V/H/S: Viral (2014)

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Well, I have covered the V/H/S franchise so it's for the best I get to what was left. V/H/S (2012), which I viewed as a failure as many did but now is worth revisiting, was a curious case in the boom of horror anthologies in the early 2010s which purposely ran with the growing obsession with both VHS culture, the obsession with found footage sub-genre, and (with the directors involved) individuals who circled around the mumblecore movement since the 2000s. V/H/S 2 (2013) was seen as a success, mainly because of the segment by Timo Tjahjanto and Gareth Evans where a television interview with a religious cult goes south as nastily as possible. V/H/S: Viral, when the horror anthology wave hit its peak and subsided, was met with a resounding whimper. It's worth noting that, whilst there was a danger visibly seen that this movement just trapped interesting genre directors into just making anthology segments, the early 2010s horror anthology boom was absolutely worthwhile in just allowing figures of all kinds to get some creative space; I will gladly defend The ABCs of Death series, but there were others, and V/H/S was seen as the other biug rival who got more than one film. Both have subsided since the mid-2010s however.

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Vicious Circles

Director: Marcel Sarmieto

Screenplay: T.J. Cimfel, David White, and Marcel Sarmiento

Cast: Patrick Lawrie as Kevin; Emilia Zoryan as Iris; Steve Berens as Cop; Stephanie Silver as Eva; Angela Garcia as Carolina; Gary Sugarman as Lewis

The V/H/S franchise gimmick is that all the segments including the wraparound have to be found footage, as if footage found after an incident the viewer watches. It originates (to my knowledge) with Ruggero Deodato's Cannibal Holocaust (1980), where the cannibals are in a film recovered within the initial film we the viewers watch. The Blair Witch Project (1999) was the one which cemented this sub-genre of horror, but it wasn't really until into the 2000s, and especially after Paranormal Activity (2009) became a phenomenon, as a low budget production scooped up by a major Hollywood studio and reaping financial success, where there were so many being made due to their cost effectiveness.

It is however a logistical nightmare as, unlike documents within a piece of literature or a comic, the presence of being "live" within an incident leads to logic gaps such as how the camera is still on regardless of what horrifying events are taking place or how, unless from one camera, it is all spliced together. V/H/S II had the best idea for this for one segment where, by bad luck, a BMX enthusiast with a helmet mounted camera on his head was turned into a zombie, not surprisingly from the directors of The Blair Witch Project who, give or take that film's own logic gags, tried to get around this issue. Viral gives up trying from the beginning, instead the logical holes replaced with a fetishism of all recording mediums spliced together from various recording formats by an unknown form.

One visibly sinister as, controversially, the much hated wraparound to this sequel is a strange beast, one even more controversially I'd watch again over any of the other segments. Despite its disjointed nature, having to act like a wraparound without context, and a deeply problematic caricature of Hispanics falling out at a BBQ, Marcel Sarmieto's bizarre anti-internet trending epic is the one insanely ambitious, mad and visibly higher produced yarn where our collective obsession with becoming popular online, filming accidents and deaths, literally turns into a John Carpenter approved doomsday scenario at least for the entirety of Los Angeles. All by way of a police car chase with an ice cream truck, one where said truck absorbs peoples' girlfriends, infect people through their phones with bleeding from the nose, and purposely speeding in circles across Los Angeles to deliberately maim and cause deaths to as many bystanders it can, even those recording the chase, in a delirious spectacle that feels completely alien to any of the V/H/S franchise, even the beloved second film segment about the religious cult, in scale and complexity in making. The director made the divisive Deadgirl (2008), which I hated, but we meet again over the years and he keeps surprising me with work like this.

Vicious Circles' only issue for me, barring the stereotypes, is that it's a bit of a mess in plotting and especially in editing. You still have an insanely large scale production - with stunt work, speeding cars, a city environment with panorama shots over the city and many extras - which is insanely difficult and just insane to have went to for what is an anthology structure meant for smaller scale stories in-between. Sarmieto produced this, and his risk in doing so, the internet literally sentient and about to upload until our brains melt, was meet with badly despite it effectively wrapping up the questions about the franchise's lore into an ambitiously oddball segment.

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Duke the Great

Director: Greg Bishop

Screenplay: Greg Bishop

Cast: Justin Welborn as Dante the Great; Emmy Argo as Scarlet Kay; Dan Caudill as Detective Gregory Hugues

Bishop made the popular horror-comedy Dance of the Dead (2008), and he here hits upon a funny idea, in which an egotist who wants to be a successful magician finds a cape with actual magical power...only with the caveat that it needs to be sated with human flesh out in a while to cooperate. Again, as a hybrid of a documentary with security footage and Duke's own recordings, it tries to make sense but eventually is still a mess in terms of the "found footage" tag, giving up in the end as it'd ruin the (legitimately good) magician versus SWAT police fight at the end trying to figure out who is recording it all. Probably the biggest compliment to make as well, in lieu to that ending, is that production wise this manages for more inventive uses of special effects than a lot of higher budgeted blockbusters, which Bishop should've been proud of.

