As the festivities go on, it seems like it wouldn’t be Fantastic Fest without a ‘V/H/S’ flick in the mix. Over the last four years, Austin has shown ‘cover’ for a new release of the Shudder Original series which forces us to point out that the six-in-series ‘V/H/S/Beyond’ is being released this weekend and is subsequently showing on Shudder on October 4th. By this point in the narrative, the plus and the minus characters of this series have all but been well established. Good ideas but erratic style. The loglines for the segments in ‘V/H/S;Beyond’ easily rank among the best in the series, presenting genocide in new ways, this time–intentional or not absolutely centered around the theme of deformations. Many of the ideas here are just masters such as Bull’s Eyes that are effective in film but somewhere in the production process, it’s as if the entire feature film went through some massive curing process that fails to suffice. Why does it take forever to complete one of their movies? Is that question so challenging to answer?
Jay Cheel, the documentarian of this film, seems to have, through ‘Cursed Films Say Ees, ended up exploring his own skillset in the making of a piece on das tapes, which is a fake streaming original docuseries about the dynamics behind a pair of tapes that claim to show an alien encounter. There is a tendency in this franchise to structure its anthological fragments with an opening and closing of a story. However, this is a thematic one as it introduces a constant element in the film s of the appeal to view an unviewable event albeit through a haze of dust and home video quality.
The film “Beyond,” starts with a segment titled, “Stork,” which is an action sequence involving gun fights with zombies and a hint of the first-person shooter realm to it, and is directed by Jordan Downey, which is exciting. Officers go in search for some missing babies, one of the squadists own baby included, at a deserted eerie house, only to come across horrendous ‘creations’ where one of them brandishing a chainsaw. Up to its fisheye lens ending, it is the most conventional and comprehensible episode. Gets in, shoots some explosives, gets out, shoots guys, puts on some cool makeup effects.
I can’t say I got emotional, and a number of other feelings might be better left unsaid, but there is a more ambitious segment in Virat Pal’s “Dream Girl”, which allows the first dance sequence of the Bollywood genre in a movie fitting the description of “V/H/S”. As such, stellar proving that Pal is not just a competent director, but has in fact, an eye of a filmmaker was an impressive feat since the first half of this one came from pic tubes with a range of z-grade quality, courtesy a pair of paparazzi helicoptering an Indian icon. Z-grade visuals culminate quite literally, in one cut, with an attempt to sneak in to an icon’s trailer, and even that, reasonably speaking, should trigger ‘chaos’. Which, I mean chaos in terms of the experience you will see in the trailer skeleton, lights grotesquely enliven, music, vocals. The audience is purposely disoriented by gently changing a focus in a jerky frame throughout, which is not an easy method to implement, and this one was far too chaotic to be reasonably graphic.
I was in the same boat when it came to the “shakiness” of Justin Martinez’s “Live and Let Dive,” but it has SUCH a rad concept that it’s quite understandable. This series had not thought of such cool and interesting ways of depicting horrifying events since the ingenious concept of “GoPro meets zombies” classic “V/H/S/2”. In this one, a birthday party wear the people are parachuting meets an alien invasion thousands of feet above the ground. The aircraft goes belly up and half the people crash onto the terrain, the rest of the group must stand up and wrench through a citrus orchard to evade being hunted by the enormous aliens who are now stalking them. It’s the aliens on District 9 except the main character goes skydiving. Awesome.
Not so awesome was Harold P. Warren writing and directing Justin Long’s “Fur Babies,” where his creation sorts leaves the impression that Mr. Long was indeed further ‘scarred’ by Tusk. It’s a twist of deformation fetish described in that film, and while “Fur Babies” does have some gross makeup effects, they are like most of these segments, way too much. There is no justified cause as to why “V/H/S/Beyond” had to be almost two hours. I think what future installments would do best is narrow the sections by 15-20%. This has been widely done in almost all six films for every chapter.
Even as I type this, ‘Stowaway,’ the directed by Kate Siegel in her first outing as a director with a screenplay by her husband Mike Flanagan, is quickly becoming a favorite of mine. I think this one is my favorite of the three because it is not as similar to the other segments sewn into the ‘V/H/S’ narrative. It’s a case of more than what meets the eye, and the eye is the ‘camera’ in this case, etched with several recordings. The latter does not rely on disorientation even though the techniques that Siegel resorts to disguise augment its intensity. It’s about a woman who studies lights in the sky, but what she finds is more in the vein of ‘Annihilation,’ not too far off from the film itself. It’s odd however not in the sense of embarrassment/gross out or even hoarding visuals. The best segments of the “V/H/S” tapes are not easy to call as segments as they have almost nothing to do with the limitations of a box that defines a structure.
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