V/H/S/2 (2013)

Studio:       Magnet Releasing
Director:    Simon Barrett, Adam Wingard, Eduardo Sanchez, Gregg Hale, Gareth Huw Evans, Timo Tjahjanto, Jason Eisener
Writer:       Simon Barrett, Jamie Nash, Gareth Huw Evans, Timo Tjahjanto, Jason Eisener, John Davies
Producer:  Gary Binkow, Brad Miska, Roxanne Benjamin

Review Score: 

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Summary:

An investigation into a college student’s disappearance uncovers four “found footage” VHS tapes featuring an eye transplant, a zombie outbreak, a doomsday cult, and an alien abduction.

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Synopsis:     Show/Hide Spoilers

“Tape 49” – A video camera follows a man and a woman to a motel room. The man doing the recording is revealed to be a private investigator named Larry. He and his female partner Ayesha switch gears to the case of a missing college student. They break into a home where the boy was last seen and find that the house is mostly empty except for a living room with a number of television monitors and videotapes. While Larry explores the other rooms, Ayesha watches the tapes as strange figures appear behind her. After the second tape, her nose starts bleeding. Following the third tape, Ayesha collapses on the floor. Larry finds her along with a fourth tape labeled “watch.” After the final tape concludes, Larry watches a video of the student he is looking for. The kid shoots himself in the head, but then comes back to life. Larry realizes that the tape was shot just before he and Ayesha broke into the house. At that same moment, Ayesha sits up and attacks Larry. Larry escapes and hides in a closet. When Ayesha reappears, Larry shoots her, but he then discovers that the undead college student is in the closet with him. The student then murders Larry and gives a thumbs up to the camera.

“Phase I Clinical Trials” – As an experimental treatment for an ocular injury, Herman is outfitted with a cybernetic eye from the KPG Corporation. It is equipped with a camera that allows the doctors to monitor everything that he sees. On his way out of the hospital, Herman sees a girl looking at him strangely. Back at his home, Herman notices that various objects seem to be changing position on their own before he sees the ghost of a bloody man. Later, the ghost of a little girl appears and loud knocks are heard at the door. The next day, the girl from the hospital waiting room, Clarissa, comes to Herman’s house. Clarissa asks about Herman’s visions. She explains that she was born deaf and that an implant allows her to hear different frequencies. Clarissa claims that she can hear the little girl in Herman’s house before warning him not to interact with the ghosts. The ghost of Clarissa’s abusive uncle appears behind her. As a means of distraction, Clarissa has sex with Herman to stop his visions. During the night, numerous ghosts begin appearing and Clarissa is drowned in the pool. Herman takes a straight razor and carves the camera implant out of his eye socket. As Herman flails around, one of the ghosts grabs the discarded camera and shoves it down Herman’s throat.

“A Ride in the Park” – Fitted with a helmet cam, a cyclist takes a bike ride on a wooded dirt trail. A bloody woman interrupts his trek to plead for help. She begins to violently cough up blood. The cyclist hears strange noises in the distance and sees zombies approaching. The injured woman turns undead and attacks the cyclist. He escapes into the woods but eventually dies. A male and female stop when they see his body. The cyclist comes back from the dead, killing the male Good Samaritan and scaring the woman into the woods. As the cyclist gorges on the man’s body, the female returns as a zombie and joins in the flesh eating. The male reanimates and all three then stalk off to a picnic area where they wreak panic and carnage at a birthday celebration. In the aftermath, the cyclist zombie accidentally butt dials his girlfriend Amy and appears to have a moment of recognition upon hearing her voice. He then staggers to a hunter’s shotgun on the ground nearby and blows his own head off.

