V/H/S/2
(2013) 96 min.
Rated: NR (Nudity, Sex, Gore)
Director: Simon Barrett, Jason Eisener, Gareth Evans, Gregg Hale, Eduardo Sánchez, Timo Tjahjanto, Adam Wingard
Starring: Kelsy Abbott, Lawrence Michael Levine, Adam Wingard
Links: IMDB | Wikipedia
Rating: ★★★☆☆
The second installment of a found footage anthology.
Synopsis:
As before with V/H/S, this film is a collection of stories set in a framework.
Tape 49 (Directed by Simon Barrett):
This is the framework narrative. It follows the story of two private investigators named Larry and Ayesha who get asked to investigate the disappearance of a college aged male by his mother.
They make their way to the house at night and sneak up to a window, forcing it open with a crowbar. They hear a noise inside, but see no one and resume investigation. The house is practically empty and is dark.
Larry and Ayesha find a room full of TVs, VHS tapes, and a laptop which is on and which has self-recorded videos of the college guy.
Larry instructs Ayesha to watch the videos for clues as he investigates the house further. She tries to watch the laptop video. The college guy talks about a search for a certain VHS tape and saying that he found the real thing. Ayesha decides to stick a tape inside a VCR and watch the tape.
Phase I Clinical Trials (Directed by Adam Wingard):
A male patient, named Herman, in a doctor’s office has just received a state of the art eye implant. It functions much like a camera and during its testing phase will record everything. Herman asks the doctor if he can turn off the recording function during private moments, but the doctor informs him that that is the trade off for using an experimental device.
Herman starts to exit the doctors office when he catches the attention of a girl. She stares at him for a moment as he walks out.
Herman gets dropped off at his home, which happens to be a nice spacious apartment with a pool. As he begins to relax at home, he hears the sound of a kettle as it suddenly flies onto the kitchen floor with a bang. He goes to investigate to find nothing amiss. He goes into his bedroom to see a strange human-shaped lump under the covers. When he pulls back the covers, nothing is there. He’s surprised and as he turns around he suddenly comes face-to-face with a man with a head wound.
He hides in the bathroom, ventures out a bit and sees a ghostly girl in the hallway. The spirits follow him to the bathroom, where he locks himself in. Ultimately, he falls asleep in the bathtub.
In the afternoon of the next day he hears someone knocking at the front door. It’s the same girl who saw him at the doctor’s office. She says her name is Clarissa and she claims to know more about what’s going on with the spirits.
She tells him that when she was 16 she got a cochlear implant which enables her to hear spirits. Now Herman, because of his eye, can see spirits. She claims that the more a person interacts with the spirits, the more they can hurt a person.
While they talk, suddenly Herman sees a ghost outside the window. Clarissa says he was her uncle and wasn’t a nice person. She then claims she can make him go away if Herman focuses on her. She takes her top off and presumably has sex with Herman.
He wakes up and finds a spirit in his bed under his sheets. As he looks back in the hallway, Clarissa is dragged out of the house and thrown into the pool.
He tries to rescue Clarissa, but she is pulled down by forces that neither of them can control and she drowns. He goes into the house and begins to see the bloody man and the girl more and more often.
Herman hides in the bathroom and takes out a straight razor. He is determined to remove his eye. He manages to pull out his eye, which then records him as he is attacked by a man and the camera-eye is forced into his mouth and down his throat as he screams.
The segment ends.
Ayesha and Larry talk about the guy in the laptop video and Larry confirms that it is definitely him. They man in the video talks at length about how to watch the video and the video’s affects on people. Larry insists that Ayesha watch the tapes for some clue.
A Ride In The Park (Directed by Gregg Hale & Eduardo Sánchez ):
Mike, a bike rider, sets up his cameras as he plans for a ride in a beautiful forest. As he starts to ride his bike down a path he is stopped by a woman who is obviously wounded and frantic.
