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If it is OK, I'll just keep using this thread as a place to put horror film viewings into:

V/H/S (Various, 2012)

This is a strangely disappointing anthology film, although it is unsatisfying and kind of annoying in all sorts of interesting ways! If you just want 'horrific' imagery, it is here in abundance, but if you are looking for interesting stories with compelling characters then you will probably feel short changed - perhaps the best way to describe all of the various films is just as a lot of 'stuff' that happens.

But before I get into that perhaps I should get into another criticism of the film - the weird wording of "VHS" in the title should have alerted me to the idea that it wasn't going to be that faithful to the format, but very few of the films feature anything like VHS technology in them at all! For example presumably all of the films within a film are meant to be contemporary set, but they all involve characters video taping each other using the cassettes rather than SD cards or so on! The Joe Swanberg directed segment is even entirely Skype-based! The only segment that really plays fair with the concept is the final segment called "10/31/98", which at least suggests that a VHS video camera would be actually appropriate in that period of time!

Unfortunately this issue also plays havoc with the framing story too, which involves a group of Harmony Korine-esque young lawbreakers after they are done doing their equivalent of trash humping for the day getting hired to break into a house and find a tape, unfortunately finding a dead man slumped in front of a television surrounded by all kinds of tapes. One by one each member of the group is left alone with the body and television and start playing the tapes. We then see each of the films within a film segments: segments that involve Skype-chat conversations and weird videos from all sorts of eras that could either never have physically been captured on video tape due to their format, or end in such a way that as an audience member I wondered how exactly they were able to have turned into video tapes! Perhaps there is a supernatural or mysterious reason for this (especially later in the film when the television seems to be running itself), but that is bizarrely something that the film never explores at all, and in fact seems strangely incurious with regard to!

I'm pretty sure that I'm way overthinking this and that it probably was just seen to be a neat way to link a bunch of disparate 'video taped' stories together, but on first hearing about the film I remember thinking that it could have been a really great way to link an anthology film together - strange weird tapes that shouldn't by rights exist, mysterious images and maybe a sense of growing disquiet and a developing investigation into what is happening during the linking segments (after all this is really the core idea of what made the Ring films so creepy). Unfortunately the filmmakers bizarrely set up such an intriguing premise with lots of possibilities and then proceed to do exactly nothing with it, simply showing one member after another of the group sitting in front of the TV and then a jump scare at the end that doesn't really explain anything at all. When the best part of the entire film is the, again Harmony Korine-esque, sequence of the group having fun trashing a dilapidated house and trying to assault students in a car park before they go off to their assignment, all captured on grimy distorted video (a sequence of images that is quite neatly reprised before the end credits, with a moment in that reprisal that is strangely reminiscent of the notorious Sybil Danning end credits from Howling II!), then the film has serious problems!

This is the major problem of the entire film though, and it affects all of the individual segments. Most of the segments, like the framing story, play vaguely interestingly whilst they are going on. There is some action and occasionally some twists. But there is always a sense that the reasons for the characters actually doing what they are doing hasn't been properly laid out! The characters are in their situations but how and why? I don't think that I've ever seen a film before where everything falls apart if you start seriously thinking about why characters are doing what they are doing, and this happens in every segment!

For example how exactly does the website that the guys are assaulting people for in the framing section work? Then how long has the 'real sex' website that the guys in the first segment been running? Presumably not long enough for the guys to have never encountered a drunk girl falling unconscious on them before, thereby ruining their planned night of videotaped sex! What exactly is the state of the couple's relationship in the second story, 'Second Honeymoon'? Without sketching in any kind of relationship dynamics (apart from a tiff over money being removed from the guy's wallet) the twist at the end only works as a surprise, not as a comeuppance or betrayal of one of the other characters. Similarly the first segment, 'Amateur Night', by not sketching in the dynamics of the guys and their website prevents the run in with the Jeepers Creepers-esque demon woman from playing out as a comeuppance or undeserved punishment, and more just as a series of gory murders. (The big-eyed woman kept reminding me of this drug-and-drive ad, and the scene in the film of driving back from the nightclub after having picked up the girls could have directly come from it!)

These stories are keeping the short story structures of classic horror anthology films but losing any moral element, or really relatable characters, perhaps secure in the knowledge that a gory payoff and a facile twist are all that is needed. But if we have learnt anything from Switchblade Romance/Haute Tension, it should be that this isn't really enough!

