Being Film #28 for Hooptober 2023
Oh V/H/S franchise…after so many entries have you finally gotten to the point where there’s nothing left to say? The rapidly diminishing returns of the shorts, the frayed ends of commitment to the format…all of that caused me to drop out after the initial run of film that ended in 2014. I don’t know what it was about V/H/S/85 that brought me back for another look, but I will say that like almost every other entry in the increasingly frustrating series it’s a mixed bag, albeit a bag where the lows and high are much closer together. Make of that what you will.
THE QUICK SUMMARY: No framing device this time, just a series of small quirky horror shorts that only casually make use of the setting. Murders at magic lakes, ancient Mayan gods rising from the earth, weird performance art gone awry, a family get-together that celebrates a very different rite of passage, and a procedural about stopping a serial killer who sends video evidence of his crimes before they actually happen. Spooky stuff, and we didn’t even talk about the blob stuck in the basement watching exercise videos as scientists watch…it.
Your mileage is definitely going to vary here. With the removal of a framing device that explains what we’re actually watching, we’re left with just a random assortment of shorts that use (mostly) use the VHS format to tell their stories, except that things like why people continue to hold cameras and who’s editing all this footage together are completely tossed to the curb. Small quibbles, I know, especially when what folks apparently want are just graphic gore and shock twists without caring too much about logic. But for me those things are what made the first few entries fun: even when they failed, the verisimilitude was something the filmmakers strived for. Here, not so much.
So a quick recap of each segment and my thoughts on them. There is a wraparound segment, and even though it’s not a framing device David Bruckner’s “Total Copy” probably sticks the landing best, being aggressively weird and funny and gross and working as segments of a kind of Hard Copy ripoff if it married Unexplained Mysteries.
Then there’s “No Wake” which on its own isn’t really that great – we get an interesting premise of a bunch of dumb kids in an RV who go off into the woods to do what young kids do, only to meet with a killer. There’s a real interesting twist but it’s frustratingly cut short. It has to be – one you watch the entire movie you’ll understand why, and writer/director Mike P. Nelson (who also did the Wrong Turn remake) does a fair job with the violence and the twist, but it still feels abrupt.
I wish the same could be said for “God of Death” which is way, way too long, has little to no interest in being remotely believable, and doesn’t do anything we haven’t seen elsewhere, but better. Basically there is a devastating earthquake during a Mexican newscast, and the cameraman and rescue team during their attempt to escape the rapidly crumbling building come across a buried altar for the God of Death. It goes about how you’d expect. No idea how the footage got out or how the lighting worked down there, but you know…found footage!
“TKNOGD” which I think is “Technology No Good” purports to show the final show of a performance artist named Ada Lovelace. Kudos to director Natasha Kermani for making this feel very much like the kind of weird, burgeoning CG performance shows I remember in the late 80s and early 90s. Showing her sparse audience a virtual world she can visit using an early virtual reality set she sets out to find expose our new God of technology, but instead finds the Devil who virtually tears her apart. Except this is the V/H/S series, so you know that shit’s gonna happen in real life, too. Great capper to see the audience, smeared in blood, half-heartedly clap.
“Ambrosia” is the capper to “No Wake” and I’m not sure if this is the first time two shorts in the V/H/S series directly connect to each other, but Nelson gets one of the best segments by following up on a family celebration of a young woman earning his rite into adulthood – by killing seven people. Yup, the seven people from the first segment. But she didn’t count on the magical lake that revives the dead, and this family is in for a surprise. Bullets fly and Ruthie, our young woman/killer gets a taste of the medicine she left for the poor partiers she offed earlier. This might be my favorite of the bunch.
Finally there’s the reason most folks are gonna tune into this one. “Dreamkill” comes from Scott Derrickson and C. Robert Cargill, the team behind the Sinister franchise, the first Doctor Strange and most recently The Black Phone. By far the most gruesome and violent of the bunch, the story revolves around a pair of detectives trying to solve a series of brutal murders. The catch? They’re getting videos of the actual murders before they happen. It’s a fun twist, and with James Ransone and Freddy Rodriguez you have leads who know what this is and how to deliver. Somewhat abandoning the format, this is in widescreen and utilizes a number of different cameras, including surveillance cameras and interrogation footage, but the sheer insanity of what we’re seeing was enough to make me forgive the formatting transgressions and just have fun.
Seems like Shudder is going to be dipping back into these things on an annual basis for the time being, so we’ll see if I go back to well again. If not, I’m sure I’m not going to miss much.
Cinema Dual 
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