Studio: Shudder
Director: Maggie Levin, Johannes Roberts, Flying Lotus, Tyler MacIntyre, Vanessa & Joseph Winter
Writer: Zoe Cooper, Chris Lee Hill
Producer: Josh Goldbloom, Brad Miska, James Harris, David Bruckner, Radio Silence
Stars: Various
Review Score:
Summary:
VHS tapes from the turn of the millennium tell terror tales of vengeful ghouls, gorgons, demons, and cosmic creatures.
Review:
The movies that make up the “V/H/S” series have always been collections of short films only loosely linked by a common element, usually related to a wraparound involving the discovery of these tapes in one person’s possession. “V/H/S/99” doesn’t even have that much. Although “V/H/S/99’s” wraparound, which features an awkward teen making stop-motion animation with plastic Army men, is amusing in a juvenile sort of way, it doesn’t connect this installment’s pieces at all, serving instead as a trite prologue for the film’s fourth segment. It’s indicative of how “V/H/S/99” plays with plenty of inessential parts, shaping itself into perhaps the least cohesive “V/H/S” yet. The five films in this anthology feel like separate entities fighting, and losing the battle, to fit into the framing device, both as VHS “found footage” and as stories that are supposed to be set in 1999.
“V/H/S/99” opens with “Shredding,” whose paper-thin plot involves four teenage band members trespassing to play punk pranksters at an abandoned music venue where another four-person band was trampled to death in a tragedy tackily similar to the infamous Station nightclub fire. “Shredding” is probably “V/H/S/99’s” weakest link, due to consisting of too much filler footage where the first band fools around followed by excessive archival interviews of the dead band talking and vamping. Even before one of the guys mentions his worry about becoming demonically possessed, the 4+4 math telegraphs the painfully predictable outcome. To be fair, “Jackass” started airing on MTV in 2000, but “Shredding” still reads like copycat kids aping Johnny Knoxville’s more modern antics than it does like late ‘90s home videos of a post-grunge garage band.
“Suicide Bid” also has next to nothing to do with 1999. It cribs content from “Alfred Hitchcock Presents” and EC Comics to tell a trope-laden tale of cruel sorority sisters hazing a naïve new pledge by burying her alive in a cemetery. Of course, the prank turns fatal. Also of course, the sadistic bullies then get their ghoulish comeuppance at the conclusion of a routine story that’s functionally fine, if wholly unoriginal.
Flying Lotus’s “Ozzy’s Dungeon” starts making the movie more worthwhile with its perfect parody of a Nickelodeon game show. That premise works well within “V/H/S’s” financial constraints too, embracing the low-budget look of a slop-soaked soundstage, a cramped obstacle course, and a tiny audience rattling homemade signs over piped-in audio of a crowd five times the size a la “American Gladiators.” The midsection gets repetitive with gross-out gags, but the climax flips the formula with an unanticipated twist that’s weird and wild. “Ozzy’s Dungeon” has kooky fun without getting overly silly, and that tone makes it the freshest entry out of the five in this collection.
“V/H/S/99” definitely didn’t need any more of this, but “The Gawkers” features even more footage of obnoxious kids pulling mean-spirited pranks. That’s part of the problem with leaving individual creative teams to their own devices without adhering to a unifying treatment. Too many of them risk doing similar things. “The Gawkers” turns out okay thanks to doing something a little different with the fiction despite traveling in a familiar direction, i.e. selfish people eating just desserts in horrific fashion once again, for the entirety of its runtime.
Vanessa and Joseph Winter kind of provide a coda to their excellent “found footage” horror-comedy “Deadstream” (review here) with the film’s fifth and final segment. “To Hell and Back” has nothing to do with that movie, other than being similar in setup, execution, and overall vibe. It’s one of those “found footage” flicks that’s essentially a first-person walkthrough of a Halloween haunt featuring lunging monsters and the like, though that’s good enough for one last bite of easy entertainment after a mostly mediocre meal.
The final scorecard for “V/H/S/99” tallies up to one standout segment, two that eke out acceptable amounts of eerie enjoyment, and two that viewers will struggle to remember only a few days after watching the film. With the exception of “Ozzy’s Dungeon,” I’m not clear how 1999 is integral to any of these shorts. Sure, the summoning ritual in “To Hell and Back” requires invocation at midnight on the turn of the millennium, but that could be any other pagan date for all that it really matters. Hopefully the upcoming “V/H/S/85” will have a better time tying into its era than this one did, and hopefully the “found footage” frame will become important again as well.
Review Score: 55
If you want to see impossible amounts of blood explode crimson colors like the world’s worst version of a gender reveal, well, “Abigail” at least has that.