And it continues...'Thursday the 14th' is a kind of goofy blackly comic (in the grand tradition of anthology films, the tone of the stories varies wildly!) version of the 'kids go into the woods to be picked off one by one' slasher film. I think it is the best of all the segments, with its neat twist that the heroine after surviving a previous massacre has actually brought three uncomprehending friends into the woods in order to 'bait' the killer into showing his face. That premise, and the way that the unkillable killer has a video effect on them that means that they cannot be captured on tape, could be the basis of a brilliantly subversive Cabin In The Woods-style film. Here, despite game performances from the cast of kids, the plot is allowed to peter out.

(The big unresolved issue that plagues 'Thursday the 14th' is that if the killer is so deadly, had the heroine seemingly entered the woods alone on a previous occasion in order to dig all the conveniently placed spike traps and such that she tries to trap him with during the final chase? And if she had, how did she escape then?)

The Joe Swanberg directed segment 'The Sick Thing That Happened To Emily When She Was Younger' is also problematic and predicated around a twist that transforms a relationship from a concerned long distance Skype-chat with a girlfriend who might be paranoid and prone to self-mutilation into a more disturbing one of manipulation of another person's fears to achieve your own goals. The twist is actually the best one in all of the segments, playing off the Paranormal Activity and Fourth Kind banging door, night vision, exploration-of-darkened-rooms-of-your-house antics quite successfully. But again we don't really know anything about the relationship here, being thrown into the middle of the situation. The boyfriend is played rather woodenly, at least compared to the actress playing the girl, and it was interesting to find out in the extras on the disc that he was an amateur actor. His slightly unconvincing and stilted, almost bored, performance does work quite well though in providing an off-key sense to his conversations with the girlfriend and especially his low key reactions to the girl showing that she has been cutting herself, and it looks as if the role might have been tailored to someone without obvious acting chops in order to make the final twist play better.

While the Swanberg segment completely throws away the 'VHS' shakeycam gimmick for a Skype-based video chat device (causing the problems with the believability of the framing story as discussed above!) that helps it fit much more into Swanberg's technology focused feature works, particularly LOL.

"10/31/98" is a light and fun but totally insubstantial way of finishing off the film, as a bunch of guys go around to a haunted house for Halloween and find it deserted, except for a strange chanting coming from upstairs. What follows takes a bit of the current trend for exorcism movies, throws in an escape from a shifting haunted house (with some neat CGI tricks that take it into the territory of the House on Haunted Hill remake) and then an ending that suggests the obvious - that they really shouldn't have saved that tied up girl in the attic after all!

So a very problematic and unsatisfying anthology, throwing a lot of half-understood (by the filmmakers) horror imagery at the wall (without explaining much of it), and seeing what will stick. The VHS gimmick is more of a hindrance than a help too, and gets abandoned almost at will, though it must have been a painstaking and logistical nightmare for all of the various directors to have kept the technique going throughout the film. Though it is interesting that the usual traits of a 'found footage' video - the tracking grain, cuts to a blank blue screen and Cloverfield-style jump cuts showing flashes of a previous film recorded underneath the one we are watching (all of which are present and correct) - really take second place to stranger repeated motifs of most of the stories from the way that they mostly start with the characters preparing for a night out or driving in cars on trips to showing insides of motel rooms and air conditioners, to characters tripping and falling over then slowly filming their feet and an approaching menacing character while lying on the ground, to the problematic use of the female characters mostly just as sex objects to be projected onto (something which is often acknowledged in the segments, but which often plays less as subversion of a camera's gaze than as a 'having your cake and eating it' attitude!)

V/H/S/2 (2013)

Over a decade since writing up V/H/S and being kind of underwhelmed by it, I finally decided that I had better get around to watching through the rest of the series. First though I revisited V/H/S and feel much the same about it as my previous post - many of the stories have a rather icky approach to relationships and women in general. Whether they are being used as sex objects turned predators in the first couple of stories, or turned into oblivious victims in the "Sick Thing That Happened To Emily When She Was Younger" short. The final short, "10/31/1998" is now probably the best one ("Thursday the 14th" having fallen in my estimations in re-viewing it), in that it actually contains a set up and pay off to it and features characters who seem relatively decent types, although even that piece kind of encapsulates the spirit of the entire film since it can be seen as part of the 'found footage exorcism' trend of the 2010s as it has the twist of the female victim being saved suddenly do a turn into being the predator at the end. And the wraparound story tying all the segments together features an unlikeable group of reprobates introduced assaulting a couple in a parking lot and then breaking into a strange mansion to retrieve a mysterious tape, only to find a room full of tapes that makes each member of the gang disappear one by one on playing each of them.
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So I went into V/H/S/2 with tempered expectations and remembering that anything to do with "VHS" as a format is pretty minimal in all but the linking segments of the anthology. This one makes an immediate bad impression in its unrated version with almost the very first image being a camera zooming into a lady removing her bra and flashing her breasts as seen through a window of a seedy motel! Which I suppose is probably the filmmakers doing a pointed call back to the seedy nature of the first film where it seemed that most of the female characters had to take their tops off!

