in a La-Z-Boy. As they explore the house, various members of the group stay behind one at a time to watch tapes in the VCR—tapes that contains the film's other episodes—and each guy invariably disappears afterward. We know something's up when the corpse in the recliner is there in one scene and gone in the next. Spooky.

Succubus

The first vignette is Amateur Night, by David Bruckner, director of 2008's The Signal. Here, three date-rapey frat-boys go out on the town, hoping to pick up some female barflies, take them back to a rinky-dink motel, and make a sex tape using a pair of horned-rim glasses with a small camera hidden in the bridge. Of the two girls they dupe into coming with them, one passes out on the bed almost immediately, while the other, Lily (Hannah Fierman), is a bizarre, leering creature—I use the word intentionally—with enormous black eyes and a strange scar on her forehead. The guys are too drunk to notice how odd she is, until—of course—it's too late, with sexy-times quickly turning into bloody penile- dismemberment-times. Suffice it to say that Lily isn't quite who/what she seems to be. There are two distinctly terrifying images in the segment, but I feel this is a poor choice as the lead-off, simply because the characters are so unremittingly unlikeable—cackling, misogynistic, all-around awful human beings—that it sets an uncomfortable initial tone. Sure, there are guys like this who actually exist, and yes, the guys in the short definitely get what's coming to them, but it would help if we had someone to sympathize with. Amateur Night is actually one of the stronger episodes, but it would probably work better if it had been sandwiched later in the film.

The next segment, and the best—by far—is Ti West's Second Honeymoon. West's feature-length films are typically slow-burning affairs —he's the guy behind The Innkeepers—and the same is true here as he follows Sam (Joe Swanberg) and Stephanie (Sophia Takal), a young husband and wife documenting their road trip through Arizona on a small camcorder. While the other shorts try to shock us as quickly as possible, Second Honeymoon ratchets the tension slowly, setting up the couple's superficially happy relationship before introducing the horror. At one small-town hotel, a strange woman knocks on Sam and Stephanie's door, asking them for a ride the next morning. Later that night, the camera clicks on, filming Stephanie sleeping, and while we assume this is Sam's handiwork—he's been pestering her about appearing naked on tape—the camera pans over to show him asleep as well. The vibe is very much like the scene in David Lynch's Lost Highway, when a couple receives a VHS tape with weird floating footage of them in bed. I'll say no more about the plot, except that it involves a coin-operated fortune-teller, a toothbrush swished in a toilet, and a twist-ending you definitely won't see coming.

The episode I'd have no trouble with being cut is I Sell the Dead director Glenn McQuaid's Tuesday the 17th, an unsuccessful homage to Friday the 13th and the campy slasher-stalking-kids-in-the-woods sub-genre. Four loathsome youths—a jock, a dweeb, a cheerleader, and a brunette with a secret—head out to an isolated lake for some pot-smoking and pent-up horniness, but if the sexual frustration doesn't kill them, the teleporting psycho trailing them certainly will. This one is obviously supposed to straddle the funny/scary line, but it's ultimately neither, with bad acting, tries-too-hard dialogue, and a lame bad guy who can't be caught on film. When will horror filmmakers learn that there's nothing remotely terrifying about spastic digital glitches that have obviously been added in post-production?

The Sick Thing That Happened to Emily When She Was Younger is moderately better, if only because the visual premise is one that hasn't been seen much before. Directed by mumblecore all-star Joe Swanberg (Hannah Takes the Stairs), the whole short is told via laptop webcam Skype conversations between the nutty, possibly schizophrenic Emily (Helen Rogers), and her supportive long-distance, medical-student boyfriend, James (Daniel Kaufman). Emily is convinced her apartment is haunted, so she rings up James in the middle of the night to have him listen in on the muffled noises coming from her living room. She also has an unusual lump on her forearm, which she eventually investigates in a gory bit of self- surgery. Emily's descent into madness might be convincing had the short been given more time to develop—I was reminded of the 2006 William Friedkin film Bug—but it speeds to a twist-heavy conclusion that inspires more WTF mystification than scary paranoia.

