A group of criminals who like nothing better than to film their illegal exploits have been hired by a mysterious stranger to break into a house and recover a specific VHS tape. When they break in, they discover a dead old man in front of a bank of TV sets, and the house is full of VHS cassettes, any one of which could be the one they’re looking for. So they set about watching them all until the find the correct one.
What follows is a compilation of five short horror movies (or six, if you include the group of criminals framing device) directed by some of the best young genre film-makers working today; Amateur Night is about three guys who are on the prowl for sex and bring a very strange girl back to their hotel room, Second Honeymoon deals with a couple on a road-trip across America and their run ins with a strange hitchhiker, Tuesday The 17th tells the story of a group of teenagers who trek into the woods were a serial killer is known to have lurked, The Sick Thing That Happened To Emily When She Was Younger is shot entirely on Skype as a young woman tries to prove to her boyfriend that her new apartment has a ghost, and finally 10/31/98 has four lads go to a Halloween party in a what might actually be a haunted house.
All six are gory, tense found footage horrors, but unfortunately only three of them are any good, while none of them are particularly original in any way, and some of them are outright boring. Rumoured to have been shot on a budget of $1,000, which is to be commended, but in some of the shorts that cheapness is all too evident. While the idea of an anthology movie isn’t a new one, it hasn’t been done in some time and it’s nice to see its return here, but at a running time of nearly two hours it certainly overstays its welcome.
Perhaps if one or two of the bad shorts had been cut out, this might have been seen as more of a success, but as it stands… when V/H/S is good, it’s very, very good. But when it’s bad, you’ll be praying for the eject button.