Anyway, the shakey cam here belongs to a Private Investigator who after being chased off by a similarly naked man in the motel room when he is discovered filming through the window is then shown blackmailing the guy for money or else the footage will be released to the guy's wife. Then he and his female assistant move on to their next job, which is to check up on a missing person, which involves (as with the first film) breaking into a house only to find a room full of VHS tapes. The PI goes to search the house whilst leaving the assistant to parse through the missing man's laptop and each of the tapes.

And yes, none of the segments this time on each of the VHS tapes utilise VHS technology. In broad terms the technology tackled in each of the segments are: eyeball camera; trail camera; body cams; and dog cam!
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The first segment, "Phase I Clinical Trials", is a kind of a take on Mad Love/The Hands of Orlac/Body Parts, as a man who has received an eyeball camera transplant is told by his doctor that he might have hallucinations until his sight adjusts. This happens when on returning home he sees an image of a girl around his home, who proceeds to terrorise him through jump scares until he hides out locked in his bathroom. He then gets contacted by a woman who passed him in the doctor's waiting room who reveals that she had a cochlear implant and can therefore hear ghosts rather than see them and gnomically in one single line asks the guy if he has ever done something bad that he feels guilty for.

This actually would have been a fun set up for a ghost-hunting "See No Evil, Hear No Evil" duo! Unfortunately the film does worse than nothing with this set up as when the guy mentions that there is a naked fat guy outside the window (who does the jump scare thing of suddenly popping into the room itself) the lady says its her uncle and the way she has found to cope is to ignore him entirely through having distracting sex. Cue thumping techno soundtrack as she strips her top off so we get a good look at her breasts.

Waking up post-coitus the guy stumbles back to his bathroom (to 'demand the footage' of that sexual encounter from the doctor into his mirror) only to on emerging from the bathroom get assaulted again by jump scare spirits and on running back into his living room finding the woman not there but instead in his pool being drowned by her own vengeful spirits. The guy jumps in to try and save her from drowning, but fails, and then runs back again to the bathroom where in a bizarre act seemingly motivated less from any sensible behaviour (especially since the woman said previously that simply removing the implants that have revealed the ghosts will not do anything to escape them now that they are actually attacking) he cuts his eye implant out. On stumbling out of the bathroom he inevitably gets tackled to the floor by the ghosts, who pick up the eyeball camera from the sink and in a coup de grace shove it down his throat. End of scene.

(This may be the most annoying segment of this film, very much in the trend of those from the first V/H/S of just a succession of flashy events structured into a vague semblance of a story, but with any actual content removed. The commentary track between wraparound story director Adam Wingard and director of the segment Simon Barrett actually turns out to be (annoyingly) revealing of this where Barrett talks about a brief scene where the woman was going to 'explain' the situation in more detail and they were even going to allude to The Stone Tape, but they removed it because it would have been "too boring". The problem is that the 'boring explanation' is the actual meat that makes the jump scares and ironic/gory payoffs interesting! There's too much of a rush in a lot of the shorts in this anthology towards the visceral 'in your face' action without having a satisfying context for the events to take place in. And more than anything else that's what makes moments like the sudden turn into sex come across more as a clumsy excuse to show breasts rather than feeling more properly motivated.)
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Segment 2 is "A Ride In The Park" co-written and directed by Blair Witch Project director Eduardo Sanchez along with Jamie Nash. This is somewhat more interesting as a guy has a brief conversation with his girlfriend ("You ride that bike more than you ride me" - deep characterisation there! Though it was at least amusing!) before filming his bike ride through the woods with a trail camera attached to his helmet when he runs across a woman bitten by a zombie, who proceeds to bite him.

We then get the guy's own last moments and death before resurrection as a zombie himself and a visceral gut-munching scene, before he wanders through the woods with a bunch of other zombies (both pre-existing and the ones he himself has newly created) before an invasion of a children's birthday party that sends everyone running for their lives. After he is run over by one of the cars escaping the scene (in probably the best 'jump scare' shot of the whole film as the POV camera goes under the car) that causes him to accidentally 'butt dial' his girlfriend, who oblivious to all the zombie antics tells him that she loves him and is waiting at home. That seemingly gets at the last human memories of our zombified main character who picks up a discarded shotgun from one of the children's party guests (?!? I guess that's just an American thing?) and we get a first person POV of a shotgun suicide, complete with spinning head cam to end this one.