She claims that her boyfriend needs help, but then she herself starts vomiting black fluid onto the ground. Mike looks around and sees slow moving people approach him through the woods. When he turns to the girl, she attacks him, growling like a zombie. He takes a rock and hits her head until she stops. He has stopped her, but he’s wounded.
Mike, now injured, wanders a ways through the woods, coughing up blood. He finally reaches a clearing where he collapses. Soon a woman and man who are biking come along to find his body. As the man inspects him, a zombified Mike attacks him.
Mike rips open the man and starts to eat his intestines. The woman returns and is now a zombie too. She also joins in on dining on her late-partner’s gut.
The man rises back from the dead, though his intestines are now dragging. The trio then set off in search of more prey. They wander through the forest in the direction of joyous squeals and laughter.
It’s a birthday party held under a large pavilion. The zombies arrive and chaos ensues. People are running away and screaming. They run to their cars as the zombies attack a few random people. Mike chases a few people to a car and gets stabbed in the face with a meat fork.
Mike wanders around for a bit amid the chaos, his phone rings and his girlfriend Amy is trying to talk to him, but he can’t respond. She says she loves him and can’t wait for him to get home.
Mike makes a pitiful whine noise. He reaches for a nearby shotgun on the ground and shoots himself in the head dead.
The segment ends.
Meanwhile, Larry checks on Ayesha who really just wants to be left alone to watch her tapes. Her nose is bleeding but she doesn’t want to leave the house now. Larry tells her that he is going to a nearby store to get her some medication.
She agrees to just sit there and watch more tapes.
Safe Haven (Directed by Gareth Evans & Timo Tjahjanto):
A film crew decides to interview an Indonesian cult leader. They wear hidden cameras and also are carrying regular cameras for the interview.
They manage to convince the cult leader, Father, that they wish to show an unbiased side behind the ideology of Paradise Gates.
The team consists of the leader, Malik, Lena, Malik’s girlfriend and the show producer. Then there are the camerea crew of Adam and Joni.
As they enter the compound they are given a guided tour. There are many young children, men and women in the compound.
As they are about to conduct the interview with Father, Lena becomes nauseous and goes to look for a bathroom. As Lena wanders off she comes across a room full of children drawing at desks. The tour lady comes in and tells her that though the children there are beautiful, Lena’s will be even more special. Lena is confused.
Adam comes down to check on Lena and she escapes the woman and joins Adam.
Meanwhile, Malik’s interview is not going well as a battery for the camera is dying. Malik goes to retrieve a fresh one when he sees on one of the cameras that Adam and Lena are talking.
It seems that Lena has cheated on Malik with Adam and she is pregnant by Adam. Lena grows angry with Adam and tells him that she will tell Malik herself and that she doesn’t need Adam.
Joni is left alone with Father and tries to ask him interview questions. Father announces that “it is time” and begins to give a speech on a loudspeaker. When Joni tries to interrupt him, Father pounces onto him and cuts his throat with a utility knife.
The children in the classroom drink a poison, some women take Lena away, and Adam discovers a woman in a makeshift birthing center who has a huge hole in her abdomen. Malik rushes inside the building.
Malik witnesses several of the cult males shoot themselves in the head at the same time. He is lined up against a wall to be shot, but Adam arrives and begs that he is not killed. Malik begs Adam to find Lena. The cult member kills Malik and then himself.
Father and a few women drag Lena to the birthing area. Adam tries to follow them without being seen. There is an explosion in the room and Father walks out covered in blood. He tells Adam that the deed has been fulfilled.
A great horned beast rises from Lena’s belly. Adam runs away, but all who were dead are now zombies and try to attack him. He fends them off as quickly as he can. Ever present is the sound of the beast quickly gaining on Adam.
Adam manages to run out to the car and begins to drive away from the compound when the car gets side-swiped by the beast. It turns over and soon Adam is covered in blood in an overturned car. He tries to wriggle his way out, but the beast is sitting atop the car. It sees Adam stick his head out and grunts out the word “papa”. This causes Adam to laugh in a state of shock and delirium.
The segment ends.
