V/H/S/2 (2013)

Larry (Lawrence Michael Levine) is a low-rent private eye who is hired to find out why a college student has suddenly disappeared.  He and his assistant Ayesha (Kelsy Abbott) break into the house where the student lives and find a series of monitors set up with piles of old VHS tapes.  While Larry searches the house, Ayesha begins to watch the tapes.

Tape one involves a man who is given an experimental eye transplant by a medical company.  The eye is actually a camera, and at first everything is fine - until a bloody man and a little girl show up.  Turns up the camera is the perfect medium in which to see ghosts.

On the second tape we meet a man who goes out for a bike ride only to run into the beginnings of a zombie apocalypse.  Instead of the usual, we get to see things from a zombie's point of view.

Third tape in features a television crew investigating an apocalyptic cult in Indonesia that happens to decide it is time for judgment day.

Lastly, we have a group of kids left home for the weekend that become the target of an alien invasion.

I loved the first V/H/S.  There were some segments in there that didn't work too well, largely because the stories were not allowed to develop.  The ones that did, like the one with the flying creature and the haunted house sequence at the end, were examples of what could be done with the found footage genre.  Some accused the film of being anti-female, but I think this sort of knee-jerk reaction is why we rarely get good horror films today.  People are way too easily offended, directors and studios are afraid to offend, and good horror in some way always offends.

While I don't think the makers of V/H/S/2 took much of the tongue-clicking about misogyny that seriously, what they seem to have done is decided to ramp up the story telling.  Instead of trying to jam a number of disjointed stories together they instead concentrate on four and a wraparound - and this time make the wraparound halfway interesting instead of about a bunch of pricks that one wants to see dead minutes into the film.

Largely, the stories become slightly better as the movie goes on, although it is hard to follow Timo Tjahjanto's "Safe Haven" segment.  It is rare to see something that doesn't shy away from being absolutely nasty these days, and it helps that the nastiness has a point - and even quite a humorous payoff.  And, yes, this is the one you'll be wanting to see, although the rest are no slouches either.

Definitely one of the best anthology series in years, and quite a bit better than the original.

V/H/S/2 (2013)
Time: 96 minutes
Starring: Lawrence Michael Levine, Kelsy Abbott, Adam Wingard, Hannah Hughes, Jay Saunders, Fachry Albar, Hannah Al Rashid, Oka Antara, Ryan Logan, Cohen King, Samantha Gracie
Directors: Simon Barrett, Jason Eisener, Gareth Evans, Gregg Hale, Eduardo Sanchez, Timo Tjahjanto, Adam Wingard


Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Things (1989)

Image
Most of the time when I hear a movie is the worst ever I know that is hyperbole. There are few candidates and I would even say the famous book chronicling the worst movies ever made got it wrong.  Plan 9 from Outer Space is laughably incompetent, but enjoyable.  The worst kind of films are the ones where no joy can be found in the watching experience, for reasons ranging from unlikeable characters to just sheer boredom.  A truly horrible movie is something like  Things.   This is a 1989 direct-to-video horror film from Canada, filmed on 8mm and dubbed once it was completed and the makers realized most of the sound was unusable.  Director Andrew Jordan and writer Barry J. Gillis managed to grab porn star Amber Lynn for an hour to shoot her as a news reporter just so they could put her face on the video box.  Most of the music was done by Gillis, and some of it by a local band called Familiar Strangers.  It was filmed in large part in Andrew Norman's basement, and most of the props w
Read more

The Lawnmower Man (1992)

Image
Virtual reality has been one of the most hyped, and one of the most disappointing, promises of technology.  While it promotes immersion into a cybernetic world what it really provides are video games with 20-year-old graphics and the occasional bruise when one accidentally hits a closet door.  In the case of The Lawnmower Man  what it is promising is that something with graphics just a little bit better than Dire Straits's "Money for Nothing" video will somehow change the world and alter humanity. It was laughable then and it is laughable now.  The only person not laughing was Stephen King, who demanded that his name be removed from all future advertising for the movie because he never wrote this.  The story, of which a short film was made in the 1980s, involves a man unwittingly hiring a Greek god to mow his lawn and, after said god creates a spectacle, paying for the landscaping with his life.  It's only a few pages and, in my opinion, it is one of King's worst
Read more

The Omen (1976)

Image
A movie does not have to be high art to strike a chord with the public.  The Omen was an attempt by writer David Seltzer to make some money and get a nice trip to the UK.  It just so happened that because of The Exorcist the public was hungry for more movies involving demons and such, and adding a veneer of Catholicism didn't hurt either.  The Vatican's secrets are most likely of more interest to scholars than anyone else, but a religion doesn't hang on over the centuries without creating a bit of mystery.  In this case, Seltzer settled on the Revelation of St. John, the low-fantasy portion of the Bible and, instead of an hilariously named (albeit historically correct) demon named Pazuzu, with The Omen we get the son of Satan himself.  When Robert Thorne (Gregory Peck) is informed that his child has died he visits a priest at the hospital in Rome where his wife is coalescing.  He is given an offer too good to be true: a foundling, whose mother died in childbirth, was born
Read more