(This one is... fine. A bit arch and not bringing too much new to the table other than its first person POV camera. The death and resurrection sequence in the middle of the piece is quite good, with the main character's body lying on the ground with his arm in view as a couple of other bike riders discover him, with the twitching of the fingers being the warning sign that he is coming back. This actually does have a satisfying narrative arc to it too compared to the first segment, that manages to both come to a big climactic massacre action sequence but importantly also ends with a bit of tragic pathos beyond that)
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Segment 3 is "Safe Haven", a Indonesian segment co-directed by Timo Tjahjanto and Gareth Evans (coming in between the two The Raid films Evans is best known for), in which a film crew after interviewing a strange cult leader decide to visit his secluded compound for an official interview whilst also wearing body cams to do some undercover investigating as well. Unfortunately this interview seems to be the catalyst for the commune entering the final stages of its preparation for the apocalypse.

This is the longest of the four segments, at 45 minutes, and by far the best. It develops characters and even though we jump into the action in media res we get a bit of a sketched in love triangle between the director, his female colleague fiancee who has recently discovered she is pregnant and the cameraman friend who may be the father. This all plays into the extended climax as we jump between four separate viewpoints (the three characters above plus a sound guy) for their unique perspectives on the collapse of the commune, but are mostly in the cameraman's POV for the final section as the other characters and their cameras get bluntly removed from the equation. Most notably the director's POV as he initially seems to be the lead, and even fights back against the other commune members in a gunfight before he is wrestled into the mass suicide situation and executed in front of the cameraman.

There are some really neatly scary images in this piece, such as the female lead seeing four other masked women relentlessly approaching from the other end of the corridor and then grabbing and sweeping her along with them to a pre-destined fate. Or the director running back into the compound to see the men all standing in a circle in a courtyard before each putting a gun to their heads and pulling the trigger. Or the execution scene in front of the producer with another POV of being shot sequence similar to the ending of the previous segment as the person whose POV it is may now be dead but the camera is still going, capturing the reaction of his friend to his death.

One of the most important things for a found footage piece seems to be the structuring of geographical space for the characters (and most importantly the camera) to move through, and this segment appears to really understand and make full use of this aspect. After the first interview scene at a cafe to set things up, we move to the compound itself and follow the crew from their car in the driveway outside to the entrance where they are met by a couple of members of the compound and escorted through the campus to the leader's office. This takes us through the entire location in its 'normal' form (showing spooky things happening in rooms off the main corridor, like the shadows of a group of men in the dining hall, a couple of people in what looks like a hospital room, a classroom full of children) before we go through it again as the leader's announcement to commit mass suicide occurs and see the carnage occur; and then again as the cameraman first tries to reach the main female lead to save her (only for her to give birth to the full grown Devil himself) and then in his escape back through all of these areas finds that all of the people who committed suicide have now returned in zombified form, including the director (that's a particularly great moment as the character reaches that main courtyard where all the men shot themselves, and first sees one remaining still living commune member forlornly sat clicking an empty gun against his head, before all the zombified men come for the cameraman, and he escapes them only to be trapped in the small corridor leading off of this area by his reanimated director friend, forcing them to have to have a confrontation)

The cameraman escapes the compound in the car (another great moment is when he needs to break the window of the car he takes off his shirt to wrap around his hand, which of course the body cam is attached to, and so the camera suddenly 'becomes' the fist battering through the window. Then the guy then helpfully throws the shirt onto the dashboard so that we get a good shot of him as he drives the car out of the compound) only for the Devil creature to run the car off the road, and we get a final shot of him crawling out of the wreckage only to find himself overlooked by the creature, who calls him "Daddy". End segment.

Lots of good stuff here. An effective simple story and a good grasp of geographical space that gets sketched in and allows for pay offs to then occur as things change within that environment, which the characters themselves may or may not notice, which feels where the 'found footage' subgenre is at its very best (I sometimes get the impression that some filmmakers see 'shakeycam' found footage as a good excuse to play fast and loose with framing for the sake of verisimilitude, but I do wonder if the opposite might be the case and you actually need to be more controlled than a classically shot film, because so much rides on the fleetingly captured, seemingly haphazard moments in a found footage piece to convey all the meaning). I particularly love that moment on rewatching of the way the cameraman in the moment of putting the cameras on, and then in the first cafe scene turns and zooms in on his female colleague, capturing her gaze and then panning down to her hands over her belly, as if to suggest his interest in her as more than professional which then on re-viewing works as an initial sketched in suspicion of the pregnancy subplot. In the commentary for this segment the directors talk about having to cut all that set up out for a story told in this style, and that the opening was brutally cut down to even get the segment to 45 minutes. But crucially they left enough in to still suggest character motivation underpinning the action rather than, as in the first segment, just have it appear suddenly out of nowhere.

