"Joey, you're all gonna fucking die up here..."
V/H/S is a found footage-style horror movie (sounds familiar, right?), that came out in 2012. I have read a lot of positive things about it on various forums and news sites over the last year or so, and in an effort to change up the content on my blog, I convinced some of my friends to watch it with me last night. The main story of the movie is about a group of unpleasant guys that break into an old man's house in order to steal some video tapes, and when they eventually find them, the guys begin watching the tapes one by one. Every time a new VHS tape is put on, the audience gets to watches the contents of that tape as well, seen from the perspective of one of the robbers. This means that the movie consists of five short horror movies that are "framed in" by the main storyline, and this gimmick is the thing that sets V/H/S apart from the other 800 found footage horror movies that have come out over the last ten years.
Well, yea. I'm no horror movie expert, but as a big fan of movies in general, I feel pretty confident in saying that this movie is very very bad. I have not seen a horror movie since Paranormal Activity III came out because of how uncomfortable I am watching those kinds of movies, so when I, one of the easiest persons to scare you'll ever find when it comes to horror movies, think that a movie that is created with the intent of scaring people was flat out boring, somethings clearly gone terribly wrong. The first of the five shorts affected me quite a bit, but from then on and until the end, it was all down hill. Even though I watched the movie at 3.00 AM in a dark room with the lights out and the volume way up, there was no point during the entire movie where I felt legitimately scared by what was going on on the screen, so you could say that the film failed completely at doing what it set out to do. Because I was so busy being bored by 90% what V/H/S had to offer, I had plenty of time to pick up on a lot of other major flaws that the movie suffers from, so they'll be what I'm gonna focus on in this review.
One of my main issues with this movie and a lot of horror movies in general, is how riddled it is with cheap jump scares and a wide variety of this genre's hundreds of other done-to-death run-of-the-mill boring-as-fuck cliches. Something creepy was jumping up in my face every time the background noise died down for just a second, stupid but good looking young women were taking off their clothes just before they got killed extremely regularly, and every time someone heard a murderous noise from some creepy room down the hallway, their imitate reaction was to enter that room to "check it out". Granted, the idea of having five smaller movies be the center of one overall storyline is great, but when all of these shorts are made up of things that everyone has seen time in and time out again, the whole thing falls completely flat. V/H/S's gimmick actually has a lot of potential, but it's just completely wasted by the banality of the story. The last short actually went as far as to bust out the old "let's have a Halloween party in this old haunted house"-story, and as if that wasn't bad enough, the third one seriously tried to pull off the "lets go to this desolate lake way out in the woods where some kids where killed a few years ago"-storyline. To whoever decided to use these brilliant plots in this movie; I'm sorry, but that shit just isn't entertaining anymore.
Being a found footage horror movie, V/H/S pretty much spelled it's own demise before it even got released. I'm having a hard time believing that anyone creates these types of movies for any other reason than to make money any longer, and it's honestly very sad to witness a genre that used to demand loads respect on such a steep downfall alongside the brilliant idea that the found footage gimmick once was. Being nothing more than yet another cash grab, V/H/S feels incomplete and utterly incoherent, which is more sad than usual, because of the potential I believe it had. Me and both of the guys I watched it with thought that the movie would have been much more enjoyable, if only the five shorts had made any sense at all when compared to each other and the over all story that framed them in. Apart from the previously mentioned cliches and the found footage element, none of the shorts had even the slightest amount of things in common, and as a result, the whole movie seems totally out of place. It would have been so cool if all the shorts somehow were connected to the main story, and a big shocking reveal towards the end or something like that would have saved a tremendous amount of this movie's lost potential. Sadly, V/H/S just fizzles out and dies instead.
This is going to be one of the shortest reviews I've written in a while, because I honestly don't feel like spending a lot of time thinking about this movie and how much it bored me. Apart from the creepy girl form the first short's creepy face and her even creepier pose, nothing from this movie scared me even slightly, so I don't see how it would be scary to anyone else either. V/H/S deals with the same problems that every other found footage movie does; flaws like the "why the hell would you be filming this anyway?!"-mystery and the "by now any normal person definitely would have stopped filming!"-phenomenon, and the story lacks any and all sorts of coherency and logic. I'm not saying that all movies should be explained in furrow detail or else it's a shitty movie, that way of doing it is actually even worse in my opinion, I'm just trying to explain how big of a mess the story of this movie is. It's easy to see that this movies is made up of five stories that are created by five different directors who decided to come together and mix their five half assed ideas into one big, bloody, sloppy and tasteless smoothie of bad horror cliches that lasts for almost two hours, and anyone who confuses the unexplained occurrences with clever and secretive storytelling is just plain wrong. V/H/S had a lot of great potential in my opinion, but it turned out to be nothing more than the first eyegouger to appear on my blog. I guess that's still something though. (1/6)
V/H/S IMDb page here
V/H/S trailer here
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