V/H/S/85

Ooo scary stuff. Very metal.
dirs: David Bruckner, Scott Derrickson, Gigi Saul Guerrero, Natasha Kermani & Mike P. Nelson
2023
The V/H/S franchise has had, I think, 6 entries thus far, and I have to say I think this is the best of the lot of them, or at least of the ones I have seen. I am not a horror film scholar (I shudder to think of what such a person would look and smell like), nor am I paid for my highly valuable insights and opinions on the internet, so I don’t have to be exhaustive in everything I do.
I basically just watch and review stuff that piques my curiosity.
V/H/S/85 succeeds, partly at least, because of the abandonment sporadically of its found footage conceit. I don’t care about the origin of footage – I don’t need for there to always be someone filming stuff (on a bulky and clunky 80s video camera, in this anthology’s context), and someone perpetually yelling at the ‘person’ filming to stop filming before, during and after something terrible starts happening. But by the same token it does add a different energy to what we’re watching sometimes. At other times, the absurdity of someone who’s being shot at or eaten by some horrific creature still managing to keep the camera relatively steady takes you out of whatever you’re watching and tells you you’re an idiot for suspending your disbelief in the first place.
Also, the segments are significantly different from each other, thematically and action-wise, even as they’re linked by a time period, aesthetics and the deliberate ‘corruption’ of the medium, being, the look and feel of degraded magnetic tape video, accumulated in almost a palimpsest of footage recorded over footage recorded over footage. Interspersed between the different segments is an overarching story which I was very dubious about each time it would pop up, which is (deliberately) so cheesy and hacky that it gives off Z-grade direct-to-video, but when I realised that it was a shaggy dog story when I saw the punch line, I do admit to laughing out loud.
It was a brief laugh, dear reader. After all, this is not a comedy anthology. This is horror.
Respect for the fallen.
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