This segment also feels like a more condensed version of the later film The Void in its content, and ironic pregnancy aspects. And is probably the most gleefully goriest of all of the segments!
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Segment 4 is "Slumber Party Alien Abduction", which starts off kind of like one of those 1980s Goonies-style kids adventure films turned nasty, as a group of early-teens and their older teen sister (and her boyfriend) fool around with their video camera playing pranks on each other. Which are mostly sexual, in terms of barging in on the sister in bed with her boyfriend; and then in turn the sister and her boyfriend attaching a camera to their pet dog and having it go into the room whilst one of the kids is watching a sexy film.

Whilst the kids are bickering with each other, they all fail to notice the aliens (particularly on display in a nice shot where when they are in the lake an underwater shot captures the alien approaching only for another character to jump in the water in between them) until they invade the house and capture half of the characters in one fell swoop. Including one of the boys and the dog with the camera attached to it who get dragged around in a sleeping bag before seemingly getting thrown into the lake, as the bag begins filling with water and after they escape it they are dragged out onto the dock by the teen girl and her boyfriend.

After that it is a chase through the woods and a barn as the characters get picked off one by one by the aliens. This is definitely not the segment to watch if you have epilepsy as the strobing goes wild throughout most of this section. The boyfriend goes first, then the teen girl is dragged off as they try to get to the upper reaches of the barn, Then the boy and his dog themselves are being beamed up but unfortunately(?) the boy lets the dog go and we get a viscerally impacting image of falling through the air from a great height until the camera, and pet pooch, splatter onto the ground below. End segment.

This is a great example of pushing the narrative to its bare minimum but still staying tonally consistent, turning the entire segment into a kind of sensation-focused thrill ride. You get some of the tensions between the kids and the older sister sketched in and thats really all you need here before it just becomes a relentless chase sequence. I note that the director of this, Jason Eisner, appears to have recently expanded this short out into a normal styled full feature film Kids vs Aliens (NSFW), which I would really like to track down now (similarly that David Bruckner short from the first V/H/S, Amateur Night, itself got expanded to a feature with the same actress Hannah Fierman in the main role with 2016's Siren)
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So that ends things off well and then the wraparound segment "Tape 49" ends with more gun suicides and resurrections in which the Private Investigator gets his comeuppance.
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I think V/H/S/2 after a bit of a shaky start with that first segment eventually proves to be a bit better than the first film. I think it may be because the general theme of the first V/H/S was all about relationships and how they are exploitational and coercive, if not outright murderous. Which led to a lot of morally uncomfortably icky moments, and unlikeable characters for much of the action. The primary theme of V/H/S/2 appears to be of people returning from the beyond - as ghosts, as zombies, and from other dimensions as Devils or Aliens. Eventually the wraparound is about another cult of people using a series of VHS tapes that will seemingly grant immortality if watched in the correct order, though it seems to involve having to take your life LiveLeak-style first, in the process creating a new horrific image for posterity.

I also remembered why a little found footage can go a long way because the constraints of the format means that context and narrative has to often be implied. Instead of a standard build up to a story many stories have to suddenly begin in media res and the viewer has to infer a lot of details on the fly from clues peppered through subtle character moments or environmental clues. Something like the recent internet horror series from Kane Parsons or Briscoe Park mentioned in previous posts above are really pushing the subgenre into fascinating directions now because they appear to be freed from certain commercial constraints to be as gnomic and allusive in their narratives as these kind of 'found footage' pieces kind of need to be, and especially are using their platform on the internet to engage the audience in a process of speculation and dissection, leading to an interesting sense of an evolving story that may not have been envisaged in the pieces as initially created.

I wonder if part of it is that the first two V/H/S films are ironically kind of constrained by their portmanteau formats into falling between two stools in having to tell self-contained tales without the 'compensation' of a tightly constructed narrative, so its hard to get fully invested, yet its still so fictional in structure that the viewer cannot entirely 'lose themselves' in the found footage either. Instead the focus is primarily on sensation and shock moments which cause a moment-to-moment impact. I don't entirely want to be too harsh on them for that, but it can sometimes seem as if we are left with the 'middle section' of a story, with the introduction at one end and a third act twist at the other end removed. Most of the segments here make it work on that level, but whilst I'm not as morally repulsed by V/H/S/2 as I was by the first, I'm still cautious about fully endorsing this series for the moment.

