V/H/S (2012) – movie review
This is a fantastic modern anthology worthy of your attention. Directed by Adam Wingard, David Bruckner, Ti West, Glenn McQuaid, Joe Swanberg, and the filmmaking team, Radio Silence, V/H/S delivers five found footage shorts that are on the cutting edge of horror films. In the first few minutes we are introduced to a rowdy bunch of hooligans, nasty characters for which I could not feel any empathy or concern. I thought I was going to hate the film because of this, but luckily it is just the wrap around story. When these hooligans break into a home in order to find some nasty home-porn VHS tape, the real good stuff begins. One culprit sits to view-search the many vhs tapes as the others search the vacant home. Thus we are introduced to the five stories. ‘Amateur Night’ shows how a one-night-stand/bar pick-up can go horribly wrong. Though it seems like a simple and much used theme, it is done quite well and the strange young lady is interesting, to say the least. ‘Second Honeymoon’ has a couple on vacation in the mid-west, in a story that gets creepy as hell and ends with a shocking plot-twist. ‘Tuesday the 17th’ may be the scariest episode, just because of the visual aspect of the killer in the woods attacking a group of campers. ‘The Sick Thing that Happened…’ was perhaps the best story and had some engaging creepiness in the context of video chats between a guy and his girl. We see some strange things running around the woman’s apartment in the dark behind her concerned ’skype-face’. ‘10/31/98’ follows a group of young men breaking into a ‘haunted house’ on Halloween. They discover another group of men, religious fanatics in the attic, doing some kind of cleansing ritual to a young woman. They save the young lady from the witch-hunt, only to discover, maybe they shouldn’t have. I know there is a bit of a back-lash to all the found footage films in release these days, but this one is done with the rawness and intentionally sloppy editing that makes the stories seem genuine.
parlor of horror 