It's not a Fantastic Fest without a "V/H/S" movie. For the last four years running, an installment in the Shudder Original series has premiered in Austin, leading us to the sixth in the series dropping this weekend in "V/H/S/Beyond" before premiering on Shudder on October 4th. By now, the strengths and weaknesses of this series have been pretty well-established: clever concepts and inconsistent 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 intentionally or coincidentally built around deformation. However, the execution often falters, as if the entire film needed more finetuning in some stage of production. 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.
In this film's wraparound segment, documentarian Jay Cheel gets to have some fun riffing on his own skill set in projects like the excellent "Cursed Films," making a sort of faux streaming original docuseries about a pair of tapes that purport to show an alien encounter. The wraparounds often literally tie in and out of the anthology segments in this franchise. Still, this one is more thematic, setting up the recurring theme of the draw of seeing what feels impossible through a grainy home recording.
"Beyond" bursts into action with "Stork," a shoot-em-up action segment from Jordan Downey that sometimes plays like a first-person POV shooter zombie game. A group of officers are searching for some missing babies, including one of the cop's own, and end up at an old house that's been overrun by monstrous creations, one of whom is even wielding a chainsaw. Until its WTF ending, it's the most straightforward segment and enjoyable on its own wacky action terms. Get in, blow up some bad guys, drop some wicked makeup effects, get out.
A more ambitious segment unfolds in Virat Pal's "Dream Girl," which allows the first Bollywood dance number in a "V/H/S" movie. The first half of this one is stellar, proving that Pal has a filmmaker's eye, even through the shaky cameras of a pair of paparazzi chasing an Indian star. When one sneaks into the icon's trailer, he discovers something unimaginable, and, well, chaos unfolds. And by chaos, I mean shaking, screaming, flashing lights, and loud noises. The truth is that using shaky cam to disorient the audience takes more skill than it looks, and this one gets too confusing and nauseating.
I felt similarly about the shakiness of Justin Martinez's "Live and Let Dive," but it has SUCH a killer idea that it's more forgivable. Not since the brilliance of "GoPro meets zombies" in "V/H/S/2" has this series found such a neat way to tell a horrifying story. In this one, a group of people are going skydiving for a 30th birthday when they, thousands of miles in the air, stumble upon an alien invasion. As their plane explodes, and half of them smash to the ground, the survivors are forced to race through an orange tree field to avoid the massive alien creatures now hunting them. It's "District 9" with skydiving. Fun.
Less fun is Justin Long's "Fur Babies," which just proves that "Tusk" really messed up Mr. Long. A variation on that film's deformation fetish, "Fur Babies" does feature some gnarly makeup effects, but, like many of these segments, it goes on too long. There's no reason for "V/H/S/Beyond" to be almost two hours. I think the best thing future installments could do would be to tighten up the segments by about 15-20%. Almost every chapter in all six films could use a trim.
That's true of even my favorite segment in this one, "Stowaway," the directorial debut of the great Kate Siegel, from a script by her husband, Mike Flanagan. I responded so strongly to this one because it doesn't feel like other "V/H/S" segments. First, it's truer to the title, actually looking like something found on a tape that's been recorded over a dozen times. Second, it's not reliant on disorientation, even if what Siegel chooses to hide gives it strength. It's the story of a woman investigating stories of lights in the sky, and what she discovers is closer to "Annihilation" than anything else. It's weird but not merely in gross-out terms or disorienting ones. It's evidence that the best of the "V/H/S" segments don't just think outside the box; they prove that there should be no box for this kind of filmmaking in the first place.
This review was filed from the premiere at Fantastic Fest. "V/H/S/Beyond" premieres on Shudder on October 4th.
