Post by SsnakeBite, the No1 Frenchman on Feb 11, 2013 15:35:31 GMT -5
As burned out on Found Footage movies as I have become, I recently heard about this one and it spiked my interest in the genre again as I heard it was actually scary.
Okay, so for those of you who haven't even heard of it until now, this film tried to bring new life to the genre by being an anthology film. It is actually made of six short films, all with a stand-alone story, different characters and even directed by different people, one of which acts as the framing device and ties the segments together (so basically, there are five segments inside one overarching film).
Now, let's talk about the plot (spoilers are hidden).
Basically, a group of burglars are paid to enter an old man's house and retrieve a tape. They film themselves doing it because... I don't know, Internet or something. Yeah, they vaguely mention making 50 bucks per tape they shoot after a pointless "introduction" of them vandalizing an abandoned house and forcing a woman to show one of her breasts so I presume it's the kind of tapes they get paid for, but I've got to wonder who the F would pay 50 dollars to see a handful of a-holes stealing a videotape.
Anyway, they get there, find the man dead and they find several tapes. They don't know which one it is their client wants but they were told that "[they] will know when [they] find it", so one of them is assigned the task of watching the tapes to see which one is the right one. And that's how we get to the other sections of the film, which I shall now recap and review one by one:
Amateur Night: Three college guys (read: unredeemable douchebags right out of an Eli Roth movie) want to convince chicks to have sex with them and hope to film the whole thing thanks to a camera hidden in the frame of one of the guys' glasses.
Despite acting like swines (okay that was too far, my apologies to swines everywhere), they somehow manage to find two girls who are actually willing to do them. I would like to point out that one of them looks like this:
So props to the casting crew for finding an actress who looks genuinely creepy. Also, look forward to seeing her in every Tim Burton movie for the next twenty years. Not props to our "heroes" for actually wanting to bone a woman who just screams "crazy obsessive chick who doesn't understand the concept of one-night-stand and considers looking at her a proposal", especially when the only words she ever says are "I like you".
Okay, here's the spoilery part for this segment so don't click if you actually want to see this film:
Not very good at all. The horror bits are good enough and show some creativity and the special effects are very convincing, but too little too late, which I wouldn't mind if the rest of the segment was used to build tension, but it's only used to build annoyance with these caricatures of college s***heads that so many horror movie makers seem to have a hard on for these days, for some reason. As a result, the main reason I liked the horror bits was that those terrible characters finally died and frankly, I'm not sure which side is supposed to be good and which side is supposed to be villainous here (and no, that doesn't count as depth).
Second Honeymoon: A couple goes on a road trip for, well a second honeymoon. Things get weird when a girl knocks on their door and asks if they can take her for a ride the next day, which admittedly is very weird.
Wait, no it isn't. It's far weirder that the honeymooners find it weird and, in their own words "creepy". We never see the conversation and all we see of the girl is a shaky, blurry, dark shot of her in the hotel's parking lot filmed from their room's window so we have no reason to assume she was being weird. The wife even wants to call the police because of that. Again, keep in mind they are at a hotel and they describe the girl as being "college-age" so, perhaps I'm crazy but, had I been in that situation, I would have assumed she either is a hitch-hiker too, doesn't have a driving license, her car broke/ran out of fuel or pretty much any reasonable thing before... whatever came to their mind. Do they think she is a witch or something?
... our next story is from Texas, where a couple was asked for a ride by a hitch-hiker... and immediately reacted by calling the police.
In general, the two main characters are freaking weird. Not even dickish like those from the previous story, just plain weird. Not only are they apparently the kind of couple who feel the need to record every single moment of their life, but there's also a scene in which the husband realizes 100 bucks are missing from his wallet, and immediately accuses his wife from stealing it, despite saying himself that the area is full of junkies and low-life of all kind, AND the fact that he considered their encounter from the previous night "creepy". See, NOW would be an acceptable point to think maybe that girl was indeed shady and may have been trying to spot something to steal, but whatever.
