V/H/S/2

Because of the success of the first anthology, a second one was no surprise. I kept my reservations up, because the first film didn't leave me as elated or full of euphoria as V/H/S did some. Still, here I am, always willing to give another film a chance. This turned out to be a lot more entertaining than V/H/S, not what I was expecting at all.

The wraparound deals with a male/female "camera spy" team paid to snoop on cheating marrieds. They're assigned a new case, and that is to find a college kid for his mother. They discover the kid's "hideout", and inside there are video tapes, televisions, and equipment all over the place. The young woman starts to peruse his laptop (it seems as if the boy had vacated the premises, or perhaps left momentarily), and the kid pops up to describe locating a "forbidden" tape that might actually feature a real murder recorded. While the man is in the kid's bedroom taking a read through his notebooks, the woman decides to take a look at the tape...she doesn't know that someone (the kid perhaps) is methodically approaching from behind. The wraparound arc consists of the woman (and later the man) viewing tapes in the college kid's "library" (scattered about in piles) and each tape is one of the shorts that make up the anthology.

The first tape (Phase 1: Clinical Trials) was right up my alley. A young man has a unique eye transplant. His "new eye" has a chip that allows him not only to see, but it records data for a company responsible for its creation. Told by the doc who helped to install the eye that he might experience "glitches", he also seems to see...the dead! Yep, he sees the dead in his house and is told by a deaf red-headed hottie that it seems when transplants are given to those who have lost the likes of hearing or seeing that tagging along with them are ghosts from the past. Who the man and little girl the guy sees is up for debate, but he must know them somehow, as evident when the girl comes to his house (she saw him in the hospital-cum-lab where she received her own hearing implant) and is visited by her creepy, dead uncle (it seems he must've been a pedophile). It goes haywire, as the glitches seem to be a type of "radar" indication that the ghosts are present. Attempts to avoid them work for a while, but how long could this guy possibly keep them from him? This little bit of macabre fun is crossed with sci-tech and plays with the theory of "sixth sense". I have to say that the camera perspective through the eye of the character is well-done, and when he turns I was always expecting a ghost around every corner. We get him blinking and the guy awakening from sleep. There's even a sex scene and pool drowning. A lot in about ten minutes. The swallowing at the end is quite a wild conclusion as is the use of a strait-razor.

The second tape (A Ride in the Park) features a helmet cam of a zombie outbreak in a camp ground where a biker (he also has a camera installed on his bicycle) comes across a victim while riding a trail. She bites him and he turns into a zombie. The helmet cam is an imaginative way to see through the first person perspective of a victim who is bitten, suffers the turn, and goes after other victims to feed from their flesh. While zombies have been seen in so many different ways on film, someone always comes up with a unique method of shooting them or presenting them to a horror audience. Here we see zombies as if recorded on film as the person capturing everything his camera sees becomes one of the horde. The woods, an interrupted birthday party, and the gruesome make-up effects that show flesh wounds, violence to bodies, and zombie eating give the second tape a wild ride feel that even shows the helmet fall off the head of a zombie after eating the blast of a shotgun. Good stuff if you are in the mood for the typical zombie mayhem.

 

If you are looking for something REALLY fucked up, tape 3 (Safe Haven) will do the trick. A documentary crew is interested in a cult located outside a city. The leader, when interviewed in a restaurant, doesn't seem that imposing. However, when the crew gets him to agree to an interview and inside look of his religious order, they are not only in for a shock but absolute horror. The paradise gates are what this cult strive for. It seems sexual practices and deviancy have happened inside the walls, and the leader has molested the children while the adults seem totally fine with his activities. This group is completely under his spell and firmly believe that something beyond mortal flesh awaits. Well, this particular symbol (quite similar to the Blair Witch symbol), made out of sticks and twine, seems to represent their order. As the crew is within the compound, they are witness to a David Koresh type following and soon it turns into a Jim Jones Jonestown suicide with remaining members of the cult turning on the crew. After the suicide of many, the leader has the female pregnant documentary crew member taken by his nurses to a room where their symbol is etched into her tummy. What is released upon the commune is a demon (one ugly creature, too!) and those who committed suicide turn into ghouls. Included is a body exploding, a nasty use of a box cutter, a monster bursting from a stomach, a face blown apart by a shotgun blast, the mutilated body of a cult member found under a sheet, and a horrifying multi-suicide as officers in the cult shoot themselves in the head! Again, the use of multiple "head cams" and hidden "spy cams" are used incredibly to create a first-person experience for us as the cult comes unglued. The eerie behavior of the cult leader and his followers is well executed. A real corker I won't forget anytime soon.

What do you get when you have "dog cam", menacing alien abductors giving chase, and white middle class suburbia in a whole heap of trouble in attempts to stay one step ahead of their pursuers as hideouts diminish over a night? Tape #4 (Slumber Party Alien Abduction), that's what. This might be a bit hard to watch for those with an inability to withstand shaky cam (the cam is attached to a dog, remember.), but those damned loud aliens (the classic kind with elongated heads and arms with fingers that stretch far) are scary. Their first appearance has one under the water (it's silhouette is all that we see, but it is a quick look that remains), and then noisy outbursts of their arrival to the house of the kids (the adults are away for the night, and big sis is responsible for her bro; while she has her boyfriend over, he has a couple of pals from school spending the night) really set the stage in grand fashion. The way the aliens have no quit and just keep coming until they secure their "prizes" produced a gulp in my throat. I was surprised at how effective this was with me. The dog's fate left me rather troubled, though.

The wraparound (titled "Tape 49") ends on a bizarre note as the female partner of the spy team was found collapsed on the floor dead. The spy guy had went to get her something for migraines, but he was too late to save her from whatever befell her. Then, when spy guy sees college kid shoot himself in the face (blowing off his lower jaw!), the gal sits up and attacks him, getting her neck snapped in the process. That doesn't even stop her, though, as she starts spider walking like Linda Blair from The Exorcist in a weird twist that left me bewildered. Spy guy has a gun but isn't expecting the resident to greet him with strangling hands.

V/H/S/2 definitely seems to have a better budget and delivers lots of gore. Buckets and buckets of gore. There's plenty of violence and it's really in your face. I like that it's weird, too. Every tale is a downer, with a finale for each featured on their recordings unable to escape rather disturbing ends. Some are left to our imaginations, but most of these tales end with unsuspecting victims on the receiving end of grim fates. I have to warn viewers that haven't seen this to suspect a lot of jarring camera movements, lines on the film, pops when the camera suffers from its owner taking punishment or trying to get away from whatever evil is coming after them, among other "steadi-cam" problems that turn many people off. I do think the use of the camera in this sequel is an asset in its favor as there are a number of innovative and imaginative methods for telling the stories featured in the sequel. The supernatural features heavily in the sequel. Almost every tale has a type of surreal touch to it. I had fun with this sequel and liked it a hell of a lot more than the previous film. I wouldn't mind this to have a series because anthologies provide a number of young filmmakers a chance to tell stories using the camera in ways our technological age allows. Because the equipment is so available these days, films have a better chance of being made by students of filmmaking. This sequel was a nice surprise to me. I expected to find it lacking.