V/H/S Beyond

dirs: Jay Cheel, Jordan Downey, Virat Pal, Justin Martinez, Justin & Christian Long, Kate Siegel and probably a few other people from a bus that was just passing through the neighbourhood…

2024

The latest in a long line of V/H/S horrorish anthologies, this is this year’s instalment, I guess. Let’s hope it’s an annual thing.

There is a whole lot of fuckery going on here. Some good, some not so good, but that is the nature of anthologies. If what you’re watching isn’t thrilling you, wait a few minutes, and something else will be playing soon. You’d think this would be the way to capture the attention of people with short attention spans, but let’s be honest none of “the youth” are watching a “movie” or this “movie”: they’d rather be watching 30 two minute vids in a row on Youtube instead.

So, these are presumably made for old horror heads like me. I greeted the new instalment in this series, after having really enjoyed the most recent one V/H/S 1985 with interest, as that one struck me as a strong uptick in quality (compared to earlier instalments).

When you get your hopes up, you’re inevitably setting yourself up for a fall. The moral of the story is, you’re a fool for getting your hopes up, so never get your hopes up, ever. You’re climbing a tree of anticipation and then sawing off branches you settled upon, because the universe remains supremely indifferent to your hopes and dreams.

The tack they took here was about having something more of a sci-fi focus, as in, the boogieman / thing that kills a bunch of people in almost every instance is an alien of some description, or a robot, or both. Not everything is as cut and dried as having a Big Bad that eats people’s faces that happens to be from elsewhere in the cosmos: but in practice it doesn’t amount to that much of a difference.

If something is chomping on your brains, I guess it doesn’t matter much if it’s a dinosaur, an armadillo, a cyborg, a zombie or a grey skinned alien, the end result is pretty much the same.

In case I haven’t mansplained enough, the other enduring conceit that links these anthologies is that they’re relatively a) low budget and b) found footage / the camera is often a first person “character” filming the horrors, and they sometimes have overarching linkage footage either tying them together or setting up an alternative narrative / separate story that, in the case of 1985 was better than some of the instalments.

Here, well, they have their cake and fuck it too, by having the piecemeal story of a house over time not haunted by ghosts or demons, but frequented by aliens, possibly, as well as a number of ‘expert’ talking heads playing themselves talking about mass hysteria, people’s need to believe in stuff that’s unlikely or unprovable, in order to feel that there’s something meaningful in their lives.

First off is Stork, which is mostly about a special unit of police attacking brainless zombies in a house after a whole bunch of babies have gone missing. And then there’s a horrible stork-like alien that does this or that, and everything’s from the point of view of a rookie who is tasked to film everything.

It is exactly what it sounds like, with the camera as a first person character, lots of people yelling and screaming, and running up and down stairs. Chainsaws get a look in. Several cops die (yay!), but these people are not here for empathy and communication across interstellar barriers – it’s kill and be killed. There’s an energy to it, like a lot of these shaky-cam instalments across the V/H/S anthologies, but it’s not great. You need an action-y instalment, to potentially make the other quieter ones somewhat more enjoyable. That’s not an issue this time around, because each episode has its quota of people running around screaming before something alien tears them apart.

Dream Girl takes the international slot this time around (last year’s instalment I think was set in Mexico with a cast of reporters discovering the rebirth of an ancient awful god just after a terrible earthquake), with paparazzi desperate to get snaps of the latest Bollywood superstar, being Tara (Namrata Sheth). There is a lacklustre ‘Bollywood’ scene filmed which is… like nothing you’ve seen if ever you’ve watched contemporary Indian cinema, it wouldn’t even be TV-worthy.

But these don’t have massive budgets, so… the paparazzi discovers Tara’s secret, which doesn’t really make a lot of sense, and Tara decides, quite rightly, as the ‘star’, to start ripping people’s arms and faces off.

I mean, sometimes it’s the only way to get people to listen.

Live and Let Dive somehow managed to be the segment that made me regret having pressed play on this anthology in the first place, and really gave me the feeling that I was both wasting my time and my life, not unlike one of the protagonists of this segment, who goes skydiving with friends to celebrate his 30th birthday.

