V/H/S 94 (2021)

directed by Simon Barrett, Timo Tjahjanto, Steven Kostanski, Jennifer Reeder, Chloe Okuno, Ryan Prows

USA, Canada, Indonesia

102 minutes

3.5 stars out of 5

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I don't know if I can honestly call myself a "fan" of the V/H/S films, because their quality varies so wildly, but the concept behind them is something that I'm very enthusiastic about. Even if it's bad, I'll watch anything involving a cursed tape. And I genuinely appreciate that the series is bold enough to make explicit the supernatural status of the tapes; even if a solid mythos is never established, in every film - if I recall correctly - it's more than just a clandestine network of trading snuff videos, which would itself probably be interesting enough - it's something weirder and harder to define going on.

But I think where the problem lies is that every single V/H/S film seems to have all these really cool ideas and somehow every single one of them falls just barely short of capturing them to their full potential. I mean, they definitely do something right, because even though they're not perfect films, I've seen all of them multiple times and can talk about each segment from memory. But the thing is that I haven't seen them all multiple times because they're flawless, but because I feel like that's as good as I can get. If I want to watch a movie about a guy who gets a camera installed in his eye and starts seeing ghosts, I don't have anywhere else to go. If I want to watch something where a slumber party is interrupted by aliens, nobody else has done that yet. Timo Tjahjanto's goat satan baby could have been in a better film, but it's not, so that's what I have to deal with. It's not that the V/H/S films are so great, it's that I have to settle for their not-quite-fully-fleshed-out ideas because these films are the only place to find them.

V/H/S 94 continues this tradition of getting really close to a cool concept, or even having a cool concept, but botching the execution just a tiny bit. In this case, the most egregious part is the wrap-around story, which has to do with possibly supernatural tapes and the wild cult that distributes/worships them. Great story, but who wrote the dialogue, a machine intelligence fed nothing but episodes of COPS and scripts from Call of Duty? I don't make a habit of watching movies featuring the police/military, but the acting and dialogue in the wrap-around story was every awful military hardass cliche combined. It's no better when the cultists get to speak - "We are the final girls, and this is our final kill!" Spare me. If you asked me if I wanted a short film about girls in a VHS death cult who turn the tables on a police raid, I'd be all over it, but if you told me it'd be like this, I'd say no thanks.

I think my favorite segment might have been the first one, which takes place mostly in a sewer, with two reporters stumbling on a different kind of cult built around a strange creature who lives down there. I enjoyed this almost entirely because of the well-placed practical effects (something this series has always done great with, and I'll talk more about that in a minute) that were neither overused nor skimped on. There's a classic facemelting scene with exposed skull that made me smile and looked like something that genuinely would have come from the time period this film sets itself in, but the sewer god itself also looks pretty decent.

I was most excited for Timo Tjahjanto's segment, and within the first minute it had hooked me due to the tone and subject matter being so different from everything else in V/H/S 94. All the other segments are pretty fleshy, but Tjahjanto shows us a man's head attached to a mechanical spider body within thirty seconds of his segment starting up, and it only gets weirder from there. This could have been my favorite if it hadn't gone on for what felt like far longer than it needed to - with the first-person POV, it felt like watching somebody play a first-person shooter, dying, and then just... continuing to play even after their character should have been dead. There's something interesting about the idea of merging human with camera, and I think a found-footage film series is the perfect place to explore that, but as usual, something fell a little short for me with this. I love the vibe of it and the effects are done well but it could have been much shorter and benefited from it.

It actually seems like each segment in this is ordered in descending quality from best to worst. The final one is where this lost me, and then the wrap-around segment is completed and it all goes further down the drain. From the start I was uninterested in the last segment, with the militia who try to weaponize something they don't understand, but I totally checked out as soon as the rabbit exploded. You cannot put exploding rabbits in something and then play the rest of the thing straight. I love seeing white supremacists get decimated, and if they explode - hey, that's great too! But I think something about that concept didn't quite stick the landing, and I'm not sure if it's just that physically depicting a person or animal exploding has some weird inherent humor to it, or if I felt like this segment never quite got as extreme as it could have.

I really feel like the gore effects are what made this any kind of an enjoyable film. Even though every segment was made by a different person or persons, they all have that same theme of chunky, frequent blood and guts - though never so frequent as to feel overused, as it has in the series in the past. The skull exposure in the rat god segment, the animate body parts in the funeral home one, the scrap-and-junk half-people in Tjahjanto's piece, that absolutely wonderful vampire creature in the otherwise middling last segment - things like that feel innovative and original and are what I love seeing when I watch a V/H/S film. The culture of collaboration that this series presents is a great thing for modern horror filmmaking, and that is another reason why, even though I don't love them, I keep coming back to these things: It's just pure fun to see people who love the genre doing original work together.