Last year's “V/H/S/94” would successfully rebirth a series that most people thought was dead. The film was well received by critics and fans. It must've done good streaming numbers for Shudder as well, as a fifth installment in the series was greenlit immediately. “V/H/S/99” would gather together another group of indie filmmakers for an anthology of found footage horror. This time, the talent would include: Maggie Levin, of an episode of “Into the Dark;” Johannes Roberts, of the “47 Meters Down” movies and “The Strangers 2;” rapper-turned-filmmaker Flying Lotus, who previously made “Kuso,” Tyler MacIntyre of “Tragedy Girls” and “Patchwork,” and the husband and wife team behind “Deadstream.”
Levin's “Shredding” follows a quartet of teenagers who sneak into a club, where a all-girl punk band burned to death a year before. Roberts' “Suicide Bid” concerns a pledge to a sorority, who is locked in a coffin as part of