FILM/DVD REVIEW: V/H/S (2012)

FILM REVIEW

V/H/S is the ultimate found-footage horror film, because it's every horror film you've ever seen shoved into the found footage format.  A slow-moving stalker paces through the woods.  Ravens flap through the halls of a haunted house.  A masked invader terrorizes a young couple.  Something vampiric and starved interrupts a tryst.  There's even a paranormal pregnancy.  While some of these segments work more effectively in the first-person format than others, all of the stories are unified by two key elements: the found-footage technique, and an innate fear of empowered women.  One of these tropes is older than the other, but neither is likely to leave horror movies anytime soon.

Found-footage movies typically face an uphill battle for plausibility, since they must forever justify characters who are never so frightened that they don't put down a camera.  It doesn't help that those characters, freed by the "realism" of the technique, almost never speak with genuine cleverness, interest, or depth - they are excused to talk about nothing more or less than exactly what's happening around them, usually with a barrage of swearing.  To be fair, horror films aren't classically defined by superior dialogue or wit, but found-footage-speak too often sounds like the filmmakers insisting on how goddamn fucking holy shit scary their movie is at any given moment.  Attempts at substance or foreshadowing ("You're all going to die out here") land with a thud.

The specter from "Tuesday the 17th" impacts the video's interlacing.

V/H/S doesn't exactly compensate for this, but its anthology format forgives a lot, since the character dramas give over quickly to horrific shocks and surprises; any boring or weightless interactions are over in moments, often bloodily so.  The last segment, "10/31/98," offers the bare minimum of background for its scares: a hero dresses as a nanny-cam for Halloween, and he and his buddies arrive at a "haunted house" party.  Once they arrive, the talk subsides, and the scares take over, and the story shifts into overdrive, as the boys find a cult trying to sacrifice a girl to appease... whatever it is that lurks in the walls.

This segment flips the film's ambitions in a key way, as the boys try to save the woman being victimized.  This plays like a corrective to the prior segments, where women either suffer under dominating men or violently take back their power.  The fourth segment, awkwardly titled "The Sick Thing That Happened to Emily When She Was Younger," is a prime example of the film's gender war.  Through a series of Skype conversations, Emily (Helen Rogers) speaks to boyfriend James (Daniel Kaufman) about a haunting in her apartment.  Then, after a session that ends with a ghostly jump-scare, the next session begins with James apologizing for not recording the ghost.  That isn't true, though, because we just saw it, right?  Ah-hah.  What was a ghost story is now also about how James controls her by controlling what she knows.

The best effect in the film is actress Hannah Fierman's unearthly set of eyes.

This goes further as, in all but the fourth segment, the people wielding the camera are boorish college-aged chunkheads, and the camera reflects their baser desires.  Sometimes this leads to savvy filmmaking.  The third segment, "Tuesday the 17th," opens with a zoom-in on a pair of breasts.  The film's first segment, "Amateur Hour," goes in a sharper direction, following sleazes who plan to get women drunk, take them to a motel, and secretly film the sex with video-recording glasses - a clever literalization of the infamous "male gaze" of cinema.  Other times, the use of sex-crazed alpha males plays more like titillation for its own sake: a segment with thieves victimizing an innocent woman does little besides give the film an opening shock, and a brief sex tape interlude proves needless, since "Amateur Hour" already handles the subject so much better.

However, this issue is common to all horror, and by discussing these elements, I'd essentially be unpacking the whole genre (and maybe I'll do that someday).  So it might best to set that can of worms on the shelf and  quickly run down the list of segments in V/H/S.

"Tape 56" (dir. Adam Wingard, You're Next) feels extraneous - this film doesn't need a device to justify its anthology nature.  "Amateur Hour" (dir. David Bruckner, The Signal) is the movie's highlight, creepy and scary and gory and increasingly fantastical.  "Second Honeymoon" (dir. Ti West, The House of the Devil), offers clues to the story's gruesome direction, but not much build.  "Tuesday the 17th" (dir. Glenn McQuaid, I Sell the Dead), does the old teens-visit-the-woods thing, but the ephemeral killer elevates the premise.  "The Sick Thing..." (dir. Joe Swanberg, Autoerotic), overdoses on exposition during the climax but offers more complexity than the other segments.  "10/31/98" (dir. Radio Silence) is a deeply fun haunted house piece.  Give me crows, poltergeists, and hands slithering out of walls, and I will give you my heart.

RATING: B

Is this image from "10/31/98" a nod to Blair Witch (inset)?

DISC REVIEW

With the advent and acceleration of streaming video, there's been a loss in terms of presentation and added value for "home releases."  Which is why it was great to pick up V/H/S on DVD and take it for a spin.  The DVD, produced by New Wave Entertainment, does a great job of creating a clean and simple aesthetic and organizing its materials.  On that note, there's a bunch of fun extras, including a raucous (if muddled) commentary and bonus scenes.  My favorite bonus feature was the "alternate ending" to "10/31/98," a slightly more optimistic coda to the final haunted house feature.  Hilarious stuff.  The gold standard for horror movie home releases is Anchor Bay, who produce special editions of more established horror classics (Dawn of the Dead, Re-Animator).  This disc doesn't quite match that for volume or maturity of content, but V/H/S is only a year old.  For fans of the movie, or fans of anthology horror films in general, this disc is a solid buy, and better produced than most of its peers.

RATING: B+