Evan Kavanagh

The V/H/S franchise stopped taking itself seriously a long time ago, and now aims to be a parody of B-movie 80s horror. Please stop doing that. Ironically bad is still bad. Anyone who watches this will think these movies are awful. But 1 and 2 are horror masterpieces. By the way, somewhat ranting here, but they have completely lost sight of the "found footage" format which is what made the V/H/S movies good and incomparably immersive in the first place. One of the segments, "Ut Supra Sic Infra" involves a group of people recording themselves on their phones sneaking into a house where they are then killed by some supernatural force. The police need to interrogate the sole survivor of this massacre to figure out what happened, because apparently the phones never recorded (and the whole segment is based on this fact, by the way). So how are WE, the viewer, seeing the footage if it never recorded??? How can we believe it's "found footage" we are retrospectively watching, if the police admit it never recorded??? There's a handful of similar moment in this movie and it defeats the purpose of it being found footage. It's like the directors think found footage just means shaky cam and 90s fuzzy filter. The "frame narrative" present in these movies used to have purpose too. There was an overarching story that would tie the clips together, or at least explain why it is you are seeing a series of different clips in a row. The first movie nailed it, the second was great too, but with the third one they failed miserably. So after that? They just gave up instead of trying to get back on the horse. Now the "frame narrative" is just another horror segment split up and spread across the movie. Pointless! I hope this franchise will return to what it was. I can't comprehend how this has 95% of Rotten Tomatoes.

Most of stories were decent, but the wraparound/frame narrative was a bad choice. Only the first two V/H/S movies got it right. They messed up the third one by making it too convoluted and decided to abandon any attempt for the frame narrative to tie the others together after that, which was a bad choice imo. Since all these clips were about aliens (basically) couldn't the frame narrative have been the documentary guys commenting on all of them, not just one? As I said, the individual stories were okay, but the movie kept cutting away to present interludes of the mockumentary, as if copying the original movie without understanding it. Some of the stories had cliches, some bad acting. You're essentially watching 6 short B-movies, which has always been what this franchise was, but what made it stand out was the immersion it created by making you really feel (even if only for a second) that you somehow stumbled upon this tape, and the content you're seeing is real. At no point do I feel this with this movie. The last clip for example, shows a women on an alien spaceship travelling to another galaxy at lightspeed. How did the footage end up in our hands, then? I'm not saying I would have believed it, but the aim of found footage is to make the audience feel it could be real. Immersion is what gives found footage the edge, where as I think it distinctly worked against the stories here, because it wasn't used right. I can't say I'm a huge fan of this one, even though I'm a big fan of the franchise. My main gripes are lack of variety, and messy structure.