V/H/S/2

US, 2013, 96 minutes, Colour.
Directors: Simon Barrett, Jason Eisener, Gareth Huw Evans, Gregg Hale, Adam Wingard, Eduardo Sanchez.

Once upon a time in the 1960s and 1970s there were portmanteau films which contained a number of horror stories, like Tales from the Crypt, Tales that Witness Madness. Some of them were considered fairly scary in their time. Nowadays, with the increasing number of horror films as well as the decreasing limits on the blood and gore that can be presented, they may seem now to be rather quaint.


V/H/S/2 is certainly not quaint. It is a 2013 portmanteau collection of horror stories or, perhaps, gory stories. It is rather limited in its audience, to fans, especially those who tend to relish extreme horror and gore. The film has been produced by The Collective but it also notes, at beginning and end, that it has been made with the company, Bloody Disgusting, and they definitely live up to the demands of that title.

The films also advertised as being in the Blair Witch tradition, with one of the directors of this film an original director of Blair Witch.

This is not a film for the average audience who may not last beyond the introduction. Those who settle in will surrender themselves to the horror conventions of the genre and can wallow in them. Cinema buffs will notice that one of the stories, with the Thai/Indonesian settings, has been written and directed by Gareth Huw Evans, the director of the Indonesian police thriller, very violent in its way, The Raid, which was popular with many audiences in cinema release. The second story is written and directed by Simon Barrett, director of the acclaimed horror film, You’re Next.

Probably the only thing to add is to note that there is an introductory story of a private eye, Tape 49, and his blackmailing of a man for his infidelity with a girlfriend. His next job is to go to a house for clues to a missing student. He works with an assistant and, while he searches the house, his assistant looks at some VHS films, of the extreme snuff variety.

One is the story of a man who has an injured eye, Phase I Clinical Trials, and the doctor implants an experimental camera in the eye which then is able to record everything, especially the attacks on the man in close up.

The story, A Ride in the Park, begins innocently enough with… a ride in a park. But, suddenly a zombie attacks the rider, then two hikers are caught up, who then encounter families celebrating a children’s party in the park and … living dead mayhem in the now traditional manner.

There is also a film about an Asian cult leader, Safe Haven, a recluse, his setting up an institution, inviting parents to bring their children, with overtones about the leader’s relationships with the children, controlling them, making them pure; a television crew comes to interview him, and there is a subplot about the pregnancy of one of the crew; however, the storytellers have hopped back to the Jim Jones and Jonestown massacre and given their own variation; the leader becomes berserk and this leads to some bloody martial arts encounters.

The final story is a familiar one of the massacre of a group of partying young people, Slumber Party Alien Abduction. Screenplay and the director do not make the characters really distinctive side it is very hard to follow, in the dark, just who is who and who is being destroyed - until it appears that it is a group of murderous aliens who have been let loose on the young people.

It might not surprises the audience to find that when the private eye comes downstairs from his search, he finds his assistant the dead, or possessed by the spirit of the horror films that she has been watching.

The audience probably needs to go out into the fresh air after watching this film lest they too be possessed by the spirit of what they have been watching.