Not even as good as the previous one. The main characters were not as annoying at least but made up for that by making no damn sense, and they're not particularly likable either. The "reveal", if you can even call it that, was unbelievably weak and it didn't feel like a horror story at all. It could have been a nice attempt at scaring you with real-world fears, but it just doesn't work.
Tuesday the 17th: Ooooooh boy, if the main characters from the previous segments weren't to much of assholes, the ones from this story will gladly take up the douche-torch. In fact, they broke a record because it took them less than ten seconds to make me wish them to die a horrible, painful death. They keep bickering, the two guys just want to screw the two girls and one of the girls apparently had to coerce everyone else into coming together. They keep being jerks by making fun of a guy for... walking on the side of the road and presumably hitch-hiking... huh. What is it with this film and the characters' inexplicable reactions to hitch-hikers?
Oh, the plot, you may ask? Teenagers go into a cabin int the woods to get drunk, high, laid and party, are obnoxious, get killed. Whoops, did I forget the spoilers tag here? Ah come on, this is such an overused plot, you know exactly how it goes, and you know everybody is gonna die. You really don't need the spoiler tag. This must seriously be the plot of about 50% of horror movies since Evil Dead.
And it worked for exactly one film since Evil Dead.
And to top it all of, the film spoils it anyway by having the girl who coerced the others into coming say "you're all going to die here". We're supposed to assume she says that jokingly (or at least that the other characters took it as that) but nobody is fooled.
Okay, there IS a very small bit of originality so I'll have a short spoiler section:
Anyhow, it's a very by-the-book segment. We've seen it all before and we've seen it done better, and even those done better weren't done well. Add to this annoying characters that make nothing to make you care about them and some unintentionally hilarious moments as well as probably the shakiest of shaky cams in this film and you've got yourself the worst segment in the whole thing.
The Sick Thing That Happened to Emily When She Was Younger:
Well that's a mouthful. The whole thing is filmed through two web-cam feeds showing a woman talking to her boyfriend who is out on business or something. She is uneasy because she believes she is witnessing paranormal phenomenons. At first the boyfriend doesn't seem to believe her, but changes his mind when he sees something very strange in her house during one of their conversations. She also noticed a bruise on her arm even though she doesn't remember bumping it, and eventually feels a lump.
There actually isn't much to spoil as the characters are just as confused as we are and the story doesn't reveal much until the very end, but here goes anyway:
I actually rather liked that one. It's not great but the story and characters are good enough to keep you invested, there are some things I thought were stupid at first but made more sense by the end, it's creative enough that you are legitimately intrigued by what is going to happen, not to mention it's not nearly as horribly predictable as the previous three segments. In fact, the final twist was a genuine surprise to me. So yeah, not fantastic, but definitely entertaining and a big step up from what we've seen so far. Beware though, it's rather confusing and I'm not sure I got everything, but I think it's one case where not saying or showing everything actually helps.
10/31/98:
Four guys head to a Halloween party only to find the house where it's supposed to be taking place empty of people. They look around to see if they can find anyone, while the man holding the camera starts seeing strange stuff.
This is by far the best segment and I can see why they kept it for the end. This one is very atmospheric, it's genuinely scary and, the icing on the cake, it has some formidable practical special effects which really help the segment's atmosphere. It's also the segment that makes the best use of the time it has. In twenty minutes or so, it really tells a full, satisfying story that feels it lasts just the amount of time it needed to. Oh and guess what? The characters... are actually likable! You actually root for them and stuff! Amazing!
As for the wraparound segment with the thieves watching the tapes, baptized Tape 56, it's a bit difficult to judge as it mostly exists to show the other ones. It does have its own story but it's not very important or interesting and is rather predictable, and considering those are burglars who don't care much about human life and nearly committed sexual assault, I don't really care what happens to them.
Overall, despite the last two segments being pretty good, it's still a bad movie. There were creative ideas and I really liked the concept of someone collecting tapes of various unrelated paranormal (or not) events, kind of like a more straightforward The Cabin In The Woods, but in the end most of these ideas are wasted by a poor execution. On top of that, with a runtime of almost 2 hours, it's way too long, especially if it's to see assholes being assholes. Cutting Second Honeymoon and especially Tuesday the 17th alone would have greatly improved the quality of the film.
