3 out of 5

Director: Various

The linking story is still lacking a lot of sense and Adam Wingard contributes another overly masculine, too-typical entry, but V/H/S/2 takes the promise of the first film and the elements that worked – fiddling with in-frame expectations – and mostly ditches the elements that didn’t work and supersedes the first compilation in terms of overall enjoyment.  It’s still lacking a smart edge to it, and the genre writers and directors still (mostly) can’t quite seem to wrap their heads around actually plotting these things vs. just riffing off the first person visuals, but the more focused concept makes it fun instead of just itchily tolerable with highlighted moments.

My problem with the first one was mostly the attitude.  There was a lot of hype building up to it, fine, but the hype seemed to influence the making of the film as well, with the presentation and style of most of the clips giving off the odor of boast, as though the filmmakers had stumbled across some new breed of horror that was going to Wow us all.  Combined with a rather tasteless intro to our tape-watchin’ characters – regardless of its place in the film being to, perhaps, make us hope for their deaths, it again reeked of boast and so was hard to give it a pass – and a ridiculously stagnant linking bit that went absolutely nowhere forever and was the opposite of any kind of interesting or scary… well, there was the Radio Silence bit, but the movie lacked cohesion and soul, just a trickle of cool images fluttered through stupid reasons to film it in first person.

Simon Barrett has corrected that main issue by strengthening the linking material.  It shouldn’t be too important but it is; it’s what gives the sequel a better sense of flow and the impression that there was an actual plan here instead of dudes just high-fiving each other’s dicks.  There’s still the basic idea of stumbling across unmarked VHS tapes and deciding to watch them, none too pleased by the atrocities on display on the tapes, but Barrett brings back some of that Dead Birds magic of balancing explanation with pacing and the unspoken, so you get enough of a gist to get the point and are comfortable with whatever’s left out because.  That being said, the reason for going to the house with the tapes and watching them is still stupid as shit, but swallow that pill early on and though dude is douchey, he’s much more tolerable than the bums who watched the tapes in flick one.  And Kelsey Abbott from Channel 101 makes me happy, though she’s not given much to do.

Then our tapes: Adam Wingard’s has a camera implanted in a dude’s eyeball after a car accident, an experimental surgery.  He’s told he might see ‘glitches’.  And when he says the glitches, he responds completely unrealistically.  When the ‘explain it all’ stranger shows up to explain it all, he responds completely unrealistically.  The jump scares are empty, the plot is written on the back of horror trading cards (to the extent that lazy tropey reasons for his troubles are just tossed into the dialogue to justify what Wingard thought would be visually cool), and Wingard himself isn’t funny as the lead character.  This segment is the most reminiscent of film one, and gets things off to a bad start… but rather sooner than later I suppose.

Mr. Eduardo Sanchez of Blair Witch fame gives us a respectable spin on a zombie short.  It drags a bit because it’s hard to make zombies all that interesting anymore, and again sorta stinks of the “it’s cool because it’s first person” formula, but the attempts at shifting the genre do shine through and make it a notable step up and a promising next entry.

Let’s skip over the gem to the last bit, Jason Eisener’s alien abduction thing.  I sort of see this as a response to the alien bit from V/H/S, which, to me, was stupid and went from interesting to questionable to ‘why is it in this film.’  Whether intended or not, Eisener’s take on alien horror is the loud, jarring response to that bit.  Again, it’s not particularly new feeling, but he zeroes in on how to unnerve you with visuals and sounds and just goes for it, using the first person camera (attached to a dog) as a secondary method of telling the story, which is how its preferred – figure out what you want to show, then mold the V/H/S theme around it.  While Radio Silence’s haunted house was the best-for-last previously, Eisener’s bit may not be the freshest thing and is almost frustratingly loud and shaky, but it’s a good way to wrap things up before we get back to the linking story, which, thank god, actually gives us some bang for our buck at its conclusion.

Now back to flick three – Gareth Evans’ cult piece.  It’s everything this series should be.  It’s mad, it’s creepy, and it just goes there.  The camera turns on and you’re not quite sure what’s around the corner.  There’s some distracting snot in it, but I’ll forgive that.  Evans’ ‘Footsteps’ was an oddly artsy affair that dabbled in horror, then to his martial arts’ showcases of Merantau and The Raid… and this short might be his best work.  It’s totally unexpected from him, grabbing some elements from his previous films but fully committed to this project.  It approaches the story from plot first, and then uses the first person camera to up the tension.  Sure, we get some zombies again, which was sorta unfortunate, but then you get some other things that aren’t zombies, and that’s totally fortunate.

So that’s it.  If this is successful enough to make this into an ongoing series, I can only hope the step up in consistency and quality from film 1 to 2 will continue.