Nowadays it takes so much time and effort and money and man-hours to finish a new Jurassic World, Marvel movie, or the latest blockbuster based on an existing Mattel trademark, and it’s so difficult to generate an audience for something not based on a book, comic book, or existing Mattel trademark, that we’ve effectively seen the death of the annually-released franchise movie. The horror genre used to be especially rife with these, given its undemanding production values and built-in audience, but the Friday the 13th s, Nightmare On Elm Streets, Saws, Paranormal Activitys and Conjurings of yesteryear have gone into hibernation, settled in to increasing gaps between releases, or faded into sub-mediocrity. But V/H/S keeps this tradition alive with its releases which both come out annually and name themselves after years. It would be a lot simpler to keep all these releases straight if they simply called 2022’s entry V/H/S/22, V/H/S/23 in 2023, and so on. Instead, we have the fourth film, V/H/S/94, immediately followed by V/H/S/99, before we jump back fourteen years to V/H/S/85. Just try working out what order to go in if you come to the series as a newcomer. Mind you, I suppose these entries have to keep to the VHS era of strictly the 1980s and 90s, until we get the D/V/D spinoff franchise, an era of Shrek bootlegs aplenty.
This latest release, V/H/S/85, takes place unsurprisingly enough in 1985. The usual formula is followed, which is no bad thing: there is a framing narrative, which we see in brief glimpses in between twenty-minute-ish found-footage shorts by an array of well-regarded horror auteurs. On the Blu-Ray, you can even watch the framing narrative in one continuous chunk without interruption from the other segments, which gets you to the point of the story much quicker, but also skips the best parts of the film.
The best of those best parts is also the first segment we see (well, after the prologue by David Bruckner [The Ritual, the Hellraiser remake, several prior V/H/Ses]), and funnily enough it comes from the director with the worst CV, Mike P. Nelson who was responsible for the lamebrained reboot of Wrong Turn. In “No Wake”, our standard group of obnoxious, beer-chugging teenagers head down to the lake to chug beer, skinny-dip and squirt vodka at each other with a water pistol, until out of nowhere someone begins shooting off their jaws and the backs of their heads. What follows is the most devilish series of surprises you’ll find in this or any V/H/S, and I don’t want to spoil it so I’ll move on.
Gigi Saul Guerrero rose to prominence with the webseries La Quinceañera, but aside from assorted anthology contributions I haven’t seen any of her prior work. Her short “God of Death” starts strongly: it’s the most “1985” of all the segments, and its Mexican setting and overtly humourous tone give it a different flavour from the other segments. With that said, it does descend quickly into the standard found-footage formula of scream, run, stop, see something else scary, scream, run, stop, and so on. You might argue that this is the formula for much of horror, not only the found-footage subgenre, but watching a camera viewfinder as someone runs with it is uniquely irritating. Still, points for a strong ending.
Similarly, “TKNOGD” (you can parse that as “techno God”) features a nice payoff, but spends an incredibly long and tedious time in getting to it. I’m a huge fan of director Natasha Kermani’s 2017 Imitation Girl, but her subsequent Lucky, and this segment, evidence unrealised potential from that incredibly strong début.
The final segment (again, apart from the wraparound) comes from by far the highest-profile director featured here, Scott Derrickson. Derrickson has followed a similar path to his contemporaries, James Wan and David F. Sandberg, from low-budget horror (Hellraiser: Inferno)to mid-budget horror (Sinister) to super-budget superheroics (Doctor Strange), but the most obvious comparator for his work here is his latest, The Black Phone. “Dreamkill” shares that film’s period setting, dark and visceral mood, and supernatural time-travel elements, as a police detective begins to receive grisly footage of home invasion/murders, before they’ve even occurred. It’s a clever little plot, but as sometimes happens in these V/H/S films, it’s actually hampered by the brand’s reliance on found footage as USP. It also, despite being the longest of the segments by a good distance, still feels like too much story crammed into too short a space. But in the past, Siren (2016) and Kids vs. Aliens (2022) have been non-found-footage, feature-length remakes of V/H/S shorts, and both managed to improve on their source material. With that in mind, I eagerly await the Dreamkill feature and, as ever, this year’s edition of V/H/S (who knows what year they’ll name it after this time?).