Studio: Shudder
Director: Various
Writer: Various
Producer: Josh Goldbloom, Michael Schreiber, James Harris, Brad Miska
Stars: Various
Review Score:
Summary:
Various videotapes capture strange sci-fi stories involving unusual alien encounters, UFO sightings, and violent mayhem.
Review:
For the previous three entries in the long-running "found footage" anthology series, "V/H/S" gave its filmmakers a specific year in which to set their stories, resulting in recreations of VHS videos from 1994, 1999, and 1985, respectively. Now on a seventh installment, pulling another arbitrary era out of the air must have felt like one too many trips to a dry well, so producers concocted "V/H/S/Beyond," with stories taking sharper turns into sci-fi territory as the element linking its six separate segments. In actuality, the real thing these shorts have in common is that they're all too long by about 20%, and more than a few of them have nearly nothing to do with the supposed sci-fi frame.
Rather than save the best for last like anthologies usually do, "V/H/S/Beyond" starts with its strongest segment, although you don't necessarily notice in the moment. It's something you realize in retrospect, after you discover what's still to come doesn't match the opener's higher levels of energy and execution.
"Stork," from director and co-writer Jordan Downey, follows a team of NYPD officers on a nighttime raid of what turns out to be a house filled with zombie-like creatures. It certainly seems deliberate that this special police force is dubbed W.A.R.D.E.N. as a not-so-subtle nod to S.T.A.R.S., since the footage plays like a scene straight out of "Resident Evil" remixed with the first-person perspective and frenzied mayhem of "Doom." Culminating in a "boss battle" highlighted by a captivating monster design, "Stork" entertains exclusively through vibrant video game violence. Even if "Stork's" substance seems slim, you might want to savor its adrenalized intensity because the action, and especially the special effects, tumbles steadily downhill from here.
With its Bollywood setting and subtitled text, "Dream Girl" taps the tongue with a foreign flavor that initially tastes fresh. Then the tale of two bumbling paparazzi photographers tasked with stalking a superstar beelines into flimsy familiarity when the celebrity is revealed to be a cyborg about to embark on a killing spree. From here, "Dream Girl" devolves into straightforward slaughter.
In between mutilations, the notion dawns that the robot could be any kind of beast for as much as the otherworldly theme matters. You're concurrently liable to start feeling the drag of unnecessarily drawn-out durations during "Dream Girl," too. Desperately needing a bathroom break, I remarked to my girlfriend who was watching with me, "Jeebus, will this segment ever end?" Similarly underwhelmed by the redundant death scenes, she exhaustedly responded, "Seriously."
For people who get nauseous from jittery "found footage" cameras, "Live and Let Dive" presents the ultimate "keep your lunch in your stomach" challenge with a simulated skydive that outdoes any segment in "V/H/S" history in terms of frightening first-person POVs. However, because there's so much setup to the jump, which comes when an alien unexpectedly tears apart a plane full of partying parachuters, and then repetitive running once survivors land on the ground, "Live and Let Dive" ends up so far from the apex of that thrilling freefall that the rush fully fades during the dragged-out climax. When a disengaged viewer starts wondering why apples come from an orchard, but oranges are grown in a grove, maybe a movie should rethink how much attention it pays to one panting man shouting "Sh*t!" over and over again.
Actor Justin Long switches sides of the camera to join his brother Christian in writing and directing "Fur Babies," a comedic riff on "The Island of Dr. Moreau" that further stretches the definition of what the film considers to be more sci-fi than horror. Weakened by chintzy makeup where a human/dog hybrid looks like a guy took $20 to a drugstore and bought a bunch of plastic Halloween props to stick on his face and hands, the segment boasts a believable bite of acting from Libby Letlow as an oddly obsessive pet owner. Other than her, "Fur Babies" mostly sticks out only because it has a darkly humorous mood that doesn't play nice with the rest of the anthology's often gruesome, more serious tones.
Considering their pedigrees in genre entertainment, it comes as no surprise that actor-turned-director Kate Siegel and her husband Mike Flanagan, who writes her segment "Stowaway," understood the sci-fi assignment better than anyone. Siegel's short focuses on a struggling documentarian, Halley, investigating UFO sightings in the Mojave Desert. Halley has a firsthand experience with eeriness when she boards a spacecraft to collect creepy clues regarding what these extraterrestrial visitors have been doing. Unfortunately for "Stowaway's" authenticity angle, it's hard to think of any other "V/H/S" segment that has a harder time answering the question, who exactly found this footage? Bit by the same budget bug plaguing most of the movie, "Stowaway" also has a hard time overcoming the limited look of its spacecraft's unimpressive interiors, while blurry footage makes the visuals even worse when it should be masking the production value of a backyard Halloween haunt.
I could easily find four-five minutes of excisable content from each segment, knocking off nearly a half-hour in total from "V/H/S/Beyond," and I believe no audience would notice a material difference in the narratives. This includes the wraparound, whose intermediate pieces do nothing to advance a setup that doesn't do anything for the stories it wraps around. "Abduction/Adduction" is essentially a chopped-up short with extraneous filler too tame to be the centerpiece, yet "V/H/S/Beyond" begins and ends on it anyway.
50/100 is a generous shrug of the shoulders for another collection of mid material shrugging its own shoulders over a vague sci-fi premise. Now at a point where the signature framing device of VHS videotapes appears to be hindering creators instead of inspiring them, the "found footage" format is down to producing one or two standout moments, not even a full standout segment. I don't know what's in store next, but based on the similarly shaky application of threadbare themes in recent installments, maybe it's time "V/H/S" regrouped with a detailed creative direction that's more efficient and more effective than a mere concept of a plan.
Review Score: 50
The real thing these shorts have in common is that they're all too long by about 20%, and some have nearly nothing to do with the supposed sci-fi frame.