The wrap-around for this 'mockumentary'-style anthology deals with a group of miscreants with a camcorder who are trying to make money by recording bullshit home-movies of them pulling unsuspecting women's shirts up and smashing up abandoned buildings. General raucous behavior, pretty much. They're given a job from an unknown party to break into an old man's house and steal a certain video tape. The old man is slumped in a chair, seemingly dead and surrounded by TV monitors and tapes, so the thieves start rummaging through the stacks and begin playing some of the videos...
The first video (directed by David Bruckner) follows a group of douche-bag young guys who go bar-hopping with one of them wearing spy-cam glasses. They end up bringing a few chicks back to their motel room with hopes of scoring some amateur on-camera fuckin'. Shit goes bad when one of the girls passes out and the other turns into a blood-guzzling succubus... This one was pretty fucking cool!
Next is "Second Honeymoon" (directed by Ti West) about a young couple on a Grand Canyon vacation that turns creepy when a girl breaks into their motel room while they're sleeping and fucks with them. This one had the big "twist" at the end that I didn't find all that satisfying after the heavily drawn-out build up...
Segment three (directed by Glenn McQuaid) has a group of boisterous youths hiking through the woods and smoking pot until they are suddenly murdered by a brutal killer that refuses to show up on camera. This one wasn't the worst. Had a few decent kills.
"The Sick Thing That Happened to Emily When She Was Younger" (directed by Joe Swanberg) is the next one and goes the web-cam route. A girl with a terribly unattractive haircut is web-chatting with her med student boyfriend about some strange shit that's going on in her house at night. Through their pixilated interactions, she shows him glimpses of little things that appear to be babies running around in the dark. I'd have to call this the worst portion of the movie. Piss-poor acting and a confusingly vague ending...
The final story (directed by the Radio Silence Production team) is the big 'special effects' laden installment, although the premise is very basic. A group of friends show up at a mansion for a Halloween costume party (one of them equipped with a nanny-cam in in mask of his bear suit). The house appears to be empty until they wander up a hidden staircase leading to the attic where a group of guys have a girl chained up. They appear to be preparing some kind of sacrifice, but it quickly becomes apparent that there are supernatural forces in their midst as they attempt to rescue the girl and flee the evil inhabited house...
"V/H/S" is a pretty decent anthology. The best segments are certainly the first and very last. There's a good amount of bloody demises, nudity and some cleverly morbid visuals. Again, I didn't like the web-cam piece and I expected a little more from Ti West's contribution, although it wasn't horrible. A couple of things I noticed though, in terms of reoccurring themes, were young, college-age kids "bro-ing down". Seriously, the majority of the stories were douche-bag guys looking for pussy or smoking pot. Got a little tiring... Also, I thought the wrap-around material could've been handled a little better. I liked what they were going for, but I felt that it didn't really finish off all that strong. Still, "V/H/S" is actually a surprisingly cool flick, overall, that I would definitely recommend - especially to those like-minded individuals who figured the "found footage" thing had been beaten into the ground with all the repetitive teenybopper "Paranormal Activity"/"Last Exorcism" horse shit that's been vomited up over the past few years....
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