After six films over 11 years, the V/H/S series has become something of an exciting playground for established and rising horror names. Ti West, Adam Wingard, Gareth Evans and Timo Tjahjanto, Aaron Moorhead and Justin Benson, Chloe Okuno, among many others: all have lent their talent to the often uneven-but-always interesting found footage fright feast. “Uneven but interesting” would aptly describe the latest entry as well. Relishing in period aesthetic weirdness, V/H/S/85 delivers as an entertaining grab-bag of terror and scanlines.
Fresh off his Hellraiser reimagining, director David Bruckner provides V/H/S/85 with a unique wraparound that feels ripped from the period. “Total Copy”’s weird science documentary tell-all follows a group of scientists as they observe and experiment on the fleshy otherworldly being known as “Rory”. Do those experiments involve being shown stacked televisions? Of course they do. The structure of research shenanigans, deluded team lead decision, and a new gooey Rory form imbued this wraparound with repetitiveness, yet the chaotic payoff and final image made this a worthy canvas for the stories to come.
In perhaps the most clever choice yet for the series, the rest of this anthology’s segments appear as television intrusions being taped over the Rory expose special. Mike Nelson, director of the recent Wrong Turn reboot, gets the honor of V/H/S’s first two-parter with “No Wake” and “Ambrosia”. The former offers 85’s most suspenseful moments when a friend group’s day by the lake is brutally interrupted; between the camp hangout authenticity and banter, Nelson earns his segment’s gory climax and its not-so-normal aftermath. “Ambrosia” takes the “No Wake” story from its initially abrupt stopping point to a different perspective that rounds out Nelson’s segments in satisfying fashion. Fans of the director’s earlier film The Domestics will feel right at home with the darker, weirder, and more tonally playful direction of “Ambrosia”.
The middle segments of V/H/S/85 are this entry at its most succinct for better and for worse. Gigi Saul Guerrero’s “God of Death” and Natasha Kermani’s “TKNOGD” both escalate within confined single locations until their concepts crescendo in nasty pay-off. “God of Death” embraces a sense of frenetic verisimilitude as its news broadcast is engulfed by the carnage of a Mexico City earthquake. The ensuing navigation through harrowing disaster peril is fraught with claustrophobic intensity, until Guerrero’s unearthly surprise swerves the survival tension into an occult bloodbath. “TKNOGD” follows a similar escalation less successfully, as its one-woman stage show condemns the decade’s rise of digital distractions and attempts a VR-enhanced summoning of the god of technology. In true V/H/S fashion, that encounter does not end well for her; the savage conclusion boasts impressive practical effects but flounders with its wait…that’s it? ending.
While those segments were more brief concepts sans much plot, Scott Derrickson’s “Dreamkill” comes across like a feature length horror thriller awkwardly condensed into the length of an anthology segment. The Sinister director returns to the familiar but oh so effective unease of horrifying home movies, as detectives receive nightmarish VHS recordings of home invasion slaughters, days before the murders occur. Those grainy first person tapes are visceral sequences of tension and mutilation, feeling authentic to ‘80s scuzzy horror and to Derrickson’s iconic home video scares in Sinister. The segment’s intriguing mystery involving a psychic Good Samaritan and more prophetic visions of death begs for more time to flesh out its rushed string of revelations and twists. There’s a grim horror drama and supernatural police thriller playing out within “Dreamkill”’s abbreviated length, neither facet given time to breathe.
V/H/S/85 never reaches the harrowing or bonkers heights of the franchise’s best segments, but fans of the series and of found footage won’t be disappointed by this varied array of horror. Despite abrupt pacing and awkward structures, there’s plenty of creative, grisly, and chaotic terror to enjoy.
Photo courtesy of Shudder
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