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Critics Consensus: An uneven collection of found-footage horror films, V/H/S has some inventive scares but its execution is hit-and-miss.
Critic Consensus: An uneven collection of found-footage horror films, V/H/S has some inventive scares but its execution is hit-and-miss.
All Critics (99) | Top Critics (24) | Fresh (56) | Rotten (43) | DVD (3)
Smart, scary stuff.
The mostly played-out found footage aesthetic has its limitations, and V/H/S doesn't escape all of them. But the collected directors do manage to make many of those limitations into the films' strengths.
I came, I saw, I hunkered.
"V/H/S" probably sounded great in the pitch meeting, but it loses all luster through some shoddy execution.
Two hours of nausea-inducing shaky cam footage that fails to tell a coherent or engrossing central story.
The film also plays to the strengths of the found-footage format, proving that sometimes the scariest things are the ones you can barely see.
Although the filmmakers have a shorter time span to tell their tales, there's a distinct lack of imagination and genuine sense of fun on display.
It doesn't feel over-produced or over-ambitious, but rather as close to what it purports to be as it can get. The results are admirable and often honestly scary.
Relentlessly murky and meandering, V/H/S will have some wanting the urge to push the eject button on their 25 year-old VCR player.
Quite possibly the most effectively unsettling found-footage horror film to date.
V/H/S not only features some of the most imaginative horror films of our time, but also manages to present these as a collection that continuously defies out expectations and leaves us begging for more.
V/H/S could have been really, really good instead of just really, really interesting. As it stands, it's worth watching just to see the seeds of several very clever ideas emerge.
When a horror movie review website gets involved in making horror movies, you can be pretty sure the pressure is high. I mean, if you're going to critique movies, you better show you know how to make a good one. And VHS (barely) validates Bloody Disgusting's idea of what makes a good horror movie. It's a found footage anthology with a framed narrative that focuses on a group of misfits who are contracted to break into a house and recover one tape amid a whole bunch of them. To find the right tape, they end up watching a bunch of them, and the results are not so great. None of the stories tie into any overarching theme or villain. The directors of the short seemed to have free range to do what they want so long as it's found footage. What saves the film is that the segments are conceptually creative. The technical prowess in spite of found footage's limitations is also fascinating. Overly shaky cams, deliberate colour degradation (to mimic a VHS tape), and a lot of disbelief suspension detract the film from being the sum of its parts, but it's a mildly entertaining attempt to keep the found footage style alive.
Super Reviewer
three stars
Four hooligans are hired to break in and retrieve a VHS tape from an old house; when they get there they watch tapes containing short POV horror stories. The episodes range from very bad (a Skype session on VHS?) to not bad (Halloween partiers walk into the wrong house), but there is a frat boy vibe to many of the segments that won't sit well with less douchey folks.
It is hard to figure out what it worse here: if the fact that this pile of crap forces us to be in the company of a bunch of obnoxious people or that the stories are all dull and lead nowhere, with the found footage execution being so incredibly pretentious and even incoherent.
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