V/H/S Viral
If there is one sad truth about horror films, it’s that while there are those writers, directors and producers who are genuinely talented and interested in exploring the genre through inventive and challenging storytelling with an understanding of atmosphere and character, in accordance with Sturgeon’s Law the overwhelming majority of material offered is artistically void; worse, there is a willing audience willing to overlook these shortcomings in order to receive their fix.
The third in the V/H/S sequence, the anthology film has a long history in horror such as Roger Corman’s Edgar Allan Poe inspired Tales of Terror (1962), the Amicus portmanteaus from Dr Terror’s House of Horrors (1965) to From Beyond the Grave (1974) and more recently two volumes of The ABC’s of Death, but structured around the enduring fad of found footage, they have served as little more than a showcase of how limited and tedious that subgenre is.
While the first two films had a loose structure involving a “wraparound” story involving a discovery of mysterious videotapes, the contents of which when viewed were the various segments, the connecting thread this time is director Marcel Sarmiento’s Vicious Circles. From a script by T.J. Cimfel and David White in collaboration with Sarmiento who contributed D is for Dogfight to the first ABCs of Death, within minutes it demonstrates every unpleasant, tiresome and indulgent cliché of the genre.
Opening with randomly spliced and corrupted footage which is neither edgy nor generates tension, Kevin (Patrick Lawrie) is just one of many who obsessively records the moments of his life. Mocked by his girlfriend (“You think that’s going to go viral? You think you’re going to be famous?”) his moment comes when a police chase they are watching on the news enters their neighbourhood, he joins those on the street in pursuit of hot footage.
Badly filmed and populated with selfish, indulgent, vain people whose only validation comes from pointing a camera at themselves, the subsequent scenes which separate the other segments follow the same pattern as Kevin closes in on the rogue ice-cream truck which leaves a trail of destruction and mangled bodies behind it, trying to rescue his kidnapped girlfriend.
Gregg Bishop’s Dante the Great begins with more promise with aspects of mockumentary spliced with police interview footage of Scarlett (Emmy Argo), glamorous stage assistant of the eponymous Dante (Justin Welborn), rising star of theatrical magic, as she details his rise to fame and the terrible cost. In possession of a cloak rumoured to have once belonged to the legendary Harry Houdini, it has imparted true power to Dante but it is capricious and demands blood in return, a succession of stage assistants having vanished without trace while in his employ.
With at least an acknowledgement of storytelling requirement, albeit a sub Twilight Zone rip-off, it has higher production values, though with a reliance on trick camerawork and editing to achieve what little it does, it is undermined throughout by Welborn’s ham-faced gurning. Completely abandoning the found-footage pretext for the final duel between Dante and Scarlet and long overstaying its welcome, whatever relief it offered as an alternative to Sarmiento’s introduction is shortlived, the sleight of hand and misdirection of true stage magic replaced by heavy handed digital effects.
Next up, Los Cronocrímenes director Nacho Vigalondo revisits the themes of that piece in the tale of Alfonso (Gustavo Salmerón) who in his basement has invented a dimensional portal. While his debut feature was a paradoxical puzzlebox of looped timelines, this revisitation is undoubtedly the most interesting and competently conceived of the pieces.
As Arthur C Clarke and Stephen Baxter’s Time Odyssey trilogy reimagined the Space Odyssey quartet if the entities who controlled the Monoliths manipulated time instead of space, where Vigalondo previously threw a character out of time, here he allows Alfonso to meet the parallel Alfonso from the universe next door with whom he agrees to swap places for fifteen minutes.
Initially assuming their worlds must be substantially the same for them both to have arrived at the same point simultaneously, he explores his alternative house and finds first minor divergences, while his alternate self goes upstairs to pay a visit to his sleeping wife Marta (Marian Álvarez).
With aspects of his own contribution to The ABCs of Death, A is for Apocalypse, Parallel Monsters relies on old fashioned prosthetics but suffers from a brevity which curtails full development of the idea, wrapped up in a simplistic manner which seems designed to fit the piece into a template of the series.
The final complete segment is Justin Benson and Aaron Moorehead’s Bonestorm from a script by Benson and Todd Lincoln, though Bonehead might be more apt, an extended skateboard video populated by unpleasant children who move their shoot to Tijuana where a tumble and a scraped hand result in blood splashed on the symbols graffittied on the concrete, summoning a horde of undead attackers.
With nothing to offer other than whining spoiled teenagers who take advantage of their supposed friends, denigrate the local culture and desecrate the altar they find before descending into an admittedly well staged but ultimately overlong and indulgent mayhem, when “director” Danny (Nick Blanco) claims “I’m a director,” it seems to be nothing so much as Benson and Moorehead attempting to affirm their own dubious credentials.
