1 out of 5

Directed by: Nacho Vigalondo, Marcel Sarmiento, Gregg Bishop, Aaron Scott Moorhead, and Justin Benson

I appreciate the creators of the third VHS movie making it really easy for me to almost completely dismiss it.  Standing back from the VHS series, the first flick came out as the Bloody Disgusting site was… shaping up into something rather notably more commercial.  That path had been paved for a while, but the facelift of the site and the persistent and questionable plugging of ‘Bloody Disgusting Selects’ signaled a bit more obvious step forward.  And the first VHS flick wasn’t that great.  Moments succeeded (especially Radio Silence’s bit), but the framing sequence by BD fave Adam Wingard was stocked with repulsive characters and horrid logic that did nothing to alleviate the sensation that we were watching thinly veiled fap fodder or lazy versions of the director’s other works.  When VHS 2 came out, BD had had a year to get more comfortable with its shiny exterior, and though it’s foolish to fully tie the site to these movies, VHS 2 similarly came with a better sense of identity.  It was still very uneven but felt a tad less exploitative.  The framing sequence actually expanded a bit on the ridiculousness of the first film, and the installments were mostly okay with a couple of standouts, instead of mostly trash.  And now VHS Viral.  There is one good sequence here, from Nacho Vigalondo, that shows a bit of thought to its structure instead of just aiming for a bloody punchline, but it’s sandwiched between boring (Gregg Bishop’s bit) and grating (Benson / Moorhead’s contribution, which brings back the type of unloveable character types from VHS 1)… and then framed by a horribly uninvolving ‘narrative’ from ‘Deadgirl’ director Marcel Sarmiento.  (I have not seen the version of the film which includes Todd Lincoln’s vignette, if it exists.)  This frame is probably one of the worst offenses because of how little it adds to the film.  There is the good idea for the VHS, uh, ‘virus’ to have gone ‘viral’ at this point, such that anyone staring at any recorded anything can seemingly be infected, and that gets us away from a forced reason for having someone watch video tapes.  Good idea, but it’d be nice if that freedom had been leveraged into actually “completing the story,” as we were told this film would.  Nope: we’re still just running around with a shaky cam with characters we don’t care about and saying swear words.  They do conclude things, I suppose, but it’s the Sledge Hammer! version of conclusions, and considering that show was a spoof and this is intended to be horror… yeah.  The previous two VHS movies I would have said earn their runtime.  With Viral, it’s not even close.