V/H/S/2

            Bad news, horror fans.  V/H/S/2 shouldn’t have happened and that makes me very sad.  I was a huge fan of V/H/S and  its use of the hand-held camera medium.  Though weak at points, I still felt that out of the 5, 2 were amazing, one was good, one was meh and one was really unnecessary.  This time?  Only four shorts and a slightly longer overarching narrative.  I don’t know what they did, but they ended up with one good, one decent, one meh and one really not-that-good.

            As my friend said after it was over “if someone spliced the two movies, they could make one really good horror anthology."

            On to the review!

            V/H/S/2 starts us off with the overarching story, “Tape 49” in which a private investigator and his assistant have been hired to find a woman’s missing college-aged son.  They get into the kid's place and find nothing but a bunch of old VHS tapes.  As the private dick searches the small apartment (which apparently takes 90 minutes of walking around the same two rooms repeatedly) he has his assistant check out the tapes for anything that might provide a clue.

            This is similar to the first V/H/S where some kids broke into a house to rob it and one of them started watching tapes to see if there was anything valuable.  In both cases, this is how we get into the meat of the movie.  In V/H/S/2 the first short is “Phase 1 Clinical Trials” in which a guy gets a cyber-eye.  In return for his new eye, the company says they will be recording and monitoring everything as part of a clinical trial.

            The guy gets home and finds out that his eye can see a bit more than a regular eye can.  Halfway through we’re introduced to a girl who had gotten implants into her ears because she was born deaf, and she can hear things that normal ears can’t hear.  It’s an interesting premise, and “Phase 1 Clinical Trials” is my favorite short of the group.  Unfortunately, and I know it’s rare to hear this about a short film, but it was actually too short.  Just three to five more minutes of fleshing out the characters would have gone a long way.

            Our second short is “A Ride in the Park” and is an interesting concept that I just don’t think was pulled off.  It’s pretty much a zombie story with a twist.  The helmet cam provides most of the film, so you get some neat shots from the zombie’s point of view.  Unfortunately, it doesn’t quite do much.  It could have been 10 minutes shorter or 5 minutes longer and made absolutely no difference.

            “Safe Haven” is the boldest short film in V/H/S/2 but it suffers from some narrative dissonance.  Due to the way it’s filmed, you really don’t care about any of the people and the filmmaker’s attempts at adding depth to a side plot does nothing but add unnecessary angst.  It does have the best special effects by far, but it could have used additional editing.  Maybe cut a bit out of “Safe Haven” so we could have fleshed out “Phase 1 Clinical Trials”?

            Finally, there’s “Slumber Party Alien Abduction” whose title leaves nothing to the imagination.  The only thing I can say about this is that this short made the most controversial decision when it comes to killing off a character.  Oh, wait, no.  I can say something else about it.  It’s really freaking terrible.  If the alien-oriented short film in the first V/H/S was bad (“The Sick Thing That Happened to Emily When She Was Younger”), this one was worse.  At least the “…Emily…” episode had some decent frights and just ended poorly.  “Slumber Party Alien Abduction” starts off small and ends worse.

            Did V/H/S/2 justify its existence?  Sadly, I don’t believe it did.  Even worse, by releasing it on video on-demand, I believe they’re shooting themselves in the foot if they were hoping for any sort of theater release.  Everyone who really wanted to see it (people like me) will happily pay $5 to rent it rather than $11 to see it in theaters.  Add in the film’s damning mediocrity, and I think it should skip theaters altogether.