“V/H/S” is a weird movie because I enjoy it much more in
retrospect than I did sitting in the theater. There are some elements that will
delight horror fans, but there are moments of extreme frustration as well.
“V/H/S” is another in the line of recent horror anthology films, and features a
who’s who of hot young independent horror directors. Radio Silence, Ti West,
Glenn McQuaid, Adam Wingard, David Bruckner, and Joe Swanberg all take a turn
at the helm. The individual pieces of “V/H/S” are, for the most part, solid
standalone horror shorts, and many of them have great, stand out elements. You
will have to have a high tolerance for douche bags to watch “V/H/S”, but you’ll
enjoy watching most of the characters die. How the pieces of the puzzle come
together, or in this case, how they don’t, is the central problem with the
film.
On their own, each segment is nice little bit of nastiness,
and if I were watching any of them alone, everything would be fine. There’s a
demon story, a slasher joint, some supernatural flavors, and more. All of the
pieces are held together by a frame story, and the frame story is by far the
weakest link. It isn’t the only chink in the armor, but it’s the biggest. The
attempt to connect all the stories is terrible and obnoxious, so bad that it
came close to ruining the entire movie.
The gimmick of “V/H/S” is that these guys who videotape
themselves doing all sorts of violent, destructive things—they break in and
destroy abandoned buildings, they grab random women and pull their tops off—break
into a house to find a particular videotape. They’re looking for one tape out
of thousands, and as they check each tape they find that each holds a horrific
tale of horror.
The biggest stumbling block to “V/H/S” is length. Each
section is too long, and as a result the movie runs twenty or thirty minutes
beyond where it needs to. The frame story takes way, way too long to start. It
drags on and on, and you start to not give a shit by the time the chapters kick
in. And every installment shares the same device, a found footage sort of
thing. That has its own drawbacks, but it’s fine. However, every chapter spends
time setting how the story will be told. After a couple sections, tou don’t
need that road map anymore because each segment that comes before already
established the methodology. Instead of spending ten minutes telling you how
this story will unfold, they could have done in four or five, been just as
effective, and quickened the overall pace of the film. Instead, after each
section, you’re forced to sit through another plodding introduction. Just when
the pace, action, and tension all pick up to a fever pitch, the momentum stops
and you start all over again. This is insanely frustrating to sit through time
after time.
One of the middle chapters is a framed as a home movie of a
couple on a road trip. By this point in the movie, you’ve been through a couple
runs, and you don’t need to see these two walk around a faux old west town
doing stupid touristy bullshit. By the time you get to the heart of the story,
you’re bored and a little annoyed. Like I said, if you watched any single piece
of “V/H/S” they all function as an independent horror short. Any one taken
alone most are pretty damn cool. They’re full of inventivness, as well as
frights, gore, and genre playfulness that makes them fun. Pasted together like
they are, it simply never comes together as a whole like it should, or, more
tragically, like it could.
That’s why I like “V/H/S” more now than I did when I was
watching it. I can think back to the pieces, examine them in retrospect, and
realize, yeah, that was pretty great. It’s easy to see why they chose each
piece. But the way “V/H/S” tries to fit everything together causes problems. I
wish I could take the film, fast-forward through the frame story, and watch
each piece on its own.
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