IMPORTANT NOTE: This piece was written during the 2023 SAG-AFTRA strike. Without the labor of the actors currently on strike, the movies being covered here wouldn’t exist.
Released: 6th October
Seen: 12th October
The V/H/S franchise is quite possibly one of the most fascinating series to be a part of the horror genre. Each film follows a very simple but effective structure, five short films all tied together by the gimmick of being found footage from a VHS recorder that has a larger overarching film showing between them. This has turned the franchise into a breeding ground for future major directors in the horror/sci-fi genre, some alumni of the franchise include Ti West (X, Pearl), Radio Silence (Scream, Scream 6), David Bruckner (Hellraiser) and Adam Wingard (Godzilla vs Kong) among a slew of others who have all made their mark on the genre. All of them connected through this strange little horror series using an old technology as the linking force. Now on its sixth film, V/H/S turns to a decade that was almost defined by the rise of the VHS tape and sees what horror it can find there.
Since V/H/S/85 is essentially six short films that are neatly assembled into a feature-length expriencce, you have the advantage that if you’re not into one of the shorts then you’ll only have to wait 20 minutes to get a fresh one. In this film’s case, every one of the shorts is pretty fascinating. From a twisted take on mass shootings done as only horror could do it to a performance art piece gone horribly wrong, each segment of the film is dark and twisted and pretty damn well made with enough visceral shocks to really get to anyone.
V/H/S/85 is probably the first film in the franchise that I can think of that actually does something new and daring, which is to link two of the shorts together. No Wake (the first short) and Ambrosia (the fourth short) end up providing us with two different perspectives on the same horrific event in a way that’s honestly the smartest thing this movie does, making these two shorts the best parts of the movie.
Both shorts link up to a mass shooting that kills 7 people and both have some of the goriest scenes in the entire movie, especially No Wake which has possibly the most fucked up lower jaw prosthetic I’ve seen in a while. The only problem with these two is that Ambrosia (the second short) has a plot that ends up being something that could’ve made for a great wraparound (It’s about a family sharing videos of murders they did to celebrate major events, it would’ve been more cohesive than the thing that ends up as the wraparound). They also don’t feel like they’re things that needed to be set in 1985, which is one of the ideas this film is trying to suggest.
The one short that does use the 1985 setting well, God of Death, also has some fascinating ideas to play with. This is one of the few V/H/S segments that references a real event, the 1985 Mexico City Earthquake and in particular the airing of the morning show Hoy Mismo that was on at the time of the quake. Obviously the short takes this starting line and runs right towards a demon for the finale but there is something weirdly fascinating about a short that looked at a real event and used that as a springboard for a wild demonic horror story, it’s another wild idea that feels like it should be the guideline for every short, a V/H/S movie where every short is in some way inspired by a real event could be fascinating but this is the only one to do it.
Then you have the short that feels out of time, TEKNOGOD which is all about a performance artist doing a piece that involves VR technology that absolutely did not exist in a commercial form like this at the time. It name-drops iPhones several times and feels like something that someone would probably do nowadays. It stands out among the other shorts, almost feeling like it was meant for one of the pieces set in the 90s but wasn’t ready in time so was put here. It’s still got some fun moments, the ending is actually a gloriously gory extravaganza but the rest is just watching an annoying art student do performance art, it’s the low point of the picture.
And then there’s the finale, Dreamkill where they let Scott Derickson (Doctor Strange) show off why he’s such a big director in this genre. It’s probably the most imaginative of the bunch, involving video-tape premonitions and playing with the idea of time and the fourth wall itself. If any of these shorts were to be turned into a full-length feature film, this would probably be the one that would be best to get that treatment. It’s a slow-burn mystery that revels in throwing reveal after reveal and jumpscare after jumpscare at the audience… surprise, the guy who made Sinister is still really goddamn good at scaring the shit out of people, who could’ve called that one?
As individual shorts, each one of these is ambitious as hell in what they try to pull off. It doesn’t always land, sometimes it feels like some people have a different set of instructions than the other people but it’s hard to say that any one of these is actually bad. Everyone here made some cool fun horror shorts that make pretty great use of the VHS style in order to enhance them. None of these felt like they would improve by being presented as a normal digital narrative, each one on some level feels like it needed to be presented this way which is always a hard thing to pull off.
As a full-length feature, V/H/S/85 has some cool elements but feels like it lacks cohesion. Everyone’s swinging for the fences, but they’re all aiming at different fences which makes it hard to put everything together. It feels like they are half-assing the connective tissue, only letting two of the films actually reference each other in any meaningful way, one of them just isn’t set in the same time period, it’s all jumbled up in a way that it didn’t need to be. This doesn’t make V/H/S/85 bad by any stretch, probably the middle entry in the entire franchise if we were going to rank them, but it shows where a little more planning would have made something better. It’s still cool to see this franchise has some new ideas and fun ways to explore its central concept, here’s hoping if they do more of these that they take a little more time to plan everything before putting it together.
Movie Meister Reviews 