However, if you take the film as just a collection of shorts, the last two segments are worth a watch and considering there does seem to be potential, there is hoping the makers of these movies will improve and I am looking forward to seeing the sequel, titled S-VHS. Yes, they have already made a sequel.
All in all, I give the film as a whole a 4/10. It's bad, but the two good segments save it from being complete rubbish. However, in the interest of fairness, I would also like to grade the individual segments:
Amateur Night: 4/10
Second Honeymoon: 3/10
Tuesday the 17th: 2/10
The Sick Thing That Happened to Emily When She Was Younger: 6/10
10/31/98: 8/10
Well, if you actually read all that, thanks for sticking with me, I hope you liked the review or that it at least helped you decide whether you'd like to see the movie or not. Not sure why I decided making a full review of this film in particular, I guess it just inspired me. Maybe because it was the first anthology film I saw. I dunno.
See ya!
Okay, so for those of you who haven't even heard of it until now, this film tried to bring new life to the genre by being an anthology film. It is actually made of six short films, all with a stand-alone story, different characters and even directed by different people, one of which acts as the framing device and ties the segments together (so basically, there are five segments inside one overarching film).
Now, let's talk about the plot (spoilers are hidden).
Basically, a group of burglars are paid to enter an old man's house and retrieve a tape. They film themselves doing it because... I don't know, Internet or something. Yeah, they vaguely mention making 50 bucks per tape they shoot after a pointless "introduction" of them vandalizing an abandoned house and forcing a woman to show one of her breasts so I presume it's the kind of tapes they get paid for, but I've got to wonder who the F would pay 50 dollars to see a handful of a-holes stealing a videotape.
Anyway, they get there, find the man dead and they find several tapes. They don't know which one it is their client wants but they were told that "[they] will know when [they] find it", so one of them is assigned the task of watching the tapes to see which one is the right one. And that's how we get to the other sections of the film, which I shall now recap and review one by one:
Amateur Night: Three college guys (read: unredeemable douchebags right out of an Eli Roth movie) want to convince chicks to have sex with them and hope to film the whole thing thanks to a camera hidden in the frame of one of the guys' glasses.
Despite acting like swines (okay that was too far, my apologies to swines everywhere), they somehow manage to find two girls who are actually willing to do them. I would like to point out that one of them looks like this:
So props to the casting crew for finding an actress who looks genuinely creepy. Also, look forward to seeing her in every Tim Burton movie for the next twenty years. Not props to our "heroes" for actually wanting to bone a woman who just screams "crazy obsessive chick who doesn't understand the concept of one-night-stand and considers looking at her a proposal", especially when the only words she ever says are "I like you".
Okay, here's the spoilery part for this segment so don't click if you actually want to see this film:
{Spoiler}They almost start doing it and the crazy-looking girl turns out to be a vampire, or something very similar to one. She is nice enough to kill the douchiest guy first and another one goes down soon enough. The one holding the camera makes it further but eventually gets killed when she grabs him, flies high into the air and drops him. The vampire is rather cool, due to its unique look and weird attitude, and the actress playing her does a very good job, but it's not enough to save this, so you just end up thinking they wasted a perfectly good monster.
Not very good at all. The horror bits are good enough and show some creativity and the special effects are very convincing, but too little too late, which I wouldn't mind if the rest of the segment was used to build tension, but it's only used to build annoyance with these caricatures of college s***heads that so many horror movie makers seem to have a hard on for these days, for some reason. As a result, the main reason I liked the horror bits was that those terrible characters finally died and frankly, I'm not sure which side is supposed to be good and which side is supposed to be villainous here (and no, that doesn't count as depth).
Second Honeymoon: A couple goes on a road trip for, well a second honeymoon. Things get weird when a girl knocks on their door and asks if they can take her for a ride the next day, which admittedly is very weird.
