Bob's Review: V/H/S (2012)

Genre/Tags - Horror, pov, “found footage,” anthology

The Basics 
A group of low lives are hired to break into an old man’s house and steal a rare video tape from his collection. When they enter the house, they find the old man dead, his body seated in front of a multi screen television display. With each video tape that is played by the thieves, we are shown a new and different event of horror and death.

My Recommendation
I would recommend this one for any and all fans of good horror. The R rating is for adult language, graphic violence, nudity, strong sexuality, and some drug use.

My Two Cents
I’ll start by saying that film “trends” kind of annoy me at times. For example, two of the biggest box office releases of 2001 were Harry Potter 1 and Fellowship of the Ring. The decade that followed saw Hollywood suddenly scramble to the bookstore for more block buster hits, and what we got was a slew of mediocre to poor quality movies based on books like Peter Pan, A Series of Unfortunate Events, Narnia, and led to the ultimate cultural disaster of my lifetime, Twilight.
 Sadly, the world of horror is not immune to this cycle of trends. Sometimes slashers are the “in” thing, sometimes vampires, then zombies, or ghosts, or demon possession, but for some reason, werewolves have yet to become popular. The rising trend now is the pov horror movie which attempt to put the viewer right in the “heart of the fear” using hand held cameras to film the sequence of events through the characters’ points of view. The most widely known of these films are The Blair Witch Project and the Paranormal Activity series.
 Out of all the pov horror films I’ve seen (not all of them, but a good number) V/H/S is the one that I would recommend the highest. For one thing, most, if not all, pov movies I’ve seen are slow to build, meaning you have to sit through a half hour of boring before the frightmare begins. The first shot of this movie is footage of the thieves harassing an unsuspecting bystander. So, instead of watching a half an hour of staged home movies, the film jumps right into it.
 Also, this is the only pov horror film I have seen with any level of violence or gore, both of which this movie contains. I’m not saying these things are necessary for good horror, but with the number of pov films out there, one would think that the ratio of violent to non-violent selections would be somewhat more even. And some of the segments are more violent than the others, so there are parts of the film that will satisfy those that prefer visceral terror over carnage.
 One “trick” that is used in pov horror, particularly the Paranormal Activity movies, is what I call the ambient scare. This is where loud and sudden sounds come through the surround system giving the illusion that the sound came from behind the viewer. I think this is very cool, but it is something that home viewers will miss out on if they do not have a sound system with 5.1 digital surround. And even then, this is not going to give you quite the same effect as it does in the theater, unless you turn your system way loud which tends to upset the neighbors. This film doesn’t rely on this effect, especially since the povs are on video tape rather than digital means, which gives the movie at least a little bit of believability.
 The thing that makes the movie stand out in my mind is the fact that it is an anthology style movie. It’s interesting to see the work of different writers and directors side by side in the same movie and see what they do with the time slot they are given to work with. Also being a fan of different styles of horror, I enjoyed seeing multiple styles in one film.
 Sure to satisfy any horror fan out there, this is a prime example of what can be done in the pov style.
 Ratings 
Story: Very Good. The foreground story was a bit generic, but all the footage stories were well written and executed.
Cast Performance: Good. Pov tend to work better with a cast of unknowns.
Violence/Gore: Heavy. Some of the segments are bloodier than others.
Nudity: Moderate/heavy. The total screen time with nudity is low, but there is a full frontal shot. Ambiance/music: Good. About what one would expect watching pov.
Overall Rating: 4.5/5