V/H/S Reviews

cada uno de los cortometrajes son muy buenos aunque unos mas que otros y otros son mas simples y otros mejor trabajados y logran su cometido de perturbar y de dar miedo

First expectations were to avoid this as this movie provided really intense, gritty, and disturbing elements to the movie. But after seeing this, the directors and writers did really well with their own segments and the way the terror was executed. Although I enjoyed the last segment the most, I found Amateur Night to be a little more appalling while the segments like "Tuesday the 17th" and "The Sick Thing That Happened to Emily When She Was Younger" weren't that creepy but still violent and a bit conspicuous. I was so and so with Second Honeymoon as it had a pretty good twist to the story, but felt it was a bit predictable. For a found footage movie that's as gruesome and terrifying, V/H/S blows Creepypasta right out of the water for it's own touch in horror and really decent story telling.

Nothing to see here, ladies and gents. "V/H/S" is a appallingly bad and nauseatingly shot fright flick, marred by misogynist overtones and 0% (and I do mean %0) character development. The film is geared toward predominately male teenagers with short attention spans, sporting sickeningly schizoid cinematography and and gratuitous boobie shots (most of which are in sexually violent or exploitative context.)

In the core storyline, A group of miscreants break into a house after being hired to steal one videotape. We have no sympathy for these people- between their abusive treatment of women and their grating stupidity, we're actually rooting against them. When they break in, they find a stack of V/H/S home movies... and a corpse. Unfazed by the body of an old man resting in an armchair, they begin to view the videotapes. Each one is a supposedly real horror short.

The first short in the anthology is by far the worst. A trio of horny and misogynistic friends set out to video tape one of the men's sexual experience. The situation soon becomes rapey, as one girl is passed out drunk and another is an apparently addled femme fatale who is not what she seems. The acting in this short is pretty poor and the dialogue is worse.

Is it really necessary to drop the F bomb in every sentence? I mean, I love my expletives as much anybody else, but throwing it around willy-nilly makes you sound like a 13-year-old trying to be 'edgy.' The boys are disgusting pieces of work, but watching their well-deserved demise, satisfying as it might be, is not enough to save this terrible short.

The majority of these shorts are wretchedly bad to pretty mediocre, with the exception of one. Here's a wonder- Ti West, who made one of the worst shorts in the similarly themed horror anthology "The ABC's of Death", also directs the segment that saves this movie from being a total disaster. "Second Honeymoon," starring Joe Swanberg and Sopie Takal, is a surprising and competently acted short that kept me guessing throughout.

The short with the aliens had potential, but just left too many unanswered questions for my liking. The others were utter crap. The shaky cam gave me a headache and a stomachache. The dialogue was a string of childish obscenities. There was no depth to the characters. I have not seen a movie in a long time with a cast of characters I liked less. This movie is so, so bad. Avoid it like the plague.

Disappointed. There were certain "tapes" that were interesting, but most had weird camera effects that I didn't appreciate. I felt they were just weird.
Otherwise I think there were some really creative twists in the endings of certain tapes. Thumbs up on the gore, thumbs down on almost every female showing their tits. Nudity is not a must in horror - although I did think the gang bang gone zombie tape was interesting. Too bad they didn't take any one of these short tales and expand it into a movie. Or put more effort into the original story line.

"I like you."

V/H/S is an ingenious amalgam of two horror staples: the "found footage" subgenre, and the horror anthology structure. Containing a total of six short stories, the film provided the opportunity for a handful of up-and-coming horror directors to experiment with herky-jerky POV horror. Eschewing the polish and sheen of recent films like Cloverfield and Project X, V/H/S aspires to emulate the style of The Blair Witch Project: low-budget, raw and often fuzzy footage that may induce motion sickness due to its shaky cinematography. For this reviewer's money, V/H/S undeniably works; it's an insanely atmospheric, often thrilling selection of short movies, and there's no shortage of blood, boobs, twists or dark humour.

Providing a wrap-around framework for the shorts, V/H/S introduces us to a gang of young thieves who film themselves breaking into a house, endeavouring to retrieve a VHS tape that they've been hired to find. With stacks of video cassettes lying around, the gang begin taking time to watch the unlabelled tapes. In the first tale they watch, Amateur Night (directed by Adam Wingard), a trio of horny young men aim to film a night of drunken sex using a pair of spy glasses. However, they pick up a creepy, quiet girl, and things quickly deteriorate from there. The second story, Ti West's Second Honeymoon, features a young couple filming their tourist exploits as they road trip through the American Southwest, but find themselves stalked by a hooded figure. Next up is Tuesday the 17th (directed by Glenn McQuaid), a Friday the 13th-inspired story about four friends who travel to a remote wooded area for a weekend of lakeside fun. But a vicious apparition rules the area, and is not going to let the intruders leave. The fourth story, Joe Swanberg's The Sick Thing That Happened to Emily When She Was Younger, is told through a series of video chats between two long-distance lovers. Emily believes that her apartment is haunted, and tries to convince her boyfriend of the paranormal presence. Last but not least is 10/31/98, directed by a four-man collective who call themselves Radio Silence. This last segment observes a few boys heading out to attend a Halloween party who find themselves in a haunted house.

