Party Like It's 1999
The horror anthology franchise is a very strange beast. In English language cinema, there are really only two of note: The Creepshow trilogy (which was followed by a web series and a Shudder streaming series - and that is really just a gussied-up web series, if you think about it) and the V/H/S films*. At this point, V/H/S has far outstripped Creepshow in terms of quantity, if not quality.
Beginning in 2012 when a collective of mumblegore directors gathered under the auspices of Bloody Disgusting's distribution banner to craft an anthology of found footage shorts, the V/H/S franchise now includes V/H/S/2, the Internet-themed V/H/S: Viral, the feature-length film Siren (spun off from David Bruckner's segment "Amateur Night" from the original V/H/S), and now a pair of themed retro entries: 2021's V/H/S/94, and 2022's V/H/S/99, which dropped on Shudder this week.
Seeing as the franchise shows no signs of slowing down (keep your eyes peeled for V/H/S/85 next year), it's time to return for yet another review, breaking down the segments one at a time. These shorts aren't presented with the usual wraparound narrative, instead operating on the misguided assumption that it might make a lick of sense if this were presented as a series of films re-recorded over one single tape that was originally used to record the fourth segment, "The Gawkers."
"Shredding" (dir. Maggie Levin)
"Shredding" follows a group of four teenage punks who have their own hardcore band and have decided it would be super sick to perform a music video in the abandoned underground area where a riot grrrl group called Bitch Cat (nevermind that the song of theirs that we hear sounds it belongs exactly in 2001's Josie and the Pussycats and is not one whit edgier) died in a fire three years ago to the day. Predictably, things go awry once they get there.
Unfortunately, it takes 12 interminable minutes to get there, and while three out of the four teens are delivering terrific performances that capture the verisimilitude of teens fucking around on camera, perhaps they are too good, because every single one of them is unctuous and hateful and miserable to spend any time with.
The payoff here also reveals the first and biggest flaw of the film, which carries over to the other segments as well - this film's emphasis on practical effects is limited by the fact that most of its monstrous antagonists have been given plasticky dime-store masks with almost no articulation of their facial features, making the whole affair feel more like a neighbor's bad haunted house than an actual horror film. This worked for a film like Spirit Halloween, but here the focus is on grounded realism and gut-ripping special effects, so it's an incalculable loss that the monsters look so cheap and unimaginative. (To be clear, it's fine that a movie is cheap, but there are plenty of tricks to prevent it from looking that way).
The gory finale is also cursed with incredibly wonky pacing, finding a clear endpoint and then bloviating for five more pointless minutes after that shot, hoping that throwing constant tape fuzz and cutaways will distract from the fact that it keeps pulling the same trick over and over again.
3/10
"Suicide Bid" (dir. Johannes Roberts)
Roberts is a director with an extremely unpredictable career. His credits include 47 Meters Down (which most people love and I despise with a fiery passion), The Strangers: Prey at Night (which most people max out at "meh" on and I love with a fiery passion), and The Other Side of the Door (a film that the historical record firmly insists does indeed exist).
Of the films of his that I've seen, this is the one that is most firmly average. This story of a young sorority pledge being buried alive in a coffin overnight during a hazing ritual gone wrong does manage to wring fear out of several deep-rooted human fears (spiders and drowning also get some good play here), but once again the actual monster that eventually shows up is given the worst mask by far, neither evoking the character it's meant to be representing or ever looking like anything but inflexible rubber.
6/10
"Ozzy's Dungeon" (dir. Flying Lotus)
This segment, which follows a Legends of the Hidden Temple-esque show that goes horribly wrong, highlights the second biggest flaw of the film. It coasts on '90s nostalgia rather than horror. While this is a terrific setting for a horror story, the focus on exactly recreating the vibe of a Nickelodeon game show drowns out all the horror elements, which don't really come in until after this incredibly long sequence concludes, and which never gel into something remotely satisfying, swinging from poorly executed torture porn directly into supernatural nonsense without a single thread of gristle connecting those two things.
It seems that the reason that four out of five of these segments focus on teenagers is the fact that the filmmakers were teenagers in the 1990s, rather than the fact that these are characters who were written to actually be worth following. Their primary objective seems to be crafting a painstaking recreation of the period as opposed to, you know, making a horror film.
