2 out of 5

Directed by: Maggie Levin (“Shredding”), Johannes Roberts (“Suicide Bid”), Flying Lotus (“Ozzy’s Dungeon”), Tyler MacIntyre (“The Gawkers”), Vanessa & Joseph Winter (“To Hell & Back”)

There’s a snake-eating-its-own-tail thing happening here, and it’s making me feel old.

The Blair With Project kicked off a slow but steady run of found footage horror films, which gained a lot of steam in the early 00s, turning the corner into a glut. Horror, at the time – the 2010s – was also having an interesting resurgence of sorts, poking at a more “elevated” take on some of the extremes that the 00s had explored, and splitting off into “elevated” arty horror, and elevated… horror horror, where, like, the fans looking for scares (and maybe some gore) hung out.

Bloody Disgusting was big at moving all of this along, but had also evolved from niche into a brand. I’m suppressing my need to over analyze this stuff, but let it suffice to say that BD starting its own found footage franchise with V/H/S was fitting. It was also expected that it was pretty trashy. Anthologies, by their nature, tend towards being uneven, but this often went beyond that, at least to me, with a track record (both in terms of the overall franchise and within each movie) tending towards poor. It got less trashy, which was nice, but the series was always spiraling, searching for an identity.

We’re ten years into things at this point, and V/H/S/99 is now here to act as tribute to those early found footage days: teens pointing cameras at things and being pervy and dumb. Not that that was (by any means) every found footage pic, but the “ease” of the genre gave us some lowest common denominators. This was something that the 2012 V/H/S movie spiritually latched on to – those pervy, dumb teens had grown up and now had access to better equipment and computers. So V/H/S/99 dives very legitimately into that era, and… it’s accurate. I can’t deny that. Take 2025 online culture, but cluster it into groups of 3-4 “friends,” and you get things like prank videos and hazing rituals and band practice – it’s Jackass; it’s early Youtube.

So we’ve cycled through elevated horror and the retro movement has aged past its 70s and 80s obsessions to the 90s, but where I start to feel old is that I’m not sure what’s gained by this revisit. The “problem” – I’m still sounding way old – is that there’s a certain amount of self-awareness pervading the entries in V/H/S/99 which errs them towards being kinda silly, but in a way that undermines the joke itself. It’s second-screen style found footage, which is… hilarious, though not in an intended way; it’s something inherent in (some) moviemaking in the 2020s.

To clarify, or double-down: I would say all of these entries are well-made, within their chosen styles. But even the ones I enjoyed more are coming with heavy caveats, such as “The Gawkers” not quite getting to a smarter level of commentary to make its core joke worth its opening crawl, or “To Hell & Back” – my favorite – way too eager to have its characters self-commentate to let us enjoy it. I recognize that horror (especially this brand of horror, which is designed more exclusively to entertain) doesn’t need to bury its ledes or layer in pithy meaning to anything, the experience ultimately just felt removed enough from what it was celebrating / parodying – 90s found footage – to make much impact.

The lack of a “narrative” linking the vids also bummed me out a bit; even if that has been traditionally weak in the V/H/S films, abandoning it takes away one note of uniqueness to this franchise. Additionally, three of the entries are essentially the same exact pattern of a revenge killing with a monster at the end. “Shredding” makes the mistake of carrying on pointlessly far past the punchline – even though I think its balance of teens and slop horror was well crafted – “Suicide Bid” has some good makeup, but suffers the most from ‘why is the camera still on’ syndrome and unfortunately is sequenced to feel like a location-swapped version of Shredding with even less lore; and “The Gawkers” suffers from the inbalanced tone mentioned above.

“Hell & Back” wins for its idea, visuals, and execution, though Melanie Stone’s demon ‘Mabel’ probably belongs in something less busy – she’s fun, but noise in an already noisy segment – and, as also mentioned, it’s too chattery; it’s funny without needing to tell me it is.

And I’ve maybe also obviously skipped over Flying Lotus’ entry. Lotus’ addition is probably excepted from all of the criticisms mentions, but also some of the “praise,” as his “Ozzy’s Dungeon” isn’t really indicative of any era / style of film… except for Lotus’ own Kuso, or perhaps other sleaze cinema in that same vein. I hated Kuso; I also hated watching Ozzy’s Dungeon. Which is to say that the opposite is likely true: if you liked Kuso… What does carry through to this short is the hat-on-a-hat vibe of the production. Ozzy’s Dungeon is gross as fuck, and just in case you didn’t hear the dialogue that so-and-so will be crawling through feces, we’ll tell you a few more times, in addition to showing you. It’s just so overwrought that even its bugout ending can’t (for me) add any notes of redemption. Again, though, Kuso may have been your bag, in which case: have fun.