by Michele Pearson:
Maybe I’m just too jaded to review a horror movie anymore. The word from Sundance is that people were screaming and violently ill after viewing this. My thoughts? They just got motion sickness and it had nothing to do with the horror of the film and everything to do with the cinematography, of which the directors of Blair Witch Project and Cloverfield are, no doubt, highly envious.
V/H/S is actually a collection of short films, all unrelated, that are all “found footage”. The entire premise of the film is plainly stated in the trailer: a group of amateur thieves and vandals are instructed by an unknown source to retrieve a VHS tape from a house. Once there, they begin to view the tapes and all hell breaks loose. Any more than what is revealed in the trailer would be a complete spoiler. This film is not formulaic, it is not a reboot and, while the “found film” sub-genre is certainly not new, this story premise has not been told before. It’s not “shocking” or “terrifying” but is instead disturbing. And sometimes, “disturbing” is a higher compliment to a horror film than “terrifying”.
To be honest, this is really more of a collection of short films than a single fluid movie. I almost feel it’s impossible to review the film as a whole without spilling the beans on the individual shorts. A few of the shorts were a lot more jump inducing than others with several scenes actually making me jump back and get my adrenaline going. Several characters will stay with you. I actually had a nightmare last night involving one, something that hasn’t happened since I was 10 and watched the original Nightmare on Elm Street for the first time. I will say the shaky camera work got old real quick and the deliberate film glitches were both frequent and annoying. Fortunately, there is a splash of reality in each of the stories and all the film “glitches” add to that. That’s a big bonus when we horror fans have been plagued by bad CGI, unnecessary 3-D and the dumbing down of films for a PG-13 rating for the past several years. Horror fans have been screaming for a real horror film. V/H/S isn’t necessarily that but it’s a huge step in the right direction.
Michele Pearson is a contributor for DarkMedia. She covers Vampire Diaries and any other films, books, etc that come her way. She reads everything from Lonesome Dove to Game of Thrones and loves epic tv series like Doctor Who and Star Trek: TNG. Michele also loves a good horror film and was able to channel that love as a judge for Shriekfest 2012. Follow her on Twitter at @GirlInRowB and check out her blog at http://www.girlinrowb.com.
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