V/H/S (2012)

Day 90 of Sobriety. 

This is another film that has been on my radar for a while. It is a portmanteau horror movie comprising five short films all connected by a wraparound story. All of the films are shot in “found footage” format. Recently, while watching (in some cases re-watching) the Paranormal Activity series, I have come to realize that I actually really like the found footage format, provided it's done well. One of the main reasons is that it often manages to get under my skin and actually scare me. In addition to the Paranormal Activity films (particularly the first couple), the original Blair Witch Project would be a good example of that. I did not, however, find that to be the case with V/H/S, although I thought the film as a whole was OK. Each of its segments was made by a different director and production team, and as might be expected from that patchwork approach, the result, while interesting, is also a bit patchy.

As some general comments, I would say that at 116 minutes, the film felt very long. Even for a found footage film, the rough, jerky camerawork and garbled audio is leaning towards the extreme end, and I found that started to become wearing as it approached the two-hour mark. I also found that some parts of the stories were presented so roughly that it was actually hard to follow what was going on, although, admittedly, I was getting a bit drowsy as I was watching it, so that might be partly my own fault. I didn’t think the wraparound story (titled Tape 56) was very strong—neither scary nor particularly interesting. It also lacked any real kind of credibility, which I think is important in making found footage movies convincing and effective.

The first segment, Amateur Night was pretty good—perhaps my favorite segment. Interestingly, in the context of this blog, alcohol plays an important role in this segment, as an agent to both put the protagonists in danger, and also to significantly reduce their awareness of that danger—with very bad results for them!

The second segment, Second Honeymoon, directed by Ti West, now very well known for his films X and Pearl, had some effective creepy moments, but I found the story itself to be pretty flat and uninteresting. Likewise, Tuesday the 17th, the third segment was very visually impactful as a kind of homage to 80s slasher films, but I found the story to be pretty weak and far too unlikely to be effective.

The fourth segment is the excellently-titled The Sick Thing That Happened to Emily When She Was Younger. I thought the conceit of having the whole story told through a series of video chats was a good one, but unfortunately, after delivering some effective Paranormal Activity-esque scares, it also suffered from what I thought was a very lame denouement.

The fifth and final segment was perhaps the weakest. It kind of hobbles itself from start by requiring that the viewer accepts a degree of stupidity on the part of the protagonists that is just too much of an unrealistic leap.

So that was my experience of V/H/S--patchy, but generally enjoyable enough that I will definitely check out some of the many sequel installments if I get a chance.