Late last fall, I stumbled upon V/H/S, a horror anthology that used the "found footage" gimmick to craft a very unique premise. Not every segment was up my alley, but at the end of the day, I really dug the movie. That's why I got excited when I heard that a sequel would be coming sooner rather than later. That excitement only grew further with reports that V/H/S/2 was actually better than the original. So let's not drag this out any further and jump right into V/H/S/2.
Much like its predecessor, V/H/S/2's segments are all connected by one overarching story. Private investigators Larry (Lawrence Michael Levine) and Ayesha (Kelsy Abbott) have been hired to track down a missing college student, filming their every move as they conduct their search. They sneak into the student's seemingly empty house and, much like the first movie, discover a pile of TVs and an even bigger pile of VHS tapes. They also find a laptop with a recently-recorded video of the kid they're looking for, who rants about the tapes and how bizarre they are. Larry elects to continue investigating the house while Ayesha combs through the tapes for clues. But watching these tapes will expose her to a dark evil that neither she nor her partner are prepared to deal with.
The first tape, "Phase I Clinical Trials," features a young man named Herman (Adam Wingard), who lost one of his eyes in an accident. He has a camera implanted where his eye had been, trading a little bit of privacy for sight. But when he returns home, he begins experiencing what he believes are hallucinations where malevolent spirits are after him. Herman is contacted shortly thereafter by Clarissa (Hannah Hughes), another client of the doctor who installed Herman's eye implant. She explains that much in the same way her cochlear implant allows her to hear ghosts, his new eye allows him to see them. And as is always the case in horror movies, these supernatural entities are not only very real, but very mean.
In the second tape, "A Ride in the Park," a man (Jay Saunders) sets out for a fun round of biking in the local park, documenting his trip with a helmet-mounted camera. But a strange encounter with a hysterical woman leads him to some hungry zombies. Unable to escape them, the biker is quickly attacked and added to their ranks, joining them as they attack others in the area.
Tape number three, "Safe Haven," follows a documentary crew as they travel to a remote area of Indonesia to film a report on a cult that supposedly exploits the women and children of their congregation. While the crew bickers amongst themselves for petty reasons, they soon find that they're in deeper trouble when the cult's leader (Epy Kusnandar) begins a ceremony that starts with a mass suicide and sparks what appears to be Hell itself being brought into our world.
And in our final segment, "Slumber Party Alien Abduction," some adolescents have invited a bunch of their friends to their secluded lake house to have a good time while their parents are out of town. Much as the segment's title implies, however, their fun comes to an end when extraterrestrials make their presence known and start picking everyone off one by one. Yep, the setup is that simple and straightforward.
I noted earlier that I'd heard V/H/S/2 was better than the first movie. And believe it or not, it actually is in a few ways. It's by no means a perfect movie, but it still manages to be oddly satisfying with some legitimate spooks and scares amongst its segments. Like all anthology movies, some segments are stronger than others, but they all congeal together to make V/H/S/2 a solid whole.
The movie's first tape, Adam Wingard's "Phase I Clinical Trials," is basically The Eye but shorter and faster-paced. Wingard doesn't waste any time with character development, giving us only the briefest of exposition as he shoves the ghosts right in our faces. That's not a bad thing, though, as it gets us into the action right away. Wingard's direction makes for a segment that I thought was genuinely creepy, but because of how short it is and the breakneck speed at which it moves, it's already over by the time it really gets going.
Let's move along to "A Ride in the Park," directed by Edúardo Sanchez and Gregg Hale. Like I said in my World War Z review, I'm suffering from a little zombie burnout. But the segment approaches the whole zombie thing in a unique way, which I thought was really cool and I liked it a lot. It helps that Sanchez and Hale are no strangers to the "found footage" style, both having worked on The Blair Witch Project as co-director and producer respectively. They've created something that is equal parts gross, clever, and scary, doing more in thirteen minutes than most zombie movies in the last few years had in two hours.
But there's just no topping V/H/S/2's third segment. Every review I read beforehand, every critique I saw called "Safe House" the best of the bunch. Those reviews and critiques were absolutely right, because it's one of the best pieces of horror cinema I've seen in a while. Directors Timo Tjahjanto and Gareth Huw Evans build a real feeling of dread and foreboding throughout the entire segment, making it tense almost to the point of being oppressive. It all adds up to an insane climax, a blood-soaked attempt by the film crew to escape the cult's compound. It's a thrilling way to end a segment that was already as tense as it possibly could be and it makes V/H/S/2 worth checking out just to see "Safe Haven."
It's just a shame that it was followed by "Slumber Party Alien Abduction." Directed by Jason Eisener, it's definitely the weak link in the movie's chain. There are no real scares, no tension or suspense. And if you're epileptic or hate strobe lights, then you'll loathe "Slumber Party Alien Abduction." It's frustratingly difficult to tell what the hell is happening during the climactic alien abduction because of it being lit with strobe lights (which ends up causing the segment to look like it was edited with a chainsaw). The ultra-annoying characters don't help matters either, and really, the whole segment comes off as something of a waste.
If you're wondering why I haven't talked about the wraparound story, it's because there isn't much to talk about. Director Simon Barrett does a decent enough job using it to tie everything together, but it's pretty much the exact same story as the one that connected the stories in the first movie. It doesn't particularly add anything here, but the good news is that it doesn't eat up too much time.
So not everything about V/H/S/2 is great. But I thought it was a pleasant improvement on the "horror movie mixtape" idea the first movie brought us. The disappointing elements are easily drowned out by the stuff that works, leaving V/H/S/2 as a mixed bag that's good but not great. I'll definitely recommend it to the curious and people who liked the first V/H/S, so if you want to see it, check it out if you have the chance. And I'm honestly interested in what they'll do with a third V/H/S movie. They can only go up from here, right?
Final Rating: ***
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