Good evening Minions, I hope you are well. Tonight we discuss the films VHS and VHS 2. I know they’ve been out for a while but I’ve only just gotten around to seeing the second one and when I saw the first one, reviews for the second one were flying around because it had just come out. So, taken together, I’ll give my impression of these two films at the same time.
The first thing you need to know about the V/H/S movies is that they are anthologies. Each is made up of short films by several directors. In both films the shorts are played by people watching a series of video tapes. These are found footage and the contents of the tapes, although unbelievable, are obviously real.
What this means is that between both films there are no fewer than eleven stories to talk about, which I’m not going to do. (Each story is short enough that in some cases a basic synopsis is enough to spoil it for someone who hasn’t seen it.)
So, is is scary? Are the V/H/S movies worth your time?
I’m going to go with yes. Now, you know, hold on a second. Let’s talk about this.
These are not perfect films and each little 10-minute short gives very little time to develop character or plot. This is also “found footage” so there’s a lot of shaky camera stuff in case that makes you nauseated. This is not The Shining we’re talking about here so chill out.
When I was a kid there was this thing called Faces of Death. The rumor was that there was this series of video tapes that showed people dying. Not fake people, either. No, Faces of Death had people being stabbed, burned, crushed, shot, hanged… Whatever horrible way a person could die, they showed it. That’s what I was told anyway. I never saw it. I knew plenty of kids who claimed to have seen it, but those reports went unsubstantiated. Kids are stupid and make up all kinds of stories to make themselves look cool.It wasn’t until years later that I saw the series for sale at a convenience store that I even knew for a fact that it existed for real.
So the premise of V/H/S is that there are people who collect raw footage of death and mayhem, and that they trade these videos with one another using the internet. Watching these films can and do cause the watcher to go insane and kill themselves, others, or both. When you know about Faces of Death, you know that this premise isn’t so crazy.
Altogether, the movies work well. And by work well, I mean they are really pretty scary. Given the sheer number of stories in the two films, there are bound to be a couple that fall flat, but the ones that work, really do work. I found it creepy and incredibly gory and even with the parts that didn’t work for me I can never say I was bored.
Are there better movies out there? Of course. But for a nice sick day hanging out on the couch, the V/H/S movies are a lot of fun.
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