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Parallel Monsters

Director: Nacho Vigalondo

Screenplay: Nacho Vigalondo

Cast: Gustavo Salmeron as Alfonso; Marian Alvarez as Martha; Xavi Daura as Oriol (1); Esteban Navarro as Oriol (2)

Vigalondo is probably the most well known figure in a directors' seat for this anthology. I am surprised that, though the Spanish director has made a lot of films in his home, up until his English language debut with Anne Hathaway (Colossal (2016)), probably the most well known film of his was still his international breakout Timecrimes back in 2007. Here he has an intriguing premise, exemplifying the dangers of inter-dimensional travel where a man meets himself only for the various cultural and physical differences to be an issue when they exchange places briefly. The found footage structure again raises questions, as it involves two different sets of camera footage having to be spliced together, but it's still the most precise example of we follow the two versions of the man filming each other's exploration. Getting into the bizarre with David Cronenberg approved body horror, it's a fun segment if fun evokes squeamish sentient phallus.

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Bone Storm

Directors: Justin Benson and Aaron Scott Moorhead

Screenplay: Justin Benson

Cast: Nick Blanco as Danny; Chase Newton as Jason; Shane Bradey as Taylor; Cristián Toledo as Sam

Honestly the issue with V/H/S: Viral is that it's just okay, not as toxic and bad as some reviews have suggested, but merely a watchable horror anthology. The duo behind films like The Endless (2017) clearly desired to see skateboarders fighting undead cultists in a Mexican industrial area, shot through cameras and head-cams, and that's what we got in terms of a visceral entertainment. Honestly though, a blend of carnage intermingled with potentially annoying protagonists, it's difficult to judge beyond this as it's entirely from the gut where your pleasures lay. And that's a more damning issue, the real issue, among horror anthologies in general in how they can be difficult to review as, take them or leave them, many segments even in the golden era of this format could just be ok scary stories.

Whilst, again, I want to visit the first V/H/S again, this particular franchise since the beginning, tapping into the VHS nostalgia too tentatively, really tentatively when you compare it to a work like Hi-8 (Horror Independent 8) (2013) which actually followed the rules of no-budget video genre filmmaking, has always felt a bit of a mess when even The ABCs of Death at least had a structure. After this, unlike The ABCs of Death which has turned into The Field Guide to Evil in 2018, V/H/S disappeared, all with a sense that especially after the wraparound there was little else to go with even if it was ridiculous....

...except that there was a bonus segment I didn't even learn of until finally seeing Viral...

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Glorious Vortex

Director: Todd Lincoln

Screenplay: Todd Lincoln

Cast: Jayden Robinson as The Empress

Glorious Vortex was deleted from the initial version of V/H/S: Viral, reinstated at the end after the final credits on the DVD and eventually released by itself online. It is a non-linear horror segment which surprisingly buddies up to Nicolas Winding Refn's The Neon Demon (2016) despite being made some time earlier, all about a model who in the various fragmented sequences is involved with a secret cabal up to both human experimentation, and the torture and maiming of young women. Vampire parallels arise as does the all pervading sense of everything for the lead being within a family. Then you meet the thing at the end at a certain group meeting and you are fully able to confirm that idea.

Gorgeous Vortex, when it's been championed as being better than the entirety of V/H/S: Viral itself, is also unfortunately pretentious and actually one of the dullest anthology segments I've seen for a long while. I wish I could end on a happy ending, but it's an example of surface images (some striking like the lead actress in appearance, others with the images of bound up and distressed women which evoke the myths of snuff film-making) which never convalescence into a fully formed piece that you emotionally grapple with.

I'm glad it wasn't included in V/H/S: Viral as it represents the worst of watered down, bland avant-garde weirdness, confusing vagueness with none of the risk of true weird cinema, an argument that can be legitimately made for Vicious Circles. That wraparound, befittingly the subject that starts and ends this review, has a much more artistically riskier and stranger tone to itself, in which a boyfriend with an unhealthy habit of filming his life, his work flickering in non-chronological memory over itself, pursues the evil ice cream truck to rescue his girlfriend over increasingly chaotic incidents. Even the problematic Hispanic caricatures, involved in crime as stereotypes, is at least softened by the farce that their piece ends in (where, even as a dog lover, the gag using a barbecue fork was sickly funny). The fact that, the more you think about it, the segment suggests that the Apocalypse or just the downfall of Los Angeles will be caused as much by YouTube cat videos rather than lurid real footage of death is itself far more subversive than anything Gorgeous Vortex could suggest in mere artifice; certainly its ending is weirdly haunting, seemingly shot in the Los Angeles River, with ice cream van jingles scoring the quietness after all the carnage that has taken place.

Abstract Spectrum: Grotesque/Psychotronic

Abstract Rating (High/Medium/Low/None): None