“Safe Haven” – Outfitted with a button cam and other recording equipment, a documentary crew prepares an expose on Paradise Gates, a secretive doomsday cult. While interviewing the leader, known as Father, the crew convinces him to allow them into the commune. At the cult’s compound, one of the little girls belonging to the group gives Lena the documentary producer a handmade necklace of the cult’s symbol. The girl implies that Father has made her a woman. Lena discards the necklace. As Malik conducts the interview with Father, Lena becomes physically ill and leaves the room. A woman referred to as Madame finds Lena watching the commune’s children draw pictures. Madame tells Lena that she will give birth to a special child. Confused by Madame’s message, Lena leaves the room. The interview with Father is interrupted when Malik returns to the equipment van for a spare camera battery. While there, the recording equipment shows him a conversation revealing that Malik’s fiancée Lena is pregnant with crewmember Adam’s child. When a bell sounds, Father makes an announcement over the loudspeaker that the time has come to journey to the Promised Land. The children are each given a cup of liquid to drink. Adam finds a bloody woman on a gurney with her womb carved out. Father kills Johnny, the crewmember left alone with him, by slicing his throat with a box cutter. Women wearing surgical masks grab Lena while the children commit mass suicide with the poisoned drink. The male cult members ritualistically shoot themselves in their heads with handguns. Malik is captured and executed with a shotgun. Adam is left alone to find Lena. Covered in blood, Father leads the women carrying Lena to another room. When Adam confronts the cult leader, Father explodes in a shower of gore. Adam kills the women surrounding Lena in a bizarre birthing ceremony and finds strange markings carved into Lena’s skin. A horned creature then rips its way out of her stomach. Johnny returns to life as a zombie, as do the children. The horned creature chases Adam as the other cult members also rise from the dead. Adam makes it back to the vehicle while a siren blares throughout the compound. He drives away, but the car is hit from the side and overturns. As Adam crawls from the wreckage, the horned creature appears behind him and calls Adam “Papa.”

“Slumber Party Alien Abduction” – A group of young friends record themselves playing with a dog and pulling pranks on one of the boy’s sisters and her boyfriend. After interrupting the couple as they have sex, the house shakes violently while a loud noise sounds. Hiding outside from the boyfriend, the boys see lights flashing across the water. The boyfriend steals the boys’ camera and with the sister’s help, he attaches it to the dog. The dog is sent into the living room where one of the boys is masturbating to a porno while his friends sleep in sleeping bags. Suddenly, the loud noise returns and the lights go out. Outside the door, alien silhouettes can be seen. The boyfriend retrieves a shotgun but he is struck down in the dark. The aliens then begin pulling the children away one by one. As the final child is pulled up to the sky, he drops the dog rigged with the camera and the animal dies when he hits the ground.

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Review:

In the post-Amicus Productions age of contemporary horror film anthologies, “Creepshow” has stood for thirty plus years as an oft-referenced benchmark for the format when measuring critical and commercial success.  As deservedly beloved as the film is, one potential drawback to its intentional design is that its five separate stories are voiced by the same writer and director.  Of course, that writer is Stephen King and that director is George A. Romero, two of the greatest and most consistently reliable heavyweights that the genre has ever seen.  But in the end, the final product still carries the same flavor throughout all 120 minutes of its runtime.

As fun as “Creepshow” is, anyone not in tune with the EC Comics style is going to be unlikely to enjoy “The Lonesome Death of Jordy Verrill” if “Father’s Day” already set the eyes rolling.  The advantage that “V/H/S/2” has with the anthology format is in providing a different writing and directing team for each segment.  As horror entertainment, the setup of “VHS2” gives it a divergent mix of genre voices, positioning the film for an even broader appeal.  The “found footage” format may unify each segment thematically, but a wide range of horror aficionados stands a greater chance of finding at least one segment in the film that appeals to their particular tastes.

Not counting the framing sequence, the first segment is “Phase I Clinical Trials.”  Following a disfiguring car accident, director and star Adam Wingard finds himself as the lucky recipient of an experimental cybernetic implant.  It allows the scientist braniacs who created the device to watch Wingard’s daily life through the always on camera inside his bionic eye.  As is already well known from films like “Body Parts” and “The Eye,” transplants in horror movies generally lead to bad things.  Similar to “The Eye,” Wingard’s ocular implant gives him ghostly visions at every corner turn in his Hollywood home.  Former deaf girl Clarissa has an implant that allows her to hear the ghosts that Wingard sees.  They tackle the hauntings together, but things of course take a turn for the worse.

