V/H/S/2 | 2013 | Simon Barrett, Jason Eisener, Gareth Evans, Gregg Hale, Eduardo Sánchez, Timo Tjahjanto, Adam Wingard | Bloody Disgusting | July 12, 2013
I have three loose guiding principles as to outline what makes a good found footage horror movie: a tight budget, a sense of humor, and a short runtime (Noroi: The Curse (2005) being a notable exception to that last rule). The first V/H/S (2012) anthology came close to being a blissful deliverance on those three guidelines, it was funny, it’s collective of no-name directors under budgetary constraints had something to prove, and prove something they did. That being said, the whole thing wasn’t perfect, it ran a little long, some of the effects took you right out of it, they certainly could have trimmed some of the fat.
When I heard that V/H/S had been fast tracked for a sequel I took the news with a grain of salt. Would V/H/S/2 fall victim to the issues that have ruined so many a horror series? Namely, pointless sequels due to franchising, increased budgets leading to overproduction ruining the realism, and eventually a complete disintegration of the original movie’s merits. While V/H/S/2 manages to capture some of what made its predecessor great, it also falls victim to a number of issues that you wouldn’t expect considering how the film’s advertisers really played up the movie’s set of all-star directors.
Before I start talking trash I need to make a quick side note. One of the shorts in V/H/S/2 is phenomenal, it’s so good that the rest of the collection falls like a bunch of bricks in a swimming pool by comparison. I’m talking about Safe Haven. Directed by Gareth Huw Evans (The Raid: Redemption) and Timo Tjahjanto (Dara), Safe Haven follows an independent documentary crew as they get inside access to the compound of an Indonesian cult. Think of it like if a VICE documentary where things go horribly, terrifyingly, disgustingly wrong. This is the one flick out of the bunch that manages to be daring, fun, original, and even a little scary. I would say the movie is worth the price of admission based on this one part alone.
Still, I can’t give the movie a rating based solely on the value of one of the constituents. To give an accurate barometric as to where V/H/S/2 stands on this series’ march to obscurity, I would have to say it’s a step. Not a step up or down, just a step. That being said, V/H/S had enough ambition and the shorts therein were so varied that I could forgive it for its flaws and applaud it for what it did right. Not only did V/H/S present a bunch of nifty tricks that could make the somewhat tired found footage genre fun again, but it did so while giving you a bunch of stories that were far from being your typical horror movie shtick. The shorts that made up the first movie were diverse and subversive. Whether the camera was placed in a laptop or in a pair of glasses, the stories were good, they ran the gamut from body horror, to black comedy, to a work of paranoia inducing subtlety. That’s what made V/H/S good; it was a big, experimental monstrosity of a movie that you could not look away from.
Remember that grain of salt I took when I heard V/H/S/2 was coming out a year after the first movie? That grain of salt has grown into a mountain of halite where nothing exists and nothing grows. V/H/S/2 takes what made the first movie great, turns those elements into clichés, and spends the rest of its time piling older clichés on top of them (For further evidence of this trend with regard to this genre see: Paranormal Activity 2 ). I don’t care if the camera IS the guy’s eye, especially not if you’re only going to use that to throw scary faces and loud noises at me. Also, in terms of storytelling, whether the monsters look like zombies or grey aliens, it doesn’t really make a difference to the viewer if both of them are just trying to eat their victim’s brains. The problem with V/H/S/2 is exactly what you wouldn’t expect given its team of reputable directors: it comes off like amateur hour at the horror film festival even more so than its predecessor.
The directors of these shorts should know better. Especially Eduardo Sánchez who directed a small movie a few years back called The Blair Witch Project (1999). You are talking about one of the men who made “found footage” a word in the America lexicon directing a short that amounts to nothing more than a zombie outbreak from a camera mounted on the zombie. It’s uninteresting and it’s disappointing to see once great directors reduced to such a drought of creativity. The most shocking thing about this anthology is its near total absence of ingenuity. No amount of gore or cheap shocks can make up for a lacking in narrative flair, and the sore spot that is V/H/S/2’s void of creative storytelling is only abscessed with its generous helping of gimmicky camera tricks.
I want to say that V/H/S/2 isn’t a deplorable movie. It might be a little fun. Get the boys together, grab a few beers. Cuddle up with your girlfriend and catch her when she jumps at the scary parts. You know, it’s got that going for it. But beyond that, it’s a soul crushing experience that proves once and for all that money truly has the ability to corrupt, make people lazy, and destroy the things that made the world a good place to begin with.
I’m being a little hyperbolic there. But when only one out of four of the shorts bothers to try something different I cannot responsibly vouch for the total package. Some people will get their kicks, undoubtedly, but that doesn’t mean that I shouldn’t expect better from a series that made such a big splash out of such humble beginnings. V/H/S/2 deserves a much more neutered verb, like drip, or fizzle.
Rating: Safe Haven: 8/10
The Rest of the Schlock: 2/10
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