V/H/S

 Saw V/H/S, a horror anthology film.  The frame-story of the film is that a bunch of Harmony Korine-like douchebags/thieves are hired to steal an important VHS tape from an old weird guy's house.  There, they find a whole bunch of tapes however and so they sit down to view them.  We then get to see these little skits played out on home movies.  It's an okay premise.

The film has a throw-back-y feel.  It was made in 2012 but is interested in the horrors that hand-held, VHS cameras can produce.  Many of the cameras in the skits of digital ones: hidden cameras embedded in a pair of glasses, or little, remote-control-sized grey boxes, glimpsed in the characters' hands.  The film is trying for the chilling feel of finding something fucked up in an unassuming, second-hand VHS tape.  Untraceable, obsolete, mysterious.  There's a market for these kinds of films: true-crime-scene photography and the infamous Faces of Death series.  It would be strange and terrible to find and watch one of these without realizing what it was.  This horror is sort of remote for anyone who doesn't scour Salvation Armies and such for tapes however.

So the films themselves are okay.  Each one has to contrive a way that this wound up on tape, so there's a variety of hokey home-movies, or spy cams or what have you.  Ironically, although in theory this should result in a more realistic plot, it winds up feeling more contrived to me than if they'd just had a standard, omniscient, eye of the audience.  On top of this, the characters are almost always squawking, squealing, obnoxious adults acting as teens might.  I think only one or two characters came off like people I'd want to spend time with.  I feel this is an unfortunate side-effect of the film being made in Hollywood.  Of course the types of people to film themselves obsessively would be attention-hungry, douchey idiots.

The film is not that scary.  There's a few things in it that are unsettling, but in the cold light of day I can't remember of any.  Because the shorts are so short, they have to set up the payoff and the ironic twist early.  You can kind of tell right off that the fortune-telling machine is magical, that the guy they almost hit on the highway will come back to bite them.  The characters for the most part are such jackasses however that it's hard for me to care much about their survival.

I really feel the film is a more accessible version of Harmony Korine's work.  His films have the feel of finding something inscrutable, sinister, violent, something that was shot by indifferent and possibly murderous teenagers one boring afternoon.  This film is more slick and processed, but that's sort of the very opposite feeling you want.  This was a tightrope walk that I think the film failed: to make the film slick and marketable but also look like something your creepy cousin just found.