The apocalyptic dread of Y2K, captured by the final period of camcorder customers, looms giant in V/H/S/99, the fifth within the V/H/S found-footage horror anthology collection. Not like final yr’s V/H/S/94, this installment gathers 5 unconnected tales, mashed collectively by an unseen editor who has a very good intuition for saving the perfect for final.
That’s to not say there’s lifeless weight right here—it’s simply that not each section is outstandingly memorable, and the wildest one occurs to be on the finish. Although there’s no framing story, we do get a number of interspersed vignettes of toy troopers assembly ugly stop-motion ends, a darkly comedian contact that displays the “haha/eww” vibe of your complete enterprise. As for the entries themselves, Maggie Levin’s “Shredding” kicks issues off by following a quartet of teenagers, a band that retains a video diary of their wacky pranks—one thing that might’ve made them darlings of YouTube if solely YouTube existed in 1999. “Shredding” oozes main ‘90s nostalgia and that’s actually its finest factor; the children’ newest stunt is to interrupt right into a live performance venue that’s been shuttered since a crowd stampede killed the final band (additionally a quartet of teenagers) that carried out there, and the fake promo video for the doomed musicians expertly evokes the popular culture of the period like MTV’s 120 Minutes.
You may most likely guess the way it goes for the obnoxious younger rockers as soon as they carry their goofballery to a probably-haunted venue; you might also guess the ending of Johannes Roberts’ “Suicide Bid,” a few faculty pupil so determined to get into her most well-liked sorority that she agrees to a merciless hazing stunt that entails spending the evening in a coffin. However you’ll completely not have the ability to see the place Flying Lotus’ “Ozzy’s Dungeon” goes, which begins off with a kiddie recreation present that’s like a grosser, extra harmful mash-up of Double Dare and Legends of the Hidden Temple, with a number (Snowpiercer’s Steven Ogg) who’s equal elements smarmy and sinister. The place it turns subsequent we is not going to spoil, however excessive ranges of WTF are achieved, commendably so.
After that, we get Tyler MacIntyre’s “The Gawkers,” a cautionary story for younger Peeping Toms in all places that actually captures that closing technology of bored suburban children who didn’t have mobile phone cameras and social media at their fingertips to maximise their stalking. However the pièce de résistance of V/H/S/99 is “To Hell and Again” from Vanessa and Joseph Winter, the identical duo who made the latest Shudder addition Deadstream, an entertaining found-footage Evil Useless homage. Joseph Winter and his Deadstream co-star Melanie Stone (who is very unbelievable right here) reunite for this saga of documentarians who get manner greater than they bargained for whereas shadowing a doomsday cult on New 12 months’s Eve. With out spoiling something, let’s simply say the creature design alone would make this entry the standout of the movie, however its intelligent story helps make it a standout of your complete V/H/S collection.
What does it say about V/H/S/99 that the perfect segments (“Ozzy’s Dungeon” and “To Hell and Again”) are the one two that don’t concentrate on young-adult protagonists? Perhaps that the collection is attempting too onerous to focus its efforts on who it hopes will watch the film, or perhaps that’s only a byproduct of setting your movie in 1999. As know-how was beginning to improve, many children nonetheless had easy accessibility to camcorders, to not point out probably the most pressing have to doc themselves performing like idiots for an imagined viewers. In V/H/S/99‘s case, after all, the viewers is actual, and we get to see comeuppance rain down as every mini-morality story—the tagline of V/H/S as a franchise may very well be “Do not fuck with the supernatural!”—reaches its grainy, static-filled conclusion.
V/H/S/99 hits Shudder on October 20.
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Originally published at Irvine News HQ
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