Last year Magnet Releasing put together a compilation of horror shorts called V/H/S. The basic premise was that it got a group of horror movie directors together and had them all make a found footage short, which then got loosely pieced together with a framework narration that explained away why someone would be sitting around watching a bunch of VHS tapes. V/H/S/2 is much of the same, only with a different explanation as to why someone would watch a bunch of VHS tapes, and with a different set of horror movie directors making the shorts. This time around we’ve got four shorts, two of which are are pretty good, and two of which are pretty forgettable, so in general one could call this a middle of the road movie.
The first short we get is called ‘Phase I Clinical Trials,’ and it comes from You’re Next director Adam Wingard. It’s what seems to be a fairly prescient story about a man with vision problems who gets high definition ocular implants (prescient because Google Glass is clearly the first step toward making this sort of technology not only realistic, but ubiquitous). I say seems to be though, because instead of actually exploring the reality of what horrific things everyone having recording devices attached to their faces might eventually lead to, ‘Clinical Trials’ turns into a fairly generic ghost story wherein the implant gives our protagonist the ability to see spirits. Technology and ghosts don’t really go together, so the short doesn’t resonate much, but it does manage to give us our second pair of boobs of the film, so it can’t be considered a complete loss.
The second short is probably the strongest of the feature. It’s a zombie story called ‘A Ride in the Park,’ and it comes from The Blair Witch Project director Eduardo Sánchez, as well as his co-writer Jamie Nash and his co-director Gregg Hale. In it we’re introduced to a mountain biker who comes into conflict with a zombie apocalypse not too long after he starts making his way down a wooded trail, and who becomes a zombie himself pretty quickly after first contact. The good news is he has a camera attached to his bike helmet, which allows us to spend much of the short seeing a zombie apocalypse from the perspective of an actual zombie, and which ends up being a welcome and interesting twist to the typical zombie story. In addition to some excellent gore, ‘A Ride in the Park’ also offers up a couple of brief moments toward its end that add a human touch to the proceedings and end up deepening the experience quite a bit, so pretty much this is exactly what a short film should be.
The third short is the most ambitious, and it pays its ambition off by being the most broadly entertaining. It’s a demonic possession by way of suicide cult story brought to us by director Gareth Evans (The Raid: Redemption) and his co-writer Timo Tjahjanto that’s called ‘Safe Haven’ and that tells the story of a documentary film crew who are investigating the compound of a new religious movement at the exact same moment that all of their prophecies begin to come true. While the short starts by establishing some dramatic subplots that develop among the documentary crew, eventually any focus on storytelling gets thrown out the window in order to focus on gory insanity and disturbing imagery, so ‘Safe Haven’ doesn’t quite hit as hard as the previous segment, but it throws so much insane stuff at the wall and it builds up the tension of when exactly things are going to go crazy so well that it ends up being quite a bit of mindless fun regardless. I mean, its last shot is a bunch of snot and slobber dripping out of someone’s face and into the camera. How do you top that?
Unfortunately for writer/director Simon Barrett (Hobo With a Shotgun), his closing segment, ‘Slumber Party Alien Abduction,’ isn’t able to live up to what comes before it. It starts off promising enough as a coming of age tale about a tween brother playing videotaped pranks on his older, more endowed sister, but it goes completely off the rails once its extraterrestrial threat introduces itself and all of the horror elements creep in. Instead of finding a way to make the concept of alien abduction truly scary, the short relies on dudes stumbling around in alien costumes, shaky cam, and a bunch of constantly flashing strobe lights to convince you that something scary is happening, when nothing actually is. If we had any idea of the stakes of this story, of what the aliens were trying to do to these kids, then maybe it could have been somewhat effective, but instead we’re just asked to care about contextless closeups of child actors screaming and slightly humorous shots of rubber alien suits stumbling down the pier behind a lavish lake house. It doesn’t work.
Often it’s difficult to give feature films that are compilations of disparate shorts any rating other than one that lies somewhere in the middle, because usually some of them are good and some of them aren’t, and that also seems to be the case here. If all of these shorts were connected in any particularly affecting thematic or structural way, then maybe you could make a case for V/H/S/2 being a strong feature that works well as a whole, but in general the only theme that seems to connect the stories is that they all degenerate into chaotic situations where regular people are taken down by stumbling, mindless monsters—so it’s kind of hard to defend V/H/S/2 as being anything other than a forgettable but momentarily entertaining diversion. Sometimes a momentarily entertaining diversion is all you’re looking for though, so you could do worse than firing it up while lazing on the couch some low key Saturday night.
