Because it was Halloween, my brother and I, finding nothing horrific to watch on cable decided to watch V/H/S,  a collection of found footage videos containing a series of supernatural events that in the end, make no sense whatsoever. We got what we wanted. It was a horror alright, a nightmare to watch because it was a complete waste of time and energy. I blog about it to warn you — if you’re even thinking about seeing it, don’t.

I’m not really a big fan of found footage cinema. But when a movie is well made, I have made some exceptions like Cloverfield, Chronicle, and District 9. Sadly, V/H/S does not fall under this category. The film starts out with four friends who entertain themselves by videotaping their genius day to day exploits such as trashing an abandoned apartment, assaulting a girl, having sex and the most brilliant of all — taking on a job to steal a VHS taps from an old man’s house. When they get to the location however, they find the old man dead and they each watch a VHS tape with weird things happening like a girl monster dining on a couple of college kids who pick her up, a murder, a haunting and several other weird stuff that have no relationship to one another. The weirder part is that each of the guys disappear after watching the tape.

Anyways, I must admit that I had a difficult time sitting through the movie. I even slept through some episodes mainly because I didn’t think that it made any sense. I understand that it was an anthology and was intended not to have any relationship to each other but since it was presented as a movie and not as individual episodes in a series, I was expecting something to tie them up. The scenes were crudely shot and generally, there was not anything that made the entire film cohesive. It was like the directors (yes, there were many of them) brought together a collection of short stories but failed to organize them enough to make sense as a whole. Also, there were some inconsistencies in the film like in some of the footage, more modern cameras were used that did not use VHS so how come when it was time to view the footage, they were in VHS? There were also come inconsistencies with the timeline but it already got lost amid the mass of other inconsistencies in the movie.

There were some spooky parts in the movie but sad to say, it was not enough the sustain the film and make it as interesting as it set itself out to be. To sum up my deduction of this 115-minute scarefest, I need only two words — A MESS.