V/H/S

I've found that the hardest films to write about are neither the best nor the worst.  Instead, it's films that simply fail to connect with me, especially after I've already committed myself to reviewing them.  In the case of V/H/S this problem is compounded by the fact that I only occasionally like anthologies, and think that Found Footage is a wildly misused genre.

Don't get me wrong, both formats can work well.  However, in the case of V/H/S we basically get a series of stories that amount to “someone dies a bloody death in a different context than in the previous story.”  I don't feel like I connect with any of these characters, and I don't feel like any of the stories try to set themselves apart visually either.

The film presents itself as a frame story.  A group of criminals who film their horrific crimes are hired to steal a VHS tape from a house.  They find the resident of the house dead, but the house is stocked with hundreds of VHS tapes.  While gathering them up, the criminals begin to watch a few, and witness various people dying in horrific manners, before the resident comes back as a zombie and kills them all.

As with most anthology films, I feel that an in-universe editor would greatly benefit the story.  We're shown the videos themselves, rather than the perspective of the criminals' camera, so clearly someone spliced them in.  What point were they trying to make?  And why not show us even more of the videos?  Why not make some effort to explain how any of these stories are connected?

As for fear, I didn't find any of these stories relatable enough to bother being afraid of.  I'm not someone who brings drunken women to hotel rooms for sex when they can't say no, so the thought of such a woman (Hannah Fierman) turning out to be a monster who plans to eat me doesn’t particularly concern me.  The idea of being killed by my wife's (Sophia Takal) secret lesbian lover (Kate Lyn Shell) isn’t that much of a concern when I can't imagine myself marrying a person conservative enough to be in the closet to begin with (if there was a greater reason for the murder than “I want to be with her” I missed it).  A Jason Voorhees rip-off who can teleport (Bryce Burke) is so far removed from any reality I know that you'd be as well to try to make me afraid of radioactive butter (yes, getting radiation poison from butter would be as horrible as any other source, but until it happens I'm not particularly afraid).  Finally, I find it a bit unbelievable that aliens would use a human woman (Helen Rogers) as an incubator for their young, when they presumably have perfectly good reproductive systems of their own, and barring that could just use livestock (if they can use one species that evolved on another planet, I find it hard to believe others would be a major stretch).

So, in short, I don't get it.  Maybe this movie just wasn't made for me, or maybe I went in with a dislike of both genres.  Lots of other horror fans seem to like it, so I guess there's no harm in checking it out if you're interested.  No recommendation here, but I certainly won't discourage.