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.

Impetigore (2019)

directed by Joko Anwar

Indonesia

106 minutes

4 stars out of 5

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I let Joko Anwar's presence as writer-director of this film lead me to believe I knew what it would be like before I even watched it. That, and the fact that probably the most recognizable names in Indonesian horror (Joko Anwar, Kimo Stamboel, and Timoh Tjahjanto) make extremely gory, over-the-top films. Whatever the reason, I assumed Impetigore would be an eventual gorefest, hence the title. I did not expect it to be so restrained and to feel so full of depth and meaning. There is more than enough gore to satisfy anyone who might be looking for that kind of thing, but the film itself is not pre-occupied with how much blood it can spill.

This was Indonesia's submission for the 2021 Academy Awards, and already they were taking a risk submitting any kind of genre movie at all, given the Academy's historical record of snubbing horror films. Then you add in the impossible-to-have-foreseen current state of the Academy Awards now that films can no longer be released in 2020 the way they used to be when Impetigore was made, and you've got a scenario in which it seems very difficult for this movie to get any recognition at all. But it more than deserves it.

Impetigore starts off on such a strong note that it instantly gets you sucked in, even though what happens at the beginning seems to have little to do with the rest of the film until a good way in when it's all explained. It's like a mini horror movie in itself: the main character is bored at her job as a toll booth operator, chatting on the phone with her friend (also a toll booth operator) and complaining about a certain guy who keeps showing up and acting creepy. The guy shows up again while she's on the phone, of course, and this time he gets out of his car with an enormous machete while she's trapped inside the booth with nowhere to go. This is all executed so well and with such a lack of histrionics that it's borderline uncomfortable to watch. There's no dramatic camera angles or sudden musical stings when we see the man start coming towards her, silhouetted with the long knife held out to one side. The moment when he goes back to his car and then returns with a weapon makes your blood run cold. Tara Basro's acting and the confinement of her character in the booth while an unknown malicious presence advances towards her are enough to create tension and terror all on their own.

And the rest of the film continues to be surprisingly low-key until it's necessary to ramp up. Again, this is not what I was expecting. I've been conditioned to see Indonesian horror as extreme, sadistic, envelope-pushing. There is quite a lot that goes on in Impetigore that is disturbing in a way that stands out against even what I would consider extreme for American horror, and it's made more potent by the way it's presented in this film, but the story always felt like it came first. This is as much a scary story as it is a scary film visually. While moments (a certain scene with a clothesline felt like a solid punch to the chest) utilize violence and gore, the balance is always kept between horrifying implications and horrifying reality.

I'm always a little suspicious of any horror movie that sets itself up by having people from the city travel to a rural, secluded village and experience traditions that seem strange to their city-dwelling tastes, because I feel like depicting rituals and legends as creepy and backwards is inherently harmful and I see it a lot, not just in international film but also in the glut of backwoods/Appalachian horror that plagues the U.S. (or else Wrong Turn wouldn't have about eight billion sequels and a successful reboot currently in theaters). But Impetigore does this really, really well. The village itself feels like it's presented as very neutral, and the emphasis is always on the actions of individual people rather than the place as a whole or the rituals that they perform. The underlying message of the story, really, is that the evil deeds of one man who holds power can have a ripple effect until every single person who he rules over is helpless to do anything but become complicit in his schemes, or die. I was very excited to see a movie where gamelan and wayang play a big role, and now I'm even more excited that neither of those things were presented as weird, sinister backwoods black magic rituals performed by crazy natives. It's just the badness of one man that seeps into what was otherwise a normal village and corrupts everything that they do.

Everything that happens in this movie just feels like it has such weight to it. It feels like a curse. It's not like, say, Ouija movies, or movies where somebody finds a cursed doll, stuff like that where the implication is that any innocent person could stumble upon an evil object and become the target of bad spirits. The main character of Impetigore is marked from the beginning. The horror comes from the fear that you might not be able to escape your bloodline. A shadow is over her from before the start of the film. The man with the machete is the inexorable pull of her fate looming over her all throughout the story. The Oscars haven't meant squat for some time, if they ever did, but I do hope this gets some recognition.