“Phase I” is a straightforward quick hit of horror from the shallow end of the story pool.  Then again, it is only 17 minutes long, so there is not much room for layering depth to begin with.  “Phase I” pops in a few fun jumps and jabs at levity that will elicit a smirk (“So you guys are gonna sit around and watch me take sh*ts?”).  Although those smirks may turn into grimaces with underwhelming performances, which can likely be attributed to the players having to act against a camera lens as the other character.

Taking the thin premise and levity angles further is “A Ride in the Park,” a helmet cam excursion through a bike trail and public park at the onset of a zombie uprising.  It is a played out idea and borders too much on camp with its comical grunts from the undead, but it is welcome to see the beginning moments of an outbreak and the ensuing public panic.  The piece is pulled together with several decent gags involving a birthday party, a barbecue, and a car that runs over a reanimated corpse.

However, the first forty minutes of “VHS 2” are a prologue for the undisputed crown jewel, “Safe Haven.”  This is the segment that will have people talking.  It is also the bar that subsequent shorts in this ongoing anthology series will have to meet if they even hope to be as memorable.  “Safe Haven” is the tale of the Paradise Gates cult.  Their leader combines the mass suicide ideals of Jim Jones with the child bride mongering of Warren Jeffs and the messiah complexes of every other cult leader in history.

Already thematically dark with brainwashed children and apocalyptic messages, the segment bursts into a gory bath of vicious throat slashes, gunshots, and disturbing imagery.  “Safe Haven” is an exponential escalation of one insane event after another.  Just when you think it cannot possibly get any more bizarre, it does.  Creative and demented, “Safe Haven” is not to be missed.

“Slumber Party Alien Abduction” is an odd choice to finish the film, and it has the thankless task of following the best piece of the movie.  It can only be assumed that the producers wanted to ease the audience down from the third segment shock and wrap up the affair with something a touch milder.  Which is not to say that “Alien Abduction” is lacking in the chills department.

While the segment is not played to be funny, its opening certainly is.  A group of troublesome boys film themselves pulling pranks on a teenage sister as she looks for moments of intimacy with her boyfriend.  I challenge you to not laugh out loud at the hilarious scene of coitus interruption when the boys don Santa hats and parade light-up jack-o-lanterns around her bedroom while blaring a ridiculous sounding song.

The arrival of the aliens brings some fearful moments, but more than the other segments, this one suffers from hard to see handheld camerawork during the intense action sequences.  There is an artificial soundtrack that undermines the “authenticity” of the “found footage” too, and the alien suits look like wrinkled skintight long johns in some shots.  This also has to be the sloppiest alien abduction of all time.  Greys are usually reliable for being thieves in the night.  But whatever interplanetary species these creatures belong to, they feel the need to announce their presence with a horn that could drown out an atom bomb explosion.  Their aimless and fevered pawing at abduction targets gives Alpha Centaurians a bad name when it comes to staying in the shadows.  Otherwise, “Alien Abduction” is still fun, even if it has the weakest concept of all the shorts.

The wraparound sequence is nothing to write home about.  It eats up a good chunk of the runtime when it could have used a judicious round in the edit suite without losing any of its story or impact.  Yet even with the frame being longer than needed, “V/H/S/2” is still a focused anthology, and plays as much tighter than its predecessor.  The brisk pace further ensures that the film does not wear out its welcome.

Ocular implant, bike helmet cam, documentary subject, and slumber party hijinks make for good outs to explain the traditional “found footage” pitfall of why filming is constant.  Although these are very contemporary tales using technology just as modern, which makes their presentation via VHS tapes questionably implausible.

At least two, and possibly three, of the four segments can be considered as more of an idea than a fully formed story.  And without the consistency of the same production team heading each segment, it is only natural that the production quality and entertainment value ebbs and flows throughout.  Yet it is this very variety of different writers and directors telling tales of aliens, cults, ghosts, and zombies that makes the anthology enjoyable to watch, even if the contents are light.  “V/H/S/2” is a rare film in that the sum of its parts supersedes the average portions of the individual segments.  As separate shorts, they might not be as successful, save “Safe Haven.”  But the final verdict is that the total package provides 90 minutes of horror entertainment.

Review Score:  85

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