V/H/S: Viral (2014)

Hmmmm... there are some neat story ideas in this one, although the whole 'found footage' idea kind of gets lost. After the 'toxic relationships' theme of the first film and 'visitors/returning from the beyond' idea of the second, the loose theme of this third film seems to be 'invocation'. It's also quite L.A.-centric in a few of the segments too.

The wraparound story for this one, "Vicious Circles", drops the structure of the first two films of people going into a spooky house, finding banks of CRTs and playing tape after tape. Instead this one starts (as all the entries in this series must, I guess!) with a leering close up of a woman's backside as her boyfriend films her on a bridge over the L.A. storm drains. Which was apparently his hangout spot as a kid, and which the girl says will be their 'special place' from now on. The tape jumps to the couple at home with ever more uncomfortably leering shots of the girl before the landlady bangs on the wall to get them to keep the noise down and the tape jumps again, this time to the girl playing with the camera while the guy is not there, until he barges in and seemingly is about to beat her before the camera abruptly jumps again. This time the boy is getting bored with the relationship and looking for something more to make life worth living, whilst his girl is right there but being ignored at best, and there is footage of a police chase through the city occurring on the television. The chase which involves an ice cream truck and a police car is apparently about to go right past their building so, ignoring the pleas of his girl, the guy grabs up his camera and races out of the building (accidentally barging in on his landlady towelling off after a shower, which gives us the only full frontal nudity in the film, and the first jumpscare simultaneously!) to find he's missed the chase. However it seems that the chase has doubled back and is approaching again so the guy prepares his camera. However something starts to go wrong, some of the bystanders start acting strange, whilst his girl also leaves the building in a kind of trance to stand in the middle of the street. Suddenly one of the other bystanders warning to get out of the road themselves is mown down by the chase; the guy's girl is magicked up by the truck and disappears, and the guy's phone brings up a picture of her with a countdown. As it hits zero, we jump into the first of the anthology stories...
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This is "Dante The Great" from director Gregg Bishop (who would follow this with that feature length film Siren mentioned in the previous post), which begins with a Magician's Assistant being interviewed in a police interrogation room after having whistleblown on her boss and his secret stash of hidden tapes. We then move into a SWAT team raiding the magician's dressing room and finding the tapes, before then arresting the guy and leading him out to a police car. None of this is done in 'found footage' style, instead beginning with CCTV of the interrogation room before the SWAT team body cam footage. And then the segment jumps again and becomes a kind of faux documentary that gets into the back story of 'Dante The Great', which tells us about the unassuming man who came across a mysterious magician's cloak that gave him the ability to pull off all sorts of tricks, mostly involving being able to grab things from long distances away and pull them back through the cloak. Like a bunny rabbit. Only the cloak needs to be fed to recharge its magic, and so the magician goes from feeding it bunny rabbits, to seducing and then throwing the cloak at his various comely assistants. The cloak eats the evidence, although somewhat unwisely Dante for some reason decides to film his crimes too, such as the green night-visioned scene of putting the cloak on the bed whilst his latest assistant is sleeping, and then watching her getting wrestled around the room by the homicidal piece of clothing!

The latest assistant is the one we saw in the interrogation room at the beginning, and she details how she had ambitions to become a magician herself and that she became close with Dante after he saw her ex-boyfriend beating her up one evening. We then jump to CCTV of Dante's dressing room where he performs the feat of somehow grabbing the boyfriend from somewhere else entirely into the dressing room, before magically breaking all of his limbs and neck, before feeding him to the cloak. The assistant starts becoming suspicious of this after her ex has gone missing and eventually runs across his stash of taped murders, before going to the police.

This is where the segment goes from amusingly offbeat to actually pretty good, as we jump to the SWAT guys storming the theatre, breaking the fourth wall by barging in on the faux documentary interview in progress on the stage and arresting Dante. They take him out to the car but they are dealing with someone who can with the help of his magic cloak bend time and space to an almost invincible extent and he quickly escapes and returns to the theatre. Whereupon he uses his cloak to drag his assistant out of that interrogation room mid-session and into the theatre so that they can have their final showdown. Although not before the SWAT guys try to take the magician down and end up getting gorily torn apart. But that fight with the SWAT guys has depleted the cloak's powers just enough to allow the magician and his assistant to tussle over who gets fed to it first. After the cloak seemingly switches sides(?) the magician ends up getting swallowed by his own creation and the assistant becomes the master. We then get a few more faux documentary interviews of adoring fans wondering where "Dante the Great" disappeared to, and Dante's mother being tremulously certain that he will be back soon. And then see the assistant burning the cloak. Except in a final, completely unsurprising twist it reappears back in her closet and she herself gets grabbed.