Wait, no it isn't. It's far weirder that the honeymooners find it weird and, in their own words "creepy". We never see the conversation and all we see of the girl is a shaky, blurry, dark shot of her in the hotel's parking lot filmed from their room's window so we have no reason to assume she was being weird. The wife even wants to call the police because of that. Again, keep in mind they are at a hotel and they describe the girl as being "college-age" so, perhaps I'm crazy but, had I been in that situation, I would have assumed she either is a hitch-hiker too, doesn't have a driving license, her car broke/ran out of fuel or pretty much any reasonable thing before... whatever came to their mind. Do they think she is a witch or something?
... our next story is from Texas, where a couple was asked for a ride by a hitch-hiker... and immediately reacted by calling the police.
In general, the two main characters are freaking weird. Not even dickish like those from the previous story, just plain weird. Not only are they apparently the kind of couple who feel the need to record every single moment of their life, but there's also a scene in which the husband realizes 100 bucks are missing from his wallet, and immediately accuses his wife from stealing it, despite saying himself that the area is full of junkies and low-life of all kind, AND the fact that he considered their encounter from the previous night "creepy". See, NOW would be an acceptable point to think maybe that girl was indeed shady and may have been trying to spot something to steal, but whatever.
{Spoiler}I guess I must indeed be crazy because it turns out the girl and her boyfriend had been stalking them. He was the one who stole the money and later on, they break into their room again one night and kill the husband. We don't see them kill the wife so either they killed her off-screen or they're leaving her to find him dead when she wakes up. And yes, they videotape themselves doing it, because that's a really good idea. No, we never find out why they kill them. EDIT: scratch that, I'm stupid. The hitch-hiker was in cahoot with the wife all along. Somehow, I didn't realize that one of the women was the wife and I didn't even notice what I thought to be a man was actually the hitch-hiker. To my credit, we never see the hitch-hiker up close up to that point so I didn't know what she looked like and she wears loose fit clothes and we still don't see her face by the end so I couldn't tell it even was a woman. Also, the segment is still stupider than me because why would they go through the trouble of doing all that instead of just killing the guy and running away? Or just dump him and not risk prison or death row? And why would they film themselves doing it? WHY?!
Not even as good as the previous one. The main characters were not as annoying at least but made up for that by making no damn sense, and they're not particularly likable either. The "reveal", if you can even call it that, was unbelievably weak and it didn't feel like a horror story at all. It could have been a nice attempt at scaring you with real-world fears, but it just doesn't work.
Tuesday the 17th: Ooooooh boy, if the main characters from the previous segments weren't to much of assholes, the ones from this story will gladly take up the douche-torch. In fact, they broke a record because it took them less than ten seconds to make me wish them to die a horrible, painful death. They keep bickering, the two guys just want to screw the two girls and one of the girls apparently had to coerce everyone else into coming together. They keep being jerks by making fun of a guy for... walking on the side of the road and presumably hitch-hiking... huh. What is it with this film and the characters' inexplicable reactions to hitch-hikers?
Oh, the plot, you may ask? Teenagers go into a cabin int the woods to get drunk, high, laid and party, are obnoxious, get killed. Whoops, did I forget the spoilers tag here? Ah come on, this is such an overused plot, you know exactly how it goes, and you know everybody is gonna die. You really don't need the spoiler tag. This must seriously be the plot of about 50% of horror movies since Evil Dead.
And it worked for exactly one film since Evil Dead.
And to top it all of, the film spoils it anyway by having the girl who coerced the others into coming say "you're all going to die here". We're supposed to assume she says that jokingly (or at least that the other characters took it as that) but nobody is fooled.
Okay, there IS a very small bit of originality so I'll have a short spoiler section:
{Spoiler}The girl who coerced the others into coming wanted to use them as bait to fight a creature. She does so by attracting it to various traps she laid out through the woods. The one real bit of originality is a purely aesthetic one as the creature is more or less invisible and appears as a mess of pixels on the camera, which to be honest, does have a rather creepy effect.
Anyhow, it's a very by-the-book segment. We've seen it all before and we've seen it done better, and even those done better weren't done well. Add to this annoying characters that make nothing to make you care about them and some unintentionally hilarious moments as well as probably the shakiest of shaky cams in this film and you've got yourself the worst segment in the whole thing.