Perhaps the most common complaint of found footage movies is that they're boring. After all, it's hard to sustain a movie purportedly told through home video footage, and there's often more build-up than payoff. V/H/S works so well because it jettisons the need to stretch out ideas to feature-length, and thus each story has the freedom to be short and brisk, essentially cutting most of the bullshit to skip straight to the payoff. Furthermore, there's a welcome element of surprise - you don't know how long each story will go for, and you don't know what each story will hold. It provides variety and disorientates us, compelling us to bite our nails in uncertainty of what's about to happen. Unfortunately, the primary story about the burglars who find the tapes is too repellent, silly and dull. Added to this, the idea that these guys film their exploits is difficult to accept, and the fact that they keep filming strains believability to breaking point. V/H/S would have benefitted from either losing this narrative thread entirely, or portraying the story through conventional writing and filming, rather than forcing the found footage conceit.

Fortunately, the directors of the rest of the five shorts each found ingenious ways to avoid the recurring "Why do those idiots keep filming?" question. In one segment, a character is wearing a pair of eyeglasses fitted with a small camera. Another segment consists entirely of webcam chats. In other stories, the camera plays an important role. And in the last segment, a camera is embedded in a characters' Halloween costume.

The best story, by far, is 10/31/98. Perhaps because the segment was masterminded by four people, it's the most inventive and resourceful short film, employing some seamless CGI mixed with old-school special effects trickery to sell the dread of this haunted house. Across the board, the actors all deliver naturalistic performances, without the usual stiffness associated with the subgenre. Perhaps the biggest victory of V/H/S is that it looks and sounds genuine. Paranormal Activity 3 was meant to be told through video cassettes from the 1980s, but it was too crisp and sharp. V/H/S, on the other hand, looks grungy and fuzzy, making us believe we're watching old home movies on an old VHS. Mise-en-scène is spot-on, too. But several stories would have benefitted from more judicious editing. If two or three minutes was excised from each story, the picture would have run a more serviceable 100 minutes, rather than the excessive 115 minutes it ended up being. Furthermore, there are a few logistical issues with V/H/S. For instance, why would the thieves sit inside a creepy house watching the tapes, rather than taking them home to watch? And why would a selection of computer chats end up on a VHS tape?

Packing the grungy menace of the early pictures of directors like Wes Craven and Tobe Hooper, V/H/S is a clever grab-bag of frights and intoxicating tension, all filtered through the found footage aesthetic. It feels dangerous and often real, and it puts a lot of glossy Hollywood pictures to shame. Each of the film's components would make for fine, memorable horror shorts. Therefore, with the segments all pieced together, the finished product is a terrific slice of independent horror filmmaking. It's an ideal movie to watch in a dark room on a Friday or Saturday night. And it's required viewing for horror buffs.

7.2/10

This movie arrives during an unfortunate time where found Footage movies are coming out in waves. However, this is a notch above most of them. It's not perfect but it does add some new fresh twists and in today's world that's enough to warrant a recommendation and put it above most movies in this genre.

This is an anthology, so for those who've seen Creepshow it's like that except these are found footage movies or for those who haven't seen that movie, it's basically a bunch of mini movies(5 to be exact) all put into one movie. The story is really simple, it's a group of guys who get hired by some unknown party to break into some old man's house and retrieve a video. However, it's not as easy as it seems since there are stacks of VHS tapes so they have to start watching them in order to find the right one but that's not their only problem as something else lurks in the house.

Before I say anything, none of these movies are ever boring. With that being said, some videos work better and are genuinely a lot creepier than the others. The second film, while intriguing is not scary at all. I see what they writers were trying to do(a side note: each video had different writers and directors) but it never came off as creepy or suspenseful, luckily it's not long. The 3rd film is also not that scary, but it does have two generally creepy shots and I like how they actually made the camera a crucial part of the video. The 4th film is scarier than the 2nd and 3rd as it does provide a nice "Boo" moment or two but compared to the first and last film, it's not as effective.

The first, and last films as well as the actual film(the guys breaking into the house to search for the tape) is where the actual scares of the movie lie. The first and last movies are so well done, beautifully told, and creepy that they make up for the lack of scare in the movies in between. The actual story itself is extremely creepy too, as once they break into the house you know they're not alone. A lot of scary stuff happens in the breaks between each short film. I also like how(with the exception of the 2nd film and the main story) that they manage to incorporate the camera in a way where it's a crucial part of the film(hence the third and fourth film) or avoids the common found footage movie flaw, why can't they just put the dam camera down? In first and last film, the person either has the camera in their glasses or in their costume so they manage to avoid that pitfall. I'm trying to avoid describing each film because it's more fun when you don't know much about a movie.

I should also warn that this movie is certainly not for everyone. I've never seen this much nudity in a film before(both male and female, both frontal and back) and some of these films are sick and twisted. So those of you with an easy stomach, you've been warned.

In a time where found footage movies are coming out on a monthly basis(or so it seems), it's nice to see a movie like V/H/S that completely surprises you by putting a little twist on a genre that's become monotonous. Sure some films are better and more frightening than others but this movie is never boring, at least to me it wasn't. This is also a notch above most horror movies today because it's you know, it's actually scary, something lacking in most horror movies today. It's also a bitch slap to those watered down, lame PG-13 horror movies(with the exception of Insidious and The Woman in Black of course) that are constantly coming out every week(at least, that's what it feels like). Horror fans should be pleased by this movie, and it's a nice edition to the found footage genre.