V/H/S (2012)

Spoilers

This film should have been so much better than it was. Perhaps even that's too high praise for it, but...I like found-footage, and I like it for all the stupid, clichéd reasons it's popular too: it adds realism to a film, it puts the audience in the midst of the actions taking place, and (perhaps most importantly) it's relatively low-cost grants opportunities to amateurs that wouldn't exist otherwise; The Blair Witch Project cost a mere $25,000, Paranormal Activity, $15,000, according to Wiki at least.

But, before this becomes a rant about the relative merits of found-footage, I'll rein myself in and direct my energies towards this particular target...

V/H/S correctly understands a lot. It understands that there is something pleasingly visceral about videos over DVDs. It also understands that horror often works better with little, or no, exposition, when the events in question are simply left to play out. I've often felt this is why horror works so well in the short-story format, that giving the audience only very little, and refusing to offer many answers at all (if any) is a fantastic mechanism to build atmosphere, if correctly deployed.

The plot, for as much as there is one, has a gang of petty criminals breaking into a house to steal a videotape for reasons I didn't pick up on and didn't care about, to be frank. As a result of this, they end up splitting up (naturally) to search for the tape, while one of them watches the tapes to see if it's the one they're looking for. The tapes they find form the meat of the film, providing us with the vignettes. None of them are brilliant, to be honest, though some worked much better than others.

Only one (Second Honeymoon) exploited found-footage as a genre particularly well; the other stories all would have worked fine as normally shot movies (or at least as well), but Second Honeymoon needed to be shot on a handheld by the characters it featured. For the most part, the others were rehashings of clichéd horror movies tropes (teens at the lake; haunted house; even a dash of rape-and-revenge, sort of), but there were genuine moments of originality in all of them, even the weakest (The Sick Thing That Happened To Emily When She Was Younger) was relatively well executed. Most frustrating was the last vignette, 10/31/98, which almost ventured in the realms of Lovecraftian horror. Almost.

Indeed, that says pretty much everything that needs to be said about this film: it was almost there. That it didn't quite make it, rather than failing outright, somehow makes it all the worse.