This was a fine segment. Not really anything that fits in with a "VHS" themed anthology film, but as a comically spooky Tales From The Crypt-style story, it was good. Its a kind of a cynical take on a David Copperfield-type. Film-wise it's probably a mix of I'm Dangerous Tonight and anticipates In Fabric. Plus its probably about as plausible (and far more entertainingly violent!) in using CGI to 'show' how magic tricks are 'really' done as either of those Now You See Me films!
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Back into the wraparound story, as the guy is desperately chasing after the ice cream truck and police car, which is coming to seem less like an actual chase and more like something that is spreading an infection wherever it goes. People are lining the streets to catch a glimpse of the chase, and that leads to one guy falling to his death from a bridge. Our main guy falls in with a couple of cyclists and they try and catch up to the ice cream van, only for one of them to get caught in its door and get dragged behind it until he is mangled; whilst the other cyclist gets run over by the following police car. The main character continues to follow the chase as the next story begins..
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This is a nifty piece of Spanish sci-fi/horror "Parallel Monsters" by director Nacho Vigalondo, which is kind of in a similar territory to his most famous film, 2007's Timecrimes. In this story a guy has been ignoring his wife to build a machine in his basement, which turns out to be a door into a mirror dimension. He meets his doppleganger from the other dimension and after some discussion they decide to swap places for 45 minutes to each go and check out the other's universe. Unfortunately we're in "Star Trek mirror universe" territory here where everyone in the other universe is utterly evil, which means that our original main character finds himself in a twisted version of the world where initially it appears that his wife is proposing a foursome with two other guys, before it turns into a kind of occult ritual complete with witch burnings on the television, before turning weirdly sci-fi dystopian, before all the characters turn into glowy headed alien creatures wielding monstrous sentient blood-thirsty genitals. Whilst this has been going on his mirror world counterpart has himself been going upstairs in the 'normal world' to watch the 'normal wife' sleep, and as events in the mirror universe deteriorate so the doppleganger himself proves to be a similar monster and attacks the wife.

This segment gets rather goofy, but I do like the framing of the two universes and the ending where the main character gets out of the mirror universe back into his own and fights with his doppleganger, only for the doppleganger to be eaten by the monster version of the wife before the door to the universe closes on the carnage. With another completely unsurprising extra twist (though quite an amusing one) of the guy calling his wife for help only for her to assume that he is the monster that had been attacking her and she ends up stabbing him to death.

Again, a fun segment with an amusing twist. I do like how the action intercuts on either side of the mirror universes and obvious attention has been paid to getting the action to match together. I could maybe have done without the penis and vagina puppet monsters though, which was perhaps a goofy step too far, although I guess it was the intention to make allusions to and take the action into Stuart Gordon style From Beyond-body horror territory there. And after this short Vigalondo went on to direct that Anne Hathaway starring film Colossal, which itself is also about parallel actions and the deleterious effect that such things have upon relationships!
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.. back to the wraparound story and the chase is still continuing through the streets of L.A. - the convoy passes a wildly stereotypical outdoor Latino gang barbeque set-up, which as the influence of the chimes of the ice cream van and the police siren work their magic, causes the party to degenerate into bloody violence, before we get thrown into the next segment...
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This is "Bonestorm" by Justin Benson and Aaron Moorhead, the same year they made the feature Spring. This segment is about four lackadaisical L.A. skater dudes who are straight out of those early 90s skateboarding VHS tapes, where guys end up breaking bones whilst trying to skate down some metal railings, or do a sick ollie off of the pavement and straight into a passing car. After their latest video of stunts, and worrying that they are being overtaken by the likes of Jackass, they get told by their director about a gnarly old abandoned riverbed down Tijuana-way, so decide to make the trip out there to shoot some foootage.

We get some local colour tourist footage of them going around Tijuana (and buying up fireworks, which will come in handy later on!) before getting to the location. Unfortunately they do not notice, or do not care, that instead of the usual skater graffiti there is a giant pentagram on the ground in the centre of the location. And even more unfortunately during a stunt one of the skaters cuts themselves and just happens to bleed onto the pentagram. At which point all of the mysterious occult worshippers turn up, surround the skaters, rip the director's arm off and all hell breaks loose. Which unfortunately because its all shown through shakey helmet cameras is a bit difficult to fully parse as to what is going on. But basically the director and one of the skaters gets killed, whilst the other two escape, but not after beating a few to a pulp with only their skateboards, and the rather unique image of one of the skateboarders who has conveniently brought a gun with him doing skate-by shootings at various random hooded figures!