The Sick Thing That Happened to Emily When She Was Younger:
Well that's a mouthful. The whole thing is filmed through two web-cam feeds showing a woman talking to her boyfriend who is out on business or something. She is uneasy because she believes she is witnessing paranormal phenomenons. At first the boyfriend doesn't seem to believe her, but changes his mind when he sees something very strange in her house during one of their conversations. She also noticed a bruise on her arm even though she doesn't remember bumping it, and eventually feels a lump.
There actually isn't much to spoil as the characters are just as confused as we are and the story doesn't reveal much until the very end, but here goes anyway:
{Spoiler}It turns out the boyfriend was some sort of scientist/government agent who was watching her after she was abducted by extraterrestrials, who take the appearance of children when on Earth and are what she saw and heard in her house. The lump she felt was a chip inserted under her skin and she had some sort of weird... thing that can only be described as an alien fetus inside her.
I actually rather liked that one. It's not great but the story and characters are good enough to keep you invested, there are some things I thought were stupid at first but made more sense by the end, it's creative enough that you are legitimately intrigued by what is going to happen, not to mention it's not nearly as horribly predictable as the previous three segments. In fact, the final twist was a genuine surprise to me. So yeah, not fantastic, but definitely entertaining and a big step up from what we've seen so far. Beware though, it's rather confusing and I'm not sure I got everything, but I think it's one case where not saying or showing everything actually helps.
10/31/98:
Four guys head to a Halloween party only to find the house where it's supposed to be taking place empty of people. They look around to see if they can find anyone, while the man holding the camera starts seeing strange stuff.
{Spoiler}They do eventually find someone... a cult about to sacrifice a young woman. [EDIT: I am once again stupid; they were trying to exorcise the girl... they still sure looked like they were trying to kill her to me.] While the cultists are dangerous enough on their own, it's the least of their worries as ghosts/spirits/demons start possessing the place, throwing people around, closing all issues in crazier and crazier manners and of course trying to end the protagonists.
This is by far the best segment and I can see why they kept it for the end. This one is very atmospheric, it's genuinely scary and, the icing on the cake, it has some formidable practical special effects which really help the segment's atmosphere. It's also the segment that makes the best use of the time it has. In twenty minutes or so, it really tells a full, satisfying story that feels it lasts just the amount of time it needed to. Oh and guess what? The characters... are actually likable! You actually root for them and stuff! Amazing!
As for the wraparound segment with the thieves watching the tapes, baptized Tape 56, it's a bit difficult to judge as it mostly exists to show the other ones. It does have its own story but it's not very important or interesting and is rather predictable, and considering those are burglars who don't care much about human life and nearly committed sexual assault, I don't really care what happens to them.
Overall, despite the last two segments being pretty good, it's still a bad movie. There were creative ideas and I really liked the concept of someone collecting tapes of various unrelated paranormal (or not) events, kind of like a more straightforward The Cabin In The Woods, but in the end most of these ideas are wasted by a poor execution. On top of that, with a runtime of almost 2 hours, it's way too long, especially if it's to see assholes being assholes. Cutting Second Honeymoon and especially Tuesday the 17th alone would have greatly improved the quality of the film.
However, if you take the film as just a collection of shorts, the last two segments are worth a watch and considering there does seem to be potential, there is hoping the makers of these movies will improve and I am looking forward to seeing the sequel, titled S-VHS. Yes, they have already made a sequel.
All in all, I give the film as a whole a 4/10. It's bad, but the two good segments save it from being complete rubbish. However, in the interest of fairness, I would also like to grade the individual segments:
Amateur Night: 4/10
Second Honeymoon: 3/10
Tuesday the 17th: 2/10
The Sick Thing That Happened to Emily When She Was Younger: 6/10
10/31/98: 8/10
Well, if you actually read all that, thanks for sticking with me, I hope you liked the review or that it at least helped you decide whether you'd like to see the movie or not. Not sure why I decided making a full review of this film in particular, I guess it just inspired me. Maybe because it was the first anthology film I saw. I dunno.
See ya!
