Review: V/H/S/2 (2013)

 V/H/S/2 (2013)

Rated R for graphic and bloody violence, grisly images, sexual material, nudity and language

Score: 4 out of 5

What a difference a little humanity makes. V/H/S/2 is a far superior film to its predecessor, which was constantly let down by shallow stories and repulsively unlikable characters who often had me rooting for the killers. Whereas I only liked two of the five segments in that film and found the wraparound to be the worst part of it by a mile, here I found myself enjoying all four of the segments on display and found the wraparound connecting them to be just inoffensive. It's like the opposite of a bad sequel to a good movie that tries and fails to make lightning strike twice: reuniting a lot of the producers, and even bringing back Adam Wingard and Simon Barrett to do the wraparound and one of the segments, just a year after the first film's success wound up making for a much better, scarier, and more interesting movie. I have no idea how this movie went so right where the first one went so wrong, but I'm not complaining, because this is easily one of the better anthology horror films I've seen.

The premise is once again that people discover a stash of VHS tapes containing disturbing scenes on them, which serve as the various anthology segments, all while it becomes clear that the "abandoned" house where they found the tapes is in fact very much inhabited by a malevolent force. Instead of a gang of violent, oversexed douchebags, however, the people who find the tapes here are a pair of private investigators, Larry and Ayesha, investigating the disappearance of one of the kids in that gang from the first film. Right away, I liked how the film framed them, our introduction to Larry being of him spying on a man whose wife suspects him of cheating and hires him to investigate, with Larry catching the husband in the act and then getting caught in turn and forced to flee for his life. He and Ayesha are portrayed as kinda dorky and occasionally bickering, not as cool rebels like the gang from the first movie; in short, a lot more like the people watching this film. While we don't spend enough time with them for the film to really flesh them out as characters, neither of them got in the way of my enjoyment of the movie, and the wraparound more than did the job of setting the mood, helping the various segments flow together, and having a few scary moments of its own.

Which brings us to the segments, which is where the step up in quality was even more noticeable. Whether they boast unique twists on familiar premises or just familiar premises done well, there is a ton to like here. The first segment, Adam Wingard's "Phase I Clinical Trials", is a very neat combination of sci-fi and supernatural horror as the protagonist Herman (played by Wingard himself, but originally written for none other than "the Angry Video Game Nerd" James Rolfe, of all people), blinded by injuries sustained in a car accident, receives a cybernetic ocular implant that restores his sight... and allows him to see ghosts. There are a lot of layers to this one, particularly when it comes to the relationship that Herman has with the ghosts around him, with it being never stated but heavily implied that he had something to do with their deaths. The nature of the ghosts and how they can interact with technology was also very interesting, taking tropes from a lot of modern, post-Ghostbusters supernatural horror films and ghost-hunting reality shows and applying them to science fiction. The female lead Clarissa could've easily been a Lady Exposition to explain to Herman and the viewer what's going on, but she too got a lot of depth, with allusions to her fucked-up past that raised some disquieting implications about Herman's own. This segment started the film on the right foot, and the next segment, Eduardo Sánchez and Gregg Hale's "A Ride in the Park", kept the energy going. There are fewer layers to the plot, but what it does have is a killer hook executed well: a zombie movie told from a zombie's point of view. Specifically, the zombie is a poor sucker riding his mountain bike through the woods who encounters a small group of zombies, gets bit, and proceeds to turn into one himself, all while the GoPro camera on his helmet records everything. It's simple, but it's gory as hell, has some fun twists on zombie lore as it showcases what they do when they're not eating or chasing people, and climaxes in a very fucked-up "oh, don't tell me they're going there" way.

Timo Tjahjanto and Gareth Evans' "Safe Haven" is the longest and most traditional story of the bunch, and also this film's international selection. Set in Indonesia, this one follows a film crew shooting a documentary about a cult called Paradise Gates, their investigation of the cult's compound going in exactly the directions you think it will as it turns out that, yes, there is going to be a mass suicide. But while it is derivative, it's a well-told version of a good old-fashioned cult story, complete with plenty of twisted imagery, demonic monsters, body horror, brutal violence, and terrifying predicaments, even if the attempt to manufacture drama with a romantic love triangle subplot kind of fell flat for me. Closing the anthology off was Jason Eisener's "Slumber Party Alien Abduction", a segment with a self-explanatory title and just as much crazy fun as you'd expect from such. The lone segment with dickish asshole protagonists, this one managed to actually justify it by having them be a group of adolescent boys at a sleepover so that they can pull pranks on the older sister of one of them and her friends. It was a pretty basic monster plot as a bunch of Roswell-style grey aliens arrive to abduct them, and probably my least favorite segment by default, but it had good scary bits and made the aliens out to be a truly monstrous, menacing force for our protagonists. It also had another great justification for why they don't put the camera down and just run: because the camera is strapped to the dog, who serves as the audience viewpoint character, and like hell anyone's just gonna abandon the dog! In the words of Seth Gecko in From Dusk Till Dawn, these kids may be assholes, but they're not fuckin' assholes.

A consistent running theme throughout the film was that it looked really damn good. I said in my review of the first movie that one of its better qualities (shared by many a found footage film) was the lo-fi aesthetic that helped cover up the seams in the special effects, and that's just as true here, as this film serves up a ton of grisly violence and gore, often up close and personal (especially in "A Ride in the Park" when our zombie protagonist starts chowing down on people), that could get quite shocking. The filmmakers involved also knew how to pair it with plenty of suspense, perhaps best demonstrated in "Phase I Clinical Trials" as the evidence of a haunting slowly starts to pile up around Herman, and in "Safe Haven" as the segment alludes early on to horrible things that the cult is doing in such a manner that we're eager to see the gory details they're building to. It also succeeded where its predecessor failed by keeping up a very high level of energy throughout, as befitting a movie where you're getting bite-sized short films that each need to grab the viewer's attention and tell a complete story in twenty minutes or less. There aren't any dull segments like "Second Honeymoon" or "Tuesday the 17th" in here that are filled with just people hanging out and talking about dumb, pointless stuff that lends little to the atmosphere. While they may all be in separate subgenres of horror, none of them are slow burns, all of them instead being high-octane thrill rides that constantly propel the film forward. It's a lean, mean movie that runs about twenty minutes shorter than its predecessor, long enough to have its fun without wearing out its welcome.

The Bottom Line

A massive improvement over the first film, to the point where I'd recommend skipping that one entirely and starting with this. It's four fun, nasty slices of found-footage goodness that add up to a rather lightweight but very entertaining experience. Check it out.