Sunday, February 10, 2013

V/H/S (2012)

Some a-holes are hired to steal a video tape from a house that is empty, except for perhaps a caretaker somewhere inside.  But if he's there, he's asleep so as long as they don't wake him up, they'll be fine.

The house is mostly empty but they aren't sure which room the tape is in. When they stumble across a bunch of tapes, they realize they don't know how to identify the one they're supposed to steal.  So they pop some of the tapes into the VCR in the house to watch them which provides us with the thread that keeps this anthology rolling.

I know a lot of people thought this was one of the best movies of the year, but it just didn't work for me.  The main characters are horrible people that you want to die.  Even the characters in each segment of the anthology are awful people.  The only decent human beings in the whole movie are in the last story where they accidentally end up at the wrong house for a party.  So basically we wanted everyone dead except for those in the last story.

Here's a breakdown of the hideous people you'll meet in these stories:
  1. college guys pick up some girls at a bar and take them back to their hotel with plans to secretly tape their sexual encounters with them
  2. someone is stalking a couple on vacation
  3. friends take a trip to a lake where one was traumatized by murders that took place years ago
  4. a girl and her boyfriend who lives in another town talk via a web cam and discuss the spooky  happenings in her apartment
  5. college friends go to a Halloween party but end up at the wrong address 

3 comments:

Unknown said...

I can't believe this popped up on your radar; I just watched it last weekend with a couple friends of mine. You're right about the characterizations, but I think the two things that bothered me the absolute most were where the fat dead guy gets up and the dude watching the tape doesn't notice, and the random naked guy in the basement that is NEVER explained insofar as I saw.

Chris Jart said...

I know! I don't remember any explanation for the guy in the basement either. And how can you not notice when a dead guy gets up? I can't believe he's super quiet. He didn't look like he'd be very stealthy even when he was alive.

Unknown said...

What I really could not get was the whole logic of "oh, this dude died, we should probably--OMG SIX TVS AND ALL THE VHS I CAN WATCH?! Move over fatass, I'm'a watch these NOW."

What's really bad is when you watch the little 'making of' things they included and you kinda root for them to get eaten by something too. Pretentious film school prigs.