V/H/S closes out with 10/31/98, directed by the filmmaking collective Radio Silence—made up of Matt Bettinelli-Olpin, Tyler Gillett, Justin Martinez, and Chad Villella—known for their Choose-Your-Own-Adventure-style online shorts. Theirs is the most special effects-heavy segment, following four friends—one wearing a "nanny cam" teddy bear costume—who are planning to attend a Halloween party at a stranger's house. When they show up, the place is seemingly deserted, but climbing up into the attic they inadvertently interrupt a cult conducting a virgin sacrifice. All hell breaks loose, with cult members sucked up through the ceiling, windows disappearing, and all manner of poltergeist-y paranormal activity, none of which is frightening, much less—considering the low-budget nature of the effects work—particularly convincing. And that's V/H/S in a nutshell; it's rarely scary, and with the exception of Ti West's Second Honeymoon segment, it never quite sells the illusion of being actual found footage. The final dangling incoherency? Who, in this narrative world, transferred the various camcorder, nanny-cam, and web-cam footage to VHS? And why?

V/H/S Blu-ray Movie, Video Quality 

There's really no point here in a traditional "picture quality" review, as the individual episodes were varyingly shot on low-res camcorders, VHS, spy- glasses, and the like. The imperfections—and there are many of them—are the whole point. Blurriness, fuzziness, dropped frames, sudden glitches, banding, macro-blocking, crushed shadows, soupy gray shadows, dim highlights, blown-out highlights—just about every video-related PQ quirk you can possibly imagine is present, and usually several at once. What I'm bummed about is the inauthenticity; many of these "faults" have been obviously and needlessly exaggerated in post-production. The film would have a better aesthetic if it stuck to defects actually present in the cameras used. Nevertheless, the film's 1080p/AVC-encoded presentation seems accurate to intent, and that's really all we can ask for here. Let's just call this a solid 4/5.

V/H/S Blu-ray Movie, Audio Quality 

Likewise, considering the film's lo-fi premise, you shouldn't expect the usual bombastic, expertly mixed horror movie sound design from V/H/S' lossless DTS-HD Master Audio track. That said, I'm 100% positive that none of the episodes relied solely on in-camera sound capturing. Instead of going strictly for realism—mono audio, or, at the best, stereo—each segment is opened up for a full 5.1 presentation. While most of the action is anchored up front, you will hear occasional effects and ambience in the rear channels, from electronic glitchy noises to nightclub ambience and numerous things going bump in the night. There's no score, obviously, but there is some incidental music, and dialogue—if not always crystal clear—is at least consistently easy to understand. Once again, I'll throw down high marks here for the track being true to the intended approach.

V/H/S Blu-ray Movie, Special Features and Extras 

• Cast & Crew Commentary: Most of the film's writers and directors—minus Ti West, notably—pop in and out of this loose, laugh-filled, more-entertaining-than-especially-informative commentary.
• Alternate Ending - 10/31/98 (HD, 1:32): A decidedly happier ending to the film.
• More Tuesday the 17th (HD, 2:38): A sort of prequel/deleted scenes/making-of mash-up. Or something. Annoying, anyway.
• Amateur Night Balloon Night (HD, 3:33): A behind-the-scenes look at the filming of the end of Amateur Night, which involves a camera hoisted aloft by several balloons.
• Webcam Interviews (HD, 13:35): Skype-conducted interviews with Simon Barrett and Helen Rogers, conducted by Joe Swanberg.
• Cast & Crew Interviews (HD, 28:42): A lengthy series of interviews with all the filmmakers involved, including Brad Miska & Zak Zeman, Simon Barrett & Adam Wingard, Ti West, Matt Bettinelli-Olpin & Tyler Gillett, David Bruckner & Glenn McQuaid, and Joe Swanberg & Simon Barrett.
• AXS TV: A Look at V/H/S (HD, 4:51): A short promo, featuring clips from the film and snippets from the above interviews.
• Behind the Scenes Photo Gallery (HD)
• Conceptual Design Gallery - Lily (HD)
• Theatrical Trailer (HD, 1:48)
• Also from Magnolia Home Entertainment (HD, 8:49)

V/H/S Blu-ray Movie, Overall Score and Recommendation 

V/H/S is proof that there's not much more than can be done with found-footage horror films. Yes, it's a technique/genre that can work in the right hands, and with the right story, but it so rarely does. While there are fleeting moments of real terror in V/H/S—a she-demon crouched in a stairwell, a masked hotel intruder, a self-surgery motivated by paranoid delusion—you have to sit through a lot of nauseating shaky-cam dreck to get to them. The film could easily stand to be twenty or thirty minutes shorter. I'm sure V/H/S will find a few cult fans on Blu-ray, but I doubt this is the sort of movie most would care to watch more than once. I'd recommend a rental for those still interested.