I Watch 'Em So You Don't Have To

BLOODY FREAKING HELL... ANOTHER MONTH IS ALMOST GONE AND I HAVEN'T DONE MUCH IN THE WAY OF HORROR MOVIES - GOTTA PICK ONE REALLY QUICK SO I'LL PICK.... HMMM.... SOMETHING EASY BUT GOOD.... NOPE, THERE AIN'T ONE. I'LL HAVE TO DO AWFUL AND EXCRUCIATINGLY LONG INSTEAD....

V/H/S Viral (2014)

This was to be the turd... I'm sorry, I mean the THIRD of a series of anthologies that were also kind of experiments in alternate horror. You had a wraparound story that kind of hinted that watching these V/H/S tapes in a certain order might do something to you - whether they're pushing for paranormal or not, it was sort of interesting. Not great, but interesting.

So you know what happens next - you get a history lesson! That's right, Miss Murder continues to fill space by telling you Generation Z babies (Hmm, what are they gonna call the next generation?) a little old-time history. We had video cameras before you were born you know. They may have weighed a ton, and the size of one of Jigsaw's traps, but we had 'em. AND most of 'em took full size V/H/S tapes. If they didn't, they usually had adapters so you could transfer your videos onto 'em.

But, like everything else, people wanted things to be as huge as possible, then changed their minds and started to make things as small as possible - which is why you can find lots of people squinting to watch movies on their smartphones. I couldn't believe when a young girl said she didn't understand the movie Inception - that she watched on her phone. I told her it was probably because she couldn't SEE it.

Okay, now the movie. You had parts one and two. Then you have the turd. And this time I'm not correcting myself. I kept having to look at the wiki and the movie description because I was sure this was some kind of spin off 'cause they totally took the idea of mind warping through the supernatural events on the tapes and... well... they killed it. 

For 81 minutes you just sit and watch and shake your head (not too hard - you can get brain damage from that). This movie was vapid, vacuous, vile, vague, vacillating, valueless, vexatious, vulgar, vexing, violent, There's probably more 'V' words I could use, but I don't wanna. But there's one 'V' missing in this movie: V/H/S. 

Smile for daddy...

How do you make a V/H/S movie without a tape in sight? And what kind of crap cameras (and tons of smart phones - don't forget them) have white noise, breaks in the picture, blurring - all those things that we, the previous generation were so used to with our precious technology?

Vicious Circles: The wraparound is absurd and doesn't have a point - its a freaking ice cream truck (cue the annoying bling bling music) leading a police chase around in circles. Along the way it just runs over or drags until they drop whomever it happens to run into. Oh and somehow it gets the girlfriend of the main idiot with a camera, trying to get full video footage of the whole thing for his five seconds of fame (along with dozens running around with their smart phones). The stories flicker in and out with no introduction but the main irritation is the blinking, messy footage. C'mon people, it's 2015 - you know, the digital age? There's no reason to have so much horrible footage that only serves to irritate and give you a headache. Speaking of which:

Dante The Great: The only halfway interesting story also has been done to death (pun intended) in better movies and better ways. A white trash loser living in a trailer park... okay let's stop right there, shall we?

People, I hate to break this to you but the American home (especially the ones you see in movies) are financially available to less and less of the population. The latest stats I could find about Americans who live in trailer parks were wildly different depending on what news source you looked at or what year. I saw percentages and one even claimed that nearly 20 million people in the US live in a manufactured home of some type.

I have lived in apartments, trailers and houses. Currently I live in a single wide trailer in a pretty nice "trailer park" right across the street from a grade school. You'd think that would irritate an old lady like me <stops to sip her Chamomile tea>, but I actually enjoy listening to them play and since we're just about straight across from the playground, my cats have something else to watch when the birds aren't around to tease them.

I am not white trash. I live with my husband in affordable housing (which, since the landlord thinks he can raise the rent every year will soon end) in a nice looking, very small town.

Now, the story. It was presented as a sort of a Mysterious Mysteries of Strange Mystery (Geez I miss Invader Zim!) program, summing up how Dante got started, how he somehow got hold of a cloak that once belonged to Houdini, and became super famous and super rich... until the most recent of his many assistants came forward to tell the police what happened to those other assistants and Dante was arrested and promptly disappeared. 

He grabbed the assistant from the police station and after a brief tussle, she overcame him and the cloak ate him. You heard me. The assistant burned the cloak but of course it was not that dumb and came back and ate the assistant. And that was the end.

I wish. This sucker is 81 minutes long and only 10 of them were slightly interesting (the Dante story), the rest, a freaking bore. After all, if this wasn't a true continuation of the storyline that they were developing in the first two, what's the point? At the beginning people start going insane from what they see on their phones anyway, so why continue and what... never mind. Okay, here's the short and curly summary of the rest.

Parallel Monsters: A man creates a portal, revealing a universe that exactly like his own. And in that world is his twin. They decide to switch for 15 interminable minutes. Surprise, the parallel universe is full of demons and people die. Aaaaand that's about it for that one. Oh, I did have a good laugh at what these demons had for, uh, private parts. It was kind of a psycho's wet dream combined with some H.P. Lovecraft knockoff effects. But for here I'll only show the woman, sorry.

Bonestorm: Just what everyone wants to see - skateboarders. And worse, they're wearing cameras on their helmets - but they're pointing at their faces. Why exactly? So we can NOT see what they are doing, just hear what they're pretending to be doing? Being young and stupid they agree to go to Tijuana to skate in a dry concrete ditch. Aaaaaand the ditch has monsters (oh I'm sorry, zombies) because something's got to kill these kids. But alas, two of the kids live and we stay bored and it has nothing to do with the movie.

In the wraparound, people are chasing the van like crazy, so crazy that one idiot gets caught in the back bumper somehow and get dragged along, first losing his shoes, and then his feet. That was almost, ALMOST worth watching.

In another segment that isn't even titled, we see a group having a barbeque until one of the guys goes nuts and for no reason whatsoever. He stabs this guy's dog in the head with a fork (there's a saying - we don't care who dies as long as the dog's okay) and the dog's owner goes crazy and wipes out the whole family with forks, knives, anything he can find. Oh, don't worry about the dog. He simply sits there, waiting until his part is done so he can go home, eat his treats, and tear up his SAG card.

At the blessed end the van stops and the guy with the camera whose girlfriend had been abducted is forced to upload all we've just seen so the whole city can suffer through their smartphones. Ummm, they already going insane through their smartphones. That was kind of the point - but since this ends the movie I'm not going to complain at all. And I'm so glad I own a dumbphone.