V/H/S

Directed by Adam Wingard, David Bruckner, Ti West, Glenn McQuaid, Joe Swanberg, “Radio Silence.”

2012. Rated R, 116 minutes.

Cast:

Calvin Reeder

Adam Wingard

Kentucker Audley

Sarah Byrne

Hannah Fierman

Mike Donlan

Frank Stack

A group of wayward twenty-somethings are having fun filming themselves attacking women in parking garages and forcefully exposing their breasts to the camera. Their mothers must be proud. Anyhoo, sales of these videos aren't as lucrative as they’d like. One of them knows about a VHS tape they would be paid handsomely for. Of course, they have to break into someone’s house and steal it. Once there, they discover a dead body and an extensive library of unmarked videotapes to rummage through, spread throughout the house. Of course, only one of these bozos has enough sense to press play on the VCR, even though the TV is already on. While his buddies are digging around in the various piles of tapes, he sits and watches. We watch along with occasional breaks to see how the boys are doing.

Essentially, V/H/S is a collection of vignettes whose only link is that they appear to be on the same tape and that one of the characters is watching them. On top of that, what’s going on in the house where he and his buddies are amounts to another vignette. Therefore, looking for a unifying theme is pointless, unless you count the fact that they’re all twisted. At that, each succeeds. To achieve this we get a vampire (something like a vampire), aliens, and “regular” folk.

Surprisingly, almost all of the shorts work wonderfully. None of them have a plot, per se, they’re more like little slices of the end of life. Very bloody, violent ends. As stated, they’re mostly bent on making you use some variation of the phrase “that’s messed up,” and they do.

Perhaps most notable is that it manages to put a new spin on the found footage sub-genre. Like all the rest of these type of movies, it’s heavily influenced by The Blair Witch Project.” It marries this with its love for other anthologies to give us something that feels fresh and completely unrestrained. Each vignette stretches long enough so we’re never quite sure where things are going. When they get there, our inner sadists will be quite pleased.

MY SCORE: 7/10