The fight stops and starts a few times, as unfortunately the cult members turn out to be undead skeletons (hence the "Bonestorm" title, I guess!), which handily are susceptible to being exploded with weapons-grade fireworks! Whilst our two skaters make their hasty exit, we cut back to the dead director's helmet camera, which captures a strangely Satanic goat-hooved figure passing through the shot, presumably having been brought about from the pentagram and blood combo!

This segment is fine too. It overstays its welcome a bit with the fight scene going on a bit too long. And the main characters are utterly vapid, so I did not particularly care that much about whether they lived or died. Its kind of as if the characters from Larry Clark's Wassup Rockers fell into a From Dusk Till Dawn-esque situation. But its the one segment that actually tries to look like a shakey amateur footage film compared to "Dante The Great" and "Parallel Universes", so I'll give it points for sticking to the brief in a manner that the other segments completely failed to! But I suppose we probably shouldn't be asking the question of who is editing between the different camera shots!
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Then back to the wraparound story as it reaches its conclusion in those same L.A. storm drains that the story began in. The guy reaches and enters the crashed ice cream truck and finds it full of CRT television equipment. His girl appears on one of the screens (a la Debbie Harry in Videodrome) and tells him to 'set her free' by flicking the convenient nearby switch that will upload the footage onto the internet. He does so and enables the viral videos to escape their local environment and spread even wider. The guy leaves the truck and finds his girls lifeless body with her cellphone stuck in her mouth. We then cut back to the idyllic opening shots before the end titles come up and whilst they are playing the film reverses backwards through all of the stories. The End.

I don't mind this wraparound story too much, although ironically doing a kind of county-wide chase sequence through multiple locations is so much more logistically complicated as a filmic idea than the 'confined to a couple of rooms of a spooky house' shenanigans of the first two films, whilst ending up having about as much impact as they did. Which amounts to a bit of a shrug about what is actually going on throughout. I assume it is a kind of commentary on all of those televised police chases that were big in the 90s and later after the OJ White Bronco incident, and how all of the bystanders end up getting 'infected' by the passing evil to the extent that they have to pay the price for simply noticing what is going on. And that maybe this is a new method of the cult that was lightly sketched in over the previous two wraparound stories to spread their message far and wide before they are able to get onto the internet to do it easier! Maybe its like a 'happening' that is meant only for the denizens of L.A. to witness, and be influenced by?
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But wait! I had been curious about the running time of this film being listed at 81 minutes when the previous films ran to about 100 minutes and contained four segments. Well, after the film came to an end on the Blu-ray, an entire extra story auto-plays. Which is the extremely weird "Gorgeous Vortex". Its a bit difficult to describe this one, since it is a kind of mood piece that is part Lynchian avant-garde surrealism involving characters wandering through hyper-composed environments, and part a kind of fashion model shoot, if the fashion models also posed as corpses in crime scenes. Its still got a bit of the standard V/H/S theme of lingering on women in distress, and some of the grainy images of women tied up or in cages felt uncomfortably as if they were beginning to get into some of the fetishised-torture area of the likes of Murder Set-Pieces or The Bunny Game. But I also found this segment to be quite compelling as well. There's nothing else quite like it in the first three V/H/S films, and Gorgeous Vortex feels as if it anticipates and would neatly fit together with some of the hyper-composed images of later works like The Neon Demon or that Gaspar Noe "Summer of '21" advert. And I kept thinking it was working in similar territory to one of my favourite films of the 21st century so far, and source of my avatar, the 2001 film adaptation of The Atrocity Exhibition, which also features characters wandering around environments as almost an aesthetic end goal in itself.

I'll spoiler tag my vague ideas of what the piece means, becuase I am really curious as to what others make of it and wonder if their first impressions of it will be any different:

Spoiler

I wonder if we are seeing a woman flashing back to getting abducted and inducted into a strange coven of witches which is intercut with her in the present revenge-killing all of them Kill Bill-style, up to her final confrontation with the weird witch-thing in the playhouse? Or maybe she is revenging the deaths of the other women after being the only escapee? Or was she abducted by the masked people and turned through medical procedures into a Bionic Woman (or single remaining Charlie's Angel) to go after the coven for them?

It may be the best piece to have come out of this initial "V/H/S" trilogy (I love the back and forth between the grainy VHS footage and the beautiful filmic shots; the air raid sirens going off; the slow motion moments; the tableaus of bodies scattered about the landscape), and ironically it appears to have been jettisoned from the main film for being too strange! The director appears to have gone on to direct nothing after this segment either, which is a real shame. Luckily Gorgeous Vortex is up on YouTube at the moment (NSFW), somewhat appropriately put up by the "International Fashion Film Festival Brussels" channel, and considering most of the comments underneath the film are really quite depressingly negative about it, it may just have to become my new mission to try and promote this segment as much as I can!