SFF Film Review: 'V/H/S'

Ten people left the theatre during this film that has enough blood and guts to fill the Gulf of Mexico. Each director – Ti West, Joe Swanberg, David Bruckner, Radio Silence and Glenn McQuaid made a horror short - and Adam Wingard’s footage pulled them all together. With six bloody shorts, it felt a little long.

Wingard leads off the found video footage with a group of pranksters looking for a project more fulfilling and lucrative than pulling up random women’s shirts and filming their breasts. They go on a mission to find a VHS in an empty house with the only room containing a deceased heavy-set older man lounging in a chair in front of umpteen stacked television sets and a VHS player.

Each member of the gang pops in a VHS into the player and one of the stories unfolds. With no consistent theme carried throughout, tt felt unfocused. The shorts fell just short of all containing some kind of paranormal entity except for one. The filming is also purposely erratic, as many home videos are but it makes the film very dizzying at times.

There were some good moments horror fans can appreciate. A big doe-eyed, all skin-and-bones young woman who is perhaps one of the creepiest individuals in any horror movie is one example. A couple on a road-trip put a dollar into a fortune-telling machine advising not to help anyone, and gets a knock on their hotel room door from a drifter looking for a ride. A group of guys dressed for Halloween find themselves the audience of a satanic ritual taking place in an attic of the home they thought they were supposed to be in.

All-in-all it had some nice sketches but wouldn’t make it on a list of films to recommend.