Larry finds Ayesha passed out on the floor. Next to her body written in read is a VHS labeled “Watch”. So Larry inserts the tape into the VCR and lets the tape play.
Slumber Party Alien Abduction (Directed by Jason Eisener):
A pair of boys are making a home video with their dog. The dog has a camera mounted to him. The kids parents have left and Gary’s sister invites more friends over to the house.
The younger kids attack the older kids on the dock of a lake with water guns and water balloons. As the boys are attacking from the lake, they dive under and a humanoid creature is seen swimming briefly, but then it is obscured as one of the male older boys jumps in the lake to attack the younger kids.
Later that night the kids barge into the sister’s room when she’s alone with her boyfriend in a darkened bedroom. They flash a strobe light and play loud music while screaming. During this event a loud train horn noise is heard as well as the lights flickering off and on. It appears also that the ground trembles, but all of this is ignored as the boyfriend angrily yells at the younger boys.
In another scene later, the sister and her boyfriend decide to send the dog mounted with a camera to disrupt her younger brother Gary as he masturbates to a video on TV. The other boys are sleeping next to Gary in sleeping bags in what looks to be near a dining room.
The sister and her boyfriend put a camera on the dog and send it off to disrupt Gary’s session. He sees the dog and gets angry. Then the sister and boyfriend appear to laugh at him. The other boys wake up. Suddenly, again the loud horn noise occurs, this time with a bright white light flashing in the room. There is a white light behind some windows and slender shadows of aliens appear.
The kids are frightened. The big sister starts to call the police from her cellphone and her boyfriend finds a gun and goes towards the kitchen to yell at the creatures, but he’s quickly taken out of sight. Soon the aliens appear and grab everyone.
Next the dog and Gary are seen in a tube of some sort that ends up in the lake water. They end up in the lake and Gary’s sister finds Gary floating in the water. She pulls him to the dock and tries to revive him. Suddenly the sound of a horn blasts and the aliens appear approaching from the dock with a white light behind them. Gary wakes up just before the aliens reach them and they run off the dock and onto land.
They find that the aliens area already before them on land and so they run and hide among the trees, but the dog’s bark alerts the aliens to the kids hiding spot. They end up running into a boat house where the sister gets captured and dragged away. Gary himself is also pulled away from the roof by a beam of light pulling him up. He loses his grip on the dog which tumbles to the ground. The camera falls off and points towards the dog which is bloodied and shaking.
The segment ends.
Larry is left alone in the room and decides to play the video on the laptop. The student in the video decides he will have to make his own tape and he pulls out a gun and nestles it under his chin. He pulls the trigger causing his lower jaw to be blown off and he falls backwards. The guy gets up from the floor with a gaping wound in his mouth and walks off into the hallway.
The video then shows Larry and Ayesha enter the room. In the video Larry tells Ayesha to watch the video. At this point Ayesha, who has been lying on the ground, gets up quickly and begins to attack Larry. He fends her off, but she starts to follow him walking on her hands and knees like a crab with her head down.
Larry hides in a closet and waits. When Ayesha’s head appears he shoots her dead. Larry then begins to search inside the closet and finds the student sitting there, waiting. The missing student starts to strangle Larry and kills him. He then takes the camera to show the audience Larry’s corpse and does a thumbs-up gesture.
The movie ends.
Review:
Of the two V/H/S movies out so far, I believe that this would be the better one. And one of the best things about these anthologies is that they are several stories in one film. So of course even if there is a weaker story, some others may be stronger.
This movie is actually a little more lighthearted. There is a bit of a wink and nod to the audience. A play on how goofy zombies are. So there’s both the scary and something to put you at ease.
I would also have to say that my favorite segment is Safe Haven as it seemed to be a more original story and there is a great feeling of dread that can be tapped from a cult-like atmosphere. This story took the idea and was able to incorporate not only zombies but a demon to boot.
The only thing that I didn’t like was probably the part in Alien Invasion where the dog is injured. That’s just a mild personal issue as I’m a dog and cat lover. So that is a little disturbing to see an animal in distress.