2/10
"The Gawkers" (dir. Tyler MacIntyre)
"The Gawkers" has the exact same problem as "Shredding." We spend an overwhelming portion of the run time being forced to watch irredeemable teens fucking around for what feels like hours, and then a monster shows up. The only variety here is that this time the monster is rendered with bad CGI rather than bad rubber masks.
3/10
"To Hell and Back" (dir. Vanessa and Joseph Winter)
The Y2K segment that was more or less demanded by the title is finally upon us! This segment, which is from the directors of the delightful Shudder exclusive film Deadstream, follows two documentarians who are taping a coven's demon-summoning ritual and are accidentally sucked into a hell dimension.
Using just a light with a red gel and a bunch of creepy-looking rocks, the Winters have crafted a short that is both cheap and atmospheric, plunging its protagonists into a world that operates under a very strict set of rules that it has no interest in explaining. Jam-packed with excellent creature effects and the implication of a never-ending maze of horrors, "To Hell and Back" is by a landslide the best segment in the entire film.
However, I can't commit to being 100% in love with it, because every time either of the characters opens their mouths, it ruins the effect. Both of them are given to a quippy sense of humor designed to undercut the terror of their surroundings. But why undercut it when it's so goddamn good?
7/10
With the caveat that I never actually had the guts to check out V/H/S: Viral, which looked pretty damn bad, this is by far the most consistently disappointing entry in the franchise. The one thing that audiences have been taught to expect from the V/H/S franchise is a heaping helping of jump scares, and this movie fails to deliver that, toiling to craft a tribute to the 1990s that at the very least is exactly misaligned with my tastes, though if you too are the age of the filmmakers, it will likely deliver much broader pleasures than I was able to glean from it.
*For those who are interested, what surely must be the longest-running horror anthology series out there is the Filipino franchise Shake, Rattle, & Roll, which began in 1984 and now includes 15 films and a feature-length adaptation of a previous segment.
Brennan Klein is a millennial who knows way more about 80's slasher movies than he has any right to. He's a former host of the Attack of the Queerwolf podcast and a current senior movie/TV news writer at Screen Rant. You can find his other reviews on his blog Popcorn Culture. Follow him on Twitter or Letterboxd, if you feel like it.
Beginning in 2012 when a collective of mumblegore directors gathered under the auspices of Bloody Disgusting's distribution banner to craft an anthology of found footage shorts, the V/H/S franchise now includes V/H/S/2, the Internet-themed V/H/S: Viral, the feature-length film Siren (spun off from David Bruckner's segment "Amateur Night" from the original V/H/S), and now a pair of themed retro entries: 2021's V/H/S/94, and 2022's V/H/S/99, which dropped on Shudder this week.
Seeing as the franchise shows no signs of slowing down (keep your eyes peeled for V/H/S/85 next year), it's time to return for yet another review, breaking down the segments one at a time. These shorts aren't presented with the usual wraparound narrative, instead operating on the misguided assumption that it might make a lick of sense if this were presented as a series of films re-recorded over one single tape that was originally used to record the fourth segment, "The Gawkers."
"Shredding" (dir. Maggie Levin)
"Shredding" follows a group of four teenage punks who have their own hardcore band and have decided it would be super sick to perform a music video in the abandoned underground area where a riot grrrl group called Bitch Cat (nevermind that the song of theirs that we hear sounds it belongs exactly in 2001's Josie and the Pussycats and is not one whit edgier) died in a fire three years ago to the day. Predictably, things go awry once they get there.
Unfortunately, it takes 12 interminable minutes to get there, and while three out of the four teens are delivering terrific performances that capture the verisimilitude of teens fucking around on camera, perhaps they are too good, because every single one of them is unctuous and hateful and miserable to spend any time with.
The payoff here also reveals the first and biggest flaw of the film, which carries over to the other segments as well - this film's emphasis on practical effects is limited by the fact that most of its monstrous antagonists have been given plasticky dime-store masks with almost no articulation of their facial features, making the whole affair feel more like a neighbor's bad haunted house than an actual horror film. This worked for a film like Spirit Halloween, but here the focus is on grounded realism and gut-ripping special effects, so it's an incalculable loss that the monsters look so cheap and unimaginative. (To be clear, it's fine that a movie is cheap, but there are plenty of tricks to prevent it from looking that way).
