V/H/S/85 - Mark Reviews Movies

V/H/S/85, Shudder

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Review by Mark Dujsik | October 5, 2023

The video tape-based anthology series returns with another five short movies (technically six, since one of the storylines is split into two), edited together as a sort of mixtape of low-fidelity horror. V/H/S/85 is the sixth installment in the franchise, which continues to stick to a formula: Hire a variety of filmmakers, and hope for the best.

The best parts of this entry, like so many of the better segments to appear in these movies over the past decade, have a clever or some genuinely horrific idea, like a serial killer who might be a time traveler or a group of young people being picked off one by one in the woods in a way that's tragically modern. The others hint at a promising conceit but never quite reach that potential. It's yet another installment in this series, in other words.

That's clear from the selection of filmmakers, too, which includes one firmly established director in Scott Derrickson and four up-and-comers in the genre world. Derrickson's isn't the most ambitious, but it might be the one that comes closest to pinning down the spirit of what this franchise seems to be going for in terms of aesthetics and mood.

His is called "Dreamkill," which is the pseudo-time-traveling one—although that would be impossible to gather from its opening minutes. In that scene, we watch a killer, apparently recording a break-in and search of a house with an old 16 mm camera, and hear the 9-1-1 call of the woman he's hunting played over the footage. There's an eerie and unsettling feeling in watching this, which looks real and is so simple that it's easy to imagine it actually happening. Isn't that, in some way at least, the terrifying appeal of this franchise?

Every one of the shorts that have appeared in these anthology movies (with maybe one or two serving as the exceptions that prove the rule) has established itself as a piece of found footage—archival proof of some usually supernatural terror. We shouldn't be watching it, because there's a forbidden quality to what has been recorded—not only because death is so often the result, but also because it is evidence that we should be afraid of something as common as, in this case, some noise in one's home in the middle of the night.

Co-written with usual collaborator C. Robert Cargill, Derrickson's short, then, is easily the most effective one here, because it comes across as so authentic, despite the eventual leap into the realm of the supernatural as soon as the gimmick is revealed. It possesses the dangerous sense of a snuff film as the killings continue, the momentum of a police procedural as a detective (played by Freddy Rodriguez) tries to figure out how he receives videos of grisly murders before they happen, and a couple of neat twists by the end. In a way, it really does represent what seems to be the archetypical model of a short in this particular series.

It's a shame, then, about the rest of these segments, which include a wraparound one that's about how visual media impacts a mysterious life form, another that uses a real tragedy in ultimately questionable ways, one that's barely a gimmick, and the segment that's awkwardly split into two shorts. "Total Copy," the one that's intercut between the others from director David Bruckner (with screenwriter Evan Dickson), probably suffers from this division, because it's telling a straightforward story—about scientists studying a gooey entity that mimics what it sees—but constantly loses its momentum. The final punch line, at least, is gruesomely amusing, although one is left wondering how it would play uninterrupted.

That turns out to be the case, too, with writer/director Mike P. Nelson's double-header of "No Wake" and "Ambrosia." The first takes the concept of an unstoppable killer in the woods, finding victims in a group of friends who aren't aware of the threat until it's far too late, but gives the murderer an unexpected weapon for the genre—albeit one that's too common in reality. The first half hits its peak with the terrifyingly real violence, only to have its real gimmick undermined by having to wait for the conclusion with the second segment.

The unfortunate dead ends of this installment are writer/director Gigi Saul Guerrero's "God of Death," which uses the backdrop of a deadly earthquake in Mexico City in the title year, and "TKNOGD," by screenwriter Zoe Copper and director Natasha Kermani. The first of these, which is frightening as a group of people try to escape a collapsing building, succumbs to too many clichés, from a character who carries around a camera because that's his passion to the discovery of something unnatural near the end.

The second supposedly captures the final performance at a theater, as someone rails against the coming incursion of technology in people's lives—only to meet a virtual embodiment of tech with predictable results. Such are the results of V/H/S/85, one supposes, as the success of any installment really comes down to the luck of the filmmaking draw. This one's a pretty mediocre hand overall.

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