If its red band trailer was any indication, the found footage/anthology film V/H/S should have been a horrifying, sweat-inducing, thrill ride. But the only ride this horror movie had me on was the fastest one to the bathroom. Two words: motion sickness. Although a popular, and at times, successful way to create a scary movie, the found footage style filming in V/H/S was far too shaky and amateurish - even for a handheld style film - and did little to add to the picture's style. Instead V/H/S achieves little success and creates a nauseating and frustrating cinema experience.
Maybe the biggest reason for the film's lack of cohesion is the fact that it has six directors; Adam Wingard, David Bruckner, Ti West, Glenn McQuaid, Joe Swanberg and Radio Silence (a group of four directors) who all directed their own short films. It may be safe to say that with so many creative minds, artistic decisions were hard to come by and it showed through its messy and completely different story styles. This anthology type film had five short films which centered around one main story arc. The main story arc being a group of hooligan guys, who are paid to break into a man's house to search for a mysterious VHS tape. As the group searches for the specific video tape, they end up watching five home videos, all containing extremely disturbing footage. These five videos end up being the short films that make up the horror flick, but quite frankly, only two of them are pretty entertaining.
At nearly two hours in length, V/H/S could have easily eliminated one of the weaker shorts to create a smoother flowing, less "draggy" film, which in turn would have amplified the gruesomeness, scariness and impressiveness of the two stronger shorts. Although the majority lacked any real depth or even story for that matter, the two strong shorts (titled "Amateur Night" and "10/31/98") really did an awesome job at creating an original story, with pretty impressive special effects, genuinely frightening sequences, and edge-of-your-seat suspense.
Unfortunately, the shining moments of this horror flick are few and far between and aren't enough to propel it to entertaining status. The camerawork is way, and I mean way too shaky, the video quality is far too poor (even for a found footage film - especially in this day and age) and most important of all, the majority of the shorts were simply not scary, and the main story arc lacked any real.. well.. story, and stumbled pretty hard towards the finish line. All that, and I had to keep myself from hurling on the gentleman who sat in front of me. V/H/S did have some genuine scares, it's just too bad my biggest fear was not being able to keep my dinner down.
