The found-footage sub-genre of horror has been inundated the past few years as producers have gradually realized the potential cash-cow in producing a hit found footage film. What started with Cloverfield in the recent surge of bad found footage horror movies has continued with Paranormal Activity, and the bland shaky-cam fest continues with the new Creepshow meets Blair Witch style anthology, V/H/S.
Here’s the set-up: four petty crooks/fratboy douchebags spend their time harassing women and stripping them on camera for money get paid to break into a man’s house to steal a strange VHS tape, unwitting idiots that they are they comply. What gradually, and rather predictably follows is that the short films that make up this anthology are all of course on the various tapes around this man’s house. They soon find the man lying dead in front of a television screen and gradually vanish one by one. It’s a fairly weak and underdeveloped story with no real conclusion. It’s almost tacked on, like a lot of other things about this pretentious crapshoot, but I’ll get to that later.
The first short follows a group of young men readying themselves for a night on the town and they have somehow managed to get a pair of glasses that will work as a kind of spycam. My first question here of course was, “Where did these simpletons get access to this kind of technology?” The second being, “Why would footage like this end up on a VHS tape?” That’s one of the many distracting issues with this found-footage anthology, the decision to feature them all on some sort of haunted VHS tape (though how they’re all on the tape to begin with is never explained). While I have a definite fondness for the VHS format, and I definitely think haunted VHS is creepier than say haunted DVD or Blu-Ray, I got the feeling that the filmmakers didn’t quite understand how much of a pain it is to transfer digital media to a VCR and vice-verse. One might even wonder if they even realized how VHS tapes actually work, but again I’m getting ahead of myself.
So, we have a bunch of fratboy, drunkards who have armed their friend with a spycam, and guess what they want him to do with it? Here’s a hint: they don’t want sneak him into a movie theater. If you guessed filming naked women to make a sex tape out of, you’d be right. I’m not quite sure what each of the filmmakers’ obsessions with getting a woman to bare all on a home-video camera was. It seemed to be the running motivation in nearly all of these short films. Was sleazy, misogynistic voyeurism one of the themes they were attempting to explore, or was this just another case of pretentious heterosexual “art film” directors giving themselves an excuse to shoot soft-core pornography?
Predictably one of the women they pick up is a bit stranger than others, and when the clothes fly off so do the body parts as she reveals her true nature and starts ripping the men to shreds. Not a shred of sympathy can be given considering they were all but willing to nearly rape the women they’d coerced into coming back to their hotel with them. The result is unintentional, severed-dick comedy. It’s not only hilariously predictable, but hilariously executed with over-the-top (ie bad) acting, unfortunate timing on the part of the director, and even worse writing.
I’m not going to go into each and every film on this piece, only that this one sets the general tone for the rest of the anthology. One weirdly voyeuristic male-sex fantasy with crap dialogue and sub-par acting after the other. The stories are weak, poorly executed, and their only redeeming value as entertainment is that more often than not you will find yourself falling out of your seat with laughter. Some of the visual effects and general aesthetic of the final piece, a haunted house/exorcist bit, are truly stunning, but are unfortunately attached to yet another weakly executed, paper-thin story.
In addition to the flawed acting and writing of this anthology, the characters themselves are all seemingly drawn from the same pot of “dumb male college fratboy” with very few variations that are often the exceptions that prove the rule. It’s impossible to share a lick of sympathy for any of them when all we get for character development are rousing laughter over beers and showing just how sleazy and gross these people are. You find yourself celebrating every time one of them is horribly dismembered across shaking footage.
In a horror film, that is not a good thing. For a film to be truly terrifying there is a desperate need to have endearing protagonists, people that you actually care about for when the shit really starts to hit the fan. Make them people that are likable, varied. They need to stand out as people the audience would want to be friends with, and then they need to suffer for it. Put those wonderful people through terrible things and watch your audience squirm.
The luddites over at IGN praised this film for being a “bold new experiment” when there is nothing neither bold, new, or experimental about this by-the-numbers mess. It is dripping with nearly every cliche plaguing modern American horror films. Unlikable, poorly-developed characters? Check! Found-footage film that tries to rely on the aesthetic of the sub-genre to make up for any actual artistic merit? Check! Bad acting? Check! Weak, thinly-strung narrative with no definite plot or conclusion? Check! Check! Check! Set of typical character archetypes that have by this point become cliche? Let’s see, we have the bimbo blonde, the final girl, the jock, the nerdy scholar, the drunk jock, the horny jock, the violent jock, college kids on vacation, married couple on vacation…CHECK!
If there is anything else positive to say about the film I must say it does one thing that may modern American horror films are terrified to do: it is an actual horror film. That’s something I’m sad to say is actually in this film’s favor, considering the endless parade of bland, PG-13, ghost-chasing melodramatic soap-opera, blue-filtered bullshit that has been given to us for the last few years. Films that are afraid of even remotely looking less than pristine, box-office beauty. The film is appropriately hideous, and is gory as hell.
In summary: V/H/S has the right aesthetic for a great found-footage horror film, but lacks everything else. A massive disappointment to be sure.