The gory finale is also cursed with incredibly wonky pacing, finding a clear endpoint and then bloviating for five more pointless minutes after that shot, hoping that throwing constant tape fuzz and cutaways will distract from the fact that it keeps pulling the same trick over and over again.
3/10
"Suicide Bid" (dir. Johannes Roberts)
Roberts is a director with an extremely unpredictable career. His credits include 47 Meters Down (which most people love and I despise with a fiery passion), The Strangers: Prey at Night (which most people max out at "meh" on and I love with a fiery passion), and The Other Side of the Door (a film that the historical record firmly insists does indeed exist).
Of the films of his that I've seen, this is the one that is most firmly average. This story of a young sorority pledge being buried alive in a coffin overnight during a hazing ritual gone wrong does manage to wring fear out of several deep-rooted human fears (spiders and drowning also get some good play here), but once again the actual monster that eventually shows up is given the worst mask by far, neither evoking the character it's meant to be representing or ever looking like anything but inflexible rubber.
6/10
"Ozzy's Dungeon" (dir. Flying Lotus)
This segment, which follows a Legends of the Hidden Temple-esque show that goes horribly wrong, highlights the second biggest flaw of the film. It coasts on '90s nostalgia rather than horror. While this is a terrific setting for a horror story, the focus on exactly recreating the vibe of a Nickelodeon game show drowns out all the horror elements, which don't really come in until after this incredibly long sequence concludes, and which never gel into something remotely satisfying, swinging from poorly executed torture porn directly into supernatural nonsense without a single thread of gristle connecting those two things.
It seems that the reason that four out of five of these segments focus on teenagers is the fact that the filmmakers were teenagers in the 1990s, rather than the fact that these are characters who were written to actually be worth following. Their primary objective seems to be crafting a painstaking recreation of the period as opposed to, you know, making a horror film.
2/10
"The Gawkers" (dir. Tyler MacIntyre)
"The Gawkers" has the exact same problem as "Shredding." We spend an overwhelming portion of the run time being forced to watch irredeemable teens fucking around for what feels like hours, and then a monster shows up. The only variety here is that this time the monster is rendered with bad CGI rather than bad rubber masks.
3/10
"To Hell and Back" (dir. Vanessa and Joseph Winter)
The Y2K segment that was more or less demanded by the title is finally upon us! This segment, which is from the directors of the delightful Shudder exclusive film Deadstream, follows two documentarians who are taping a coven's demon-summoning ritual and are accidentally sucked into a hell dimension.
Using just a light with a red gel and a bunch of creepy-looking rocks, the Winters have crafted a short that is both cheap and atmospheric, plunging its protagonists into a world that operates under a very strict set of rules that it has no interest in explaining. Jam-packed with excellent creature effects and the implication of a never-ending maze of horrors, "To Hell and Back" is by a landslide the best segment in the entire film.
However, I can't commit to being 100% in love with it, because every time either of the characters opens their mouths, it ruins the effect. Both of them are given to a quippy sense of humor designed to undercut the terror of their surroundings. But why undercut it when it's so goddamn good?
7/10
With the caveat that I never actually had the guts to check out V/H/S: Viral, which looked pretty damn bad, this is by far the most consistently disappointing entry in the franchise. The one thing that audiences have been taught to expect from the V/H/S franchise is a heaping helping of jump scares, and this movie fails to deliver that, toiling to craft a tribute to the 1990s that at the very least is exactly misaligned with my tastes, though if you too are the age of the filmmakers, it will likely deliver much broader pleasures than I was able to glean from it.
*For those who are interested, what surely must be the longest-running horror anthology series out there is the Filipino franchise Shake, Rattle, & Roll, which began in 1984 and now includes 15 films and a feature-length adaptation of a previous segment.
Brennan Klein is a millennial who knows way more about 80's slasher movies than he has any right to. He's a former host of the Attack of the Queerwolf podcast and a current senior movie/TV news writer at Screen Rant. You can find his other reviews on his blog Popcorn Culture. Follow him on Twitter or Letterboxd, if you feel like it.
Categories: anthology films, horror
