V/H/S an anthology horror film that debuted at the Sundance Film Festivel back in January.An anothology horror film means that it is a series of different stories,similar to a film like George A Romero's Creepshow.
V/H/S consists of five stories,besides the main story arch. The main story arch,titled Tape 56 involves a group of criminals hired by a unknown person to break into a house and steal one videotape.When they get into the house,they find the owner dead in his chair.As the group splits to search the house,one of them presses "play" on the tv that the dead guy was watching,the tape shows the first story, and throughout the movie,he continurs to put more tapes into the VCR and procedes to watch them.We see the tapes also.
Segment one,Amateur Night,directed by David Bruckner,involves three friends who like to party and are trying to find girls to bring back to the hotel.(By the way,this is also a found footage movie,the kid has a camera on his glasses,so we are seeing what he does.All the stories are like this) After finding some girls,one of them is very odd,and unusual.She keeps telling the main character in a whisper "i like you".Not to spoil too much,but eventually,they find out she's not exactly...human.I thought this segment was awesome.The girl was actually scary and it was freaky when she started going crazy.The end was cool too.
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The second story,Second Honeymoon, directed by Ti West,involves a couple who are staying at a hotel.Before they get there,they use a fortune teller machine that gives her the fortune "you will be visited by a loved one".Later a girl(not shown on screen) asks if she can have a ride in the morning.I'll just leave it at that.There are points when while the couple is sleeping,the person breaks im and is using the camera to look around and does make you nervous.This is in my opinion the weakest of all the stories. http://horrorhomework.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2012/09/v-h-s2.jpg
Story four,The Sick Thing That Happened to Emily When She Was Younger,directed by Joe Swanburg.It has a Paranormal Activity feel to it.It involves a couple talking on Skype,and the girl thinks the house is haunted.I think this has a great twist near the end,but the story ends a couple minutes after that.Maybe the rest of the story was on another videotape.But it ends right when it started to become good.
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The final story,10/31/98,directed by a group of filmmakers called Radio Silencd,is the best segment of the movie in my opinion.It has three teenagers going to a haunted house,and when they get there,no one is there,but they soon discover it's really a haunted house.I love how they find out too,like there is a group of people preforming some ritual on some tied up girl,and when the teens find them,they think it's a joke.The people are chanting,so the teens jokingly chant too,but once the people notice the three teens,they are not happy.Many other supernatural things happen too.I enjoyed it the most out of all the segments.
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Now that i've ranted about each story (wow this is a long blog),i will say my opinion on the movie:This is a movie that's probably best as a rental.I don't mean that in a bad way either,it's a good movie to rent,especially on Halloween and just watch at your house.I think the last segment is great.The Second Honeymoon segment is the weakest.It's the only one that doesn't have a supernatural angle in it.In the case of people watching these videos,the more supernatural the better.Also for me personally,i found all the characters extreamly annoying.There is one payoff of dealing with them though,and that is that most of them die.I had to deal with them,they deserved it.
I wish the final segment was longer, because it was so amusing.I think this would work better as a whole feature film. Overall,while a good movie,even clever at points,it is overall very slow in some parts, and it really does slow the pace of the movie down.
There was no real reason to have gone out and go see this in a theatre,but if you paid rental price for it,i don't think you would be disappointed.