I can’t even remember my thirtieth. Did I celebrate it in some way? I mean, sure, I probably went to a pub with friends and drank a lot, but at that time I was probably doing that a few nights a week anyway.

I would not have gone skydiving for my 30th, not only because of the cowardliness, but because skydiving has always struck me, like bungie jumping or base jumping, as a very complicated, very unnecessarily dangerous thing to do for little reward other than being able to say you survived it.

These jerks, for their troubles, have unfortunately scheduled their group jump at around the exact same time that some alien spaceship chockers with aliens, naturally, ploughs into them, meaning that if the fall doesn’t kill them, the aliens will.

The survivors end up in some vineyard / orchard before aliens that look kind of like stick insects tear them to pieces.

I did not get much of anything out of that section. Then I blinked, and it was gone.

This year there have been a number of films where aliens tear people to pieces in broad daylight or the dead of night; in a country setting or in New York proper; on Earth or in the darkness of space, and this segment was the very least of them. But to be fair the budget for this section probably wouldn’t have paid for the shoelaces used on all the other flicks I was implying (Arcadian, A Quiet Place: Day One, Alien: Romulus).

So, points for trying. I mean, so we don’t get to know any of the people before they get mangled, it’s hard to care about them during or after they get disarticulated by a special effect. I guess what’s meant to matter then is how “well” they get obliterated or torn limb from limb.

I guess it did nothing for me whatsoever, which is probably a good thing.

Fur Babies is probably the segment that was meant to really seal the deal, seeing as it’s genuinely horrific in terms of what actually happens to the victims in this section and why, but it’s also the segment that doesn’t at all follow the premise of alien stuff, alien shenanigans and alien tomfoolery.

It’s just humans being terrible to other humans.

An animal rights activist group has heard that something nasty is going on at a place that does doggie daycare and related activities, kennelling etc. Two of the activists pose as a couple and ask for a tour of the facility, and are met by someone who acts and talks so Mid-Western “nice” that you know she has to be a serial killer.

That lady, sounding somehow like a more evil version of Vanessa Bayer, really, really loves animals. Like, really loves them, so much so that she doesn’t really see the value of people compared to the animals they would neglect. In fact, if she had her way, everyone would get to be like Man’s Best Friend

If you think “furries” are inherently scary, well, this is the segment for you. It goes from unlikely to scary to hilariously bad to horrifying really, really quickly.

No animals were harmed in the making of that segment, but a lot of humans might have been dangerously embarrassed. Imagine having that on your resume.

One of the slightly more intelligent segments follows, being Stowaway, where an investigator unintentionally getting trapped on board an alien ship while out in the middle of the Mojave Desert. What follows is a cascade of bad, to worse, to worst, and a poor soul who’s done nothing wrong and who totally doesn’t deserve what’s happening, enduring both the laws of physics and the magic of futuristic technology.

It probably has the budget of the cheapest episode of Doctor Who, but that’s okay. It works only because the way it escalates feels organic within the story, even as the cascade of catastrophes that befall that poor woman aren’t because of anything she’s done wrong – wrong place / tiny bit of curiousity = terrible results, but that’s the price of discovery.

That segment I liked. Most of the others, hmm, didn’t do much for me. I liked the talking heads interviews, especially with Mitch Horowitz playing himself, explaining the collective unconscious reasons why much of people’s fixations on UFO’s link with the occult, and how little difference there is between those who fixate on the occult and the supernatural, and those who obsess over UFOs or abductions. There’s also the ‘funny’ observation that many of these obsessives need, they crave grainy, indistinct footage of the unexplained, because then it can be whatever they wish it to be, whereas clear footage doesn’t make anyone happy.

But that’s just words. Action, and footage, and well put together segments would speak louder than any criticism. Alas this series that started out cheap and nasty, and has gotten nastier but not necessarily cheaper, still hits and misses more often than not. Still, it cost me nothing extra to watch (since I am a subscriber to Shudder already), so I should express a little bit more gratitude, ungrateful fuck that I am.

Still, I hated some of those segments. Maybe next time…

4 segments of V/H/S Beyond<./b> that are not above being tedious out of 10

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“Maybe we are not alone. Maybe our company does not wish us well.” – maybe these alien overlords took a look at humanity over the course of the last year and figured we’re better off extinct - V/H/S Beyond