V/H/S/85
The sixth in the found footage horror anthology series launched eleven years ago with V/H/S, the latest returns to the golden age of the home video format it celebrates with V/H/S/85 featuring five stories from directors David Bruckner, Scott Derrickson, Gigi Saul Guerrero, Natasha Kermani and Mike P Nelson spliced together like some editor’s darkest nightmares.
In a secret lab, an unorthodox scientist continues his examination of an unknown lifeform despite the concerns of his colleagues, while elsewhere a group of friends ignore the “no trespassing” and “no swimming” signs and set themselves up as targets, and in Mexico a news broadcast is interrupted by an earthquake, a performance artists summons a demon, and finally a murder is taped before it is committed.
Divided into two segments, No Wake and Ambrosia, Wrong Turn’s Mike P Nelson initially slaughters a bunch of obnoxious friends devoid of personality with for no apparent reason other than target practice, then presents a twist which ultimately serves no purpose; rather than having the waters of the lake resurrect the victims, why not simply have a survivor carry the story forward to its conclusion seen from the other side of the hunting rifle?
Gigi Saul Guerrero’s God of Death also a tale of two halves, the emergency workers who arrive in the wake of an earthquake are ill-prepared and unprofessional, finding themselves trapped in the collapsing building and forced deeper underground where they find a gateway to Mictlān, the Aztec underworld, but built around people screaming and dying there is little story to carry it.
Natasha Kermani’s taped stage performance art piece TKNOGD which spends half its time with a presentation explaining the idea of virtual reality may be in keeping with the chosen period but is both pretentious and pointless, though fortunately it gives way to by far the best piece, Dreamkill by Deliver Us From Evil’s Scott Derrickson which actually presents a murder, a mystery and a reversal of expectations.
The segments interspersed by the fragments of Total Copy by The Night House’s David Bruckner, possibly to be interpreted as a plea for establishing adequate safety protocols, in the absence of adequate story many of the segments instead fall back on insatiable nastiness to sell themselves, often revelling distastefully in the nihilism of American gun culture, V/H/S/85 a shallow and disposable collection but still an improvement on V/H/S/99.
V/H/S/85 will be available on Shudder from Friday 6th October
