Yikes—and not in the way that a good horror movie elicits a “yikes.” This anthology feature, built around a collection of unmarked VHS tapes found in a creepy old house, tells on itself by the fact that I was initially confused about the delineation between segments, considering two of them involve boorish pack dudes seeking to sexually exploit (if not downright assault) women on camera. Throughout V/H/S, the found-footage conceit is used mainly for its voyeuristic potential, in which women are filmed without their consent, coerced into sexually performing for the camera, or do so willingingly. The fact that multiple filmmakers were involved—Adam Wingard, David Bruckner, Ti West, Glenn McQuaid, Joe Swanberg, and the filmmaking collective Radio Silence (all men and most of whom have done better work)—reveals a stunning lack of imagination. West gets a nice jolt out of the found-footage technique in his segment, “Second Honeymoon,” when the camera suddenly appears in an unexpected person’s hands, while the plot of Radio Silence’s “10/31/98”—in which another group of buddies show up at the wrong house for a Halloween party and take a bit to realize that it’s actually haunted—is pretty clever. But otherwise V/H/S is icky stuff that doesn’t deserve a pass just because the awful men in it get what’s coming to them.
(5/28/2022)
