There’s always a V/H/S movie at the Fantastic Fest. For the last four years, the Austin audience has been treated to one installment of the Shudder Originals series, leading up to the sixth in the series dropping this weekend in V/H/S/Beyond before it premiered on Shudder on October 4. By this point, the strengths and weaknesses of this series have been appreciatively well established; great ideas but poor execution. The loglines for the segments in Beyond are some of the best in the series, finding new ways into horrific tales, this time either deliberate or unintentional deformations. The problem, however, is that the execution is where many jelly beans are spilled when the production button is pressed; the film was left off as if there was more need for fine-tuning. While this is one of the better V/H/S anthologies of late, I can’t help but wonder if they shouldn’t take two years to make the next one.
Illustrating the superhero’s thrillers documentaries always amazes me. Jay Cheel incorporates some self-deprecation while describing his experiences in “Cursed Films.” It almost looks like he enjoys making an unnatural true crime series out of tapes that he claims depict an alien meet. It is the same for each of the anthology segments, where the wrapworks are literally tied in or out. This time, though, it is more thematic. The draw of trying to figure out what appears impossible is set with the aided grainy home recording.
The piece is propelled into action with “Stork,” a gun blasting, character from Jordan Downey, which has the intrigue of a zombie shooter game from a first-person perspective. A few officers are on the lookout for some missing children, one of them being the child of one of the officers. These children’s tracks lead to a house filled with horrific creations, which include a chainsaw wielder. My personal favorite part about this segment is that, unlike the rest, it has a straightforward concept with unimaginable auction terms. The goal is simple, get in, annihilate the enemies with some stunning makeup effects, and escape.
There is a more ambitious segment in Virat Pal’s “Dream Girl,” which leads to the inclusion of the first Bollywood dance number in a “V/H/S” feature. The first half of this one is stellar. It goes to prove that Pal has an eye for a filmmaker, even if it seems through the cameras of some paparazzi trying to catch a glimpse of an Indian film star. When one of them manages to catch a glimpse inside the icon’s trailer, he is done, it is not very nice, and everything breaks loose. And by everything breaking loose, I mean shaking, screaming, flashing lights, and blaring sounds. Shaky cameras in various angles can convey chaos, but they are hardest to use effectively, and frankly, they can leave an audience feeling dizzy and more so confused.
I felt the same way about Justin Martinez’s “Live and Let Dive” in regards to his drastic irregularity, for the concept alone is so stunning that it is much more excusable. This series has not discovered such an incredible narrative technique since the cleverness of “GoPro meets zombies” in the “V/H/S/2”. This time, as a group goes skydiving to celebrate a 30th birthday, the plane gets attacked by an alien invasion. Half of the group dies upon impact as the plane explodes, while the surviving members are left with no choice but to escape the alien monsters coming towards them by running through an orange tree field. Now that’s camping in style. Sky diving in an extraterrestrial attack?
Not so much fun is Justin Long’s “Fur Babies,” and this is where Mr. Long really got messed up by Tusk. A variety of that film’s deformation sexuality, “Fur Babies”, does incorporate some disturbing makeup effects though it has the same problems as these segments, and it is that the length is stretched beyond comparison. There isn’t a purpose for “V/H/S/Beyond” to be almost 2 hours long. For me, the one thing that future parts should focus on is cramming every single segment into 15-20% baj. In all six films, every chapter could use a little help in editing.
In this case ‘Stowaway’ is the finest segment Kate Siegel ever directed which stems from a script written by her husband Flanagan Mike. It was not part of the V/H/S collection but quite frankly there should have been copies. This different feel was what made it stand out the tape used in Stowaway was overused and looked like it was cut and pasted together. Plus the fact that Siegel is not employing dissorientation adds a bit of strength. She hides so many things in her shot selection. The story dives into a woman chasing the tale of lights in the sky. What she ultimately uncovers is nowhere near gentle, rather it is a cross between “Annihilation”. It’s unusual, but not in a nauseating or confusing sense; rather, it’s simply not from a world that is devoid of creativity and relies solely on disorientation. This shows how best capture “V/H/S” did this without the need for eliminating all forms of structure from storytelling.
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