V/H/S/94 -- A Strong Franchise Reboot
Name: V/H/S/94
Directed By: Various--check the IMDB page linked below, as each of the segments in the anthology were directed by a different director.
Subgenre: Found Footage Anthology
Series: Spooktober 2021 entry #9; review #102
Review: I've got a thing for horror anthologies. I've probably mentioned that before, but there's a reason why you see at least a couple of them showing up in my Spooktober reviews every year. Horror can be tricky to work into long-form films, as many ideas start with a singularly spooky idea and then work from there. In fact, some extremely well-known horror movies got their start as short films: the shorter run-time allows the director to tell a tighter story without losing any momentum or tension to story exposition or padding. Limitation is the father of creativity, and all that. Anthologies bring together a myriad of these shorter stories, most utilizing a swath of different directors with differing visions and inspirations, and weave them together into something unique. You never know what you're going to get with an anthology, and one bad apple doesn't necessarily ruin the whole bunch. They're easy to love. The V/H/S series has solidified itself as one of the most unique and effective anthology series around. While the Creepshow films lean heavily into the horror comic aesthetic of the 50's and Trick 'R Treat capturing the mystique and madness of Halloween perfectly, the V/H/S films are wreathed with the grimy analog quality of older VHS tapes so common in the 90's. Between the (occasionally over-done) static-y tracking lines and the found footage style, watching the individual V/H/S stories feels real, like you could find these tapes and watch them on your own VHS player (you've still got one of those, right?). The franchise brings with it a very stylized experience that has, unfortunately, had diminishing returns with each new entry. After the relative failure of the third V/H/S, Viral, how does V/H/S/94 hold up? Actually, pretty damn well! Like its predecessors, the film includes several shorter stories that are entirely self-contained and only connect with one another by way of being found footage and set in the year 1994; these stories are bound together by the wrap-around story, Holy Hell, this time focusing on a SWAT team break into a warehouse on a drug bust and find what looks like cult-based disaster: static-buzzing TVs litter the empty halls droning on about "the signal is the sedative. The signal is the stimulant. The signal is salvation." Spooky stuff. Spookier still, the TVs periodically, and without warning, start playing the VHS tapes that become the real meat of the movie.
In V/H/S/94, we got four such stories:
- Storm Drain: a news reporting team gets word about a legendary cryptid figure called the Rat Man living in the sewers below. They investigate, and spooky scary situations happen.
- The Empty Wake: a funeral home worker is assigned to host a wake for a recently deceased man, but when no one comes and the storm raging outside starts messing with the mortuary's power, the woman starts wondering if the bumping and clawing she's hearing isn't just coming from the tree branches outside.
- The Subject: a kidnapped woman becomes the subject of a mad scientist's latest experiment on creating human-machine hybrids. Things get crazy when the police raid the place and the rest of the experiments come to life.
- Terror: a domestic terrorist organization stalks their mark and debate on how they are going to employ their biological super-weapon.
Storm Drain and The Subject are the strongest entries, with the former merging weird horror--with its bizarre and unique creature--with gross-out body horror, while the latter goes full-tilt into adrenaline-pumping body-horror. The Subject is probably the most effective entry in terms of keeping the viewer on the edge of their seats because it plays out like a video version of DOOM or other horror-adjacent first-person-shooters (and if you like that style, then check out the Hotel Inferno series! It's splatterific fun!). The Subject is an Indonesian fusion of The Machine Gun Girl and Frankenstein's Army, more or less; and if the style feels familiar, it's because the short's director, Timo Tjahjanto, also co-directed V/H/S 2's strongest entry: Safe Haven. The Empty Wake and Terror aren't quite as strong as the other two, but they're fairly engaging in their own right. The Empty Wake takes some time to get where it's going and creates a borderline gothic sense of tension--stuck in an empty funeral home with a coffin during a dark and stormy night--but then the action twists the story into a different and interesting direction, even if simplistic. Terror is probably the weakest entry because the characters are entirely unsympathetic, but its such an interesting twist on a classic horror trope that I'm going to give it a pass for creativity alone. Plus, the payoff is still pretty solid. V/H/S/94's wrap-around stories have traditionally been the worst parts of the films, at least with Viral. That tradition continues with 94, unfortunately. The segment, Holy Hell, feels like you're on a guided tour through a modern-day haunted house attraction: each room is littered with something new and creepy, and the environmental storytelling crafts a story of a bizarre signal-worshipping Jonestown...and then the epilogue rips the blindfolds from our eyes and we can finally see the horrible truth of what's really going on: and it's just plain disappointing. Thankfully, one bad apple doesn't ruin the whole bunch, at least not here. Every anthology has its peaks and valleys, but V/H/S/94 presents a host of varied stories that are effective in their own right, though not equally so. It's well worth the watch.
Overall Score: 4 out of 5 Chads trying to avoid the Rat Man's sacrament. Did V/H/S/94 scare you? Let me know your thoughts in the comments below!
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