V/H/S/94

I’m a pretty big fan of the first V/H/S movie. Horror anthologies have really taken off in the last ten years, and I think V/H/S is one of the best. Unfortunately the two sequels rapidly went downhill; in fact, V/H/S Viral got such poor reviews that I didn’t even bother watching it.

But now along comes Shudder, releasing a revival in the form of V/H/S/94 in order to tap even more heavily into that pre-millenial nostalgia that we all crave. Can this collection rekindle the magic of the original, or is it a movie that only 90s kids will love?

Like its predecessors, V/H/S/94 consists of a framing story in which a number of hapless rubes find and watch the individual shorts before getting killed. This time around it’s a SWAT team and the TV cameraman recording them, who enter an industrial complex expecting a big, juicy drug bust. Instead they find a bunch of dead cultists sitting in front of banks of TVs and projector screens, on which the short films of the anthology are broadcast.

It’s decent as far as framing stories go and adds a few nuggets of potential lore if you choose to interpret it as a kind of origin story for the series as a whole, even though all the SWAT team dialogue is sub-CSI Miami cop show cliches and the acting is at times atrocious in a way that, oddly, seems to be deliberate (one of the actors from the framing story is also in one of the shorts, and he’s a lot less hammy there).

The first segment proper is Storm Drain, directed by Chloe Okuno, and it does not kick the movie off on a particularly promising note. It starts with a nice, simple premise: a local news anchor and her cameraman enter some storm drains while doing a story on rumours of a “Rat Man” prowling the sewers. You can probably guess what happens next.

Or maybe not, because after building a tense atmosphere and showing off some neat, low-key scares, the short devolves into ridiculously over the top gore and semi-comedic nonsense. “People go into sewers looking for rat man, rat man finds them” would have been a perfectly good basis for a segment, so I don’t know why the people behind the camera decided to take it in such a stupid direction. It’s still not outright bad, but compared to some of the stronger material that’s been featured in the series it’s definitely a weak entry.

Our second short is a lot better. “The Empty Wake” is about a funeral home employee waiting for the guests at a wake to arrive; her night goes from bad to worse to very worse when first no one shows up, then the lights start flickering, and then something starts to go bump inside the coffin. It seems like it’s setting up a classic ghost story at first, but by the end it’s swerved into being a fresh spin on a particularly played-out horror concept. 

It’s creepy, makes good use of a single atmospheric location, and I like that the main character recognizes the danger immediately and makes smart decisions once she’s in mortal peril, with her undoing coming about via a set of circumstances that she couldn’t have seen coming. Far too many found footage movies rely entirely on the protagonists acting stupid, so this was a welcome change.

Also, there appears to be a Silent Hill reference in the form of a siren-like tornado warning that kicks in right when the spooks start in earnest. I approve.

The third segment is by far the worst. “The Subject” is about a mad scientist kidnapping people and turning them into cyborgs with super-strength and sick sword-arms. This goes wrong in more or less the exact way you’re probably thinking it will.

There are a few spooky scenes involving the scientist’s failed experiments that have been left lying around his creepy Dr. Frankenstein lair, but mostly this is a vehicle for more over the top gore and incredibly stupid action movie bullshit, including another attempt at the “what if it was like a first-person shooter but a movie instead of a videogame” idea that’s never worked before.

Things pick up again with the final segment, “Terror”, which is another common horror trope masquerading as something else. A group of white supremacist militia chuds plot a terrorist attack using a “creature” that they’ve got locked up in their compound, the plan backfires hilarious because they’re all giant idiots and they decide to get wasted and fuck around with the creature the night before the attack.

This one isn’t being subtle with its messaging: even though the militia’s plot is clearly based on the Oklahoma City Bombing, we learn that the plan is being supported by the police due to cops all over the country being enraged by the election of Joe Biden Bill Clinton. The militia members are portrayed as a bunch of absolute doofuses, but unlike some stories dealing with the subject, Terror doesn’t quite forget that they’re still dangerous, even if only for their ability to galvanize extremist elements who are actually competent.

It’s not particularly scary, but it’s enjoyable for the big twist inherent in the premise: the mechanics of what the militia are doing with the creature seem to be weird, random nonsense until a single line of dialogue reveals what the creature actually is, at which point everything you’ve seen prior suddenly makes sense.

So in summary we’ve got two good segments, one mediocre segment and one outright bad one. The fact that the framing story drops the ball ends up souring the entire thing to an extent, but that’s still pretty decent as far as anthologies go. It might not have recaptured the series’ former glory, but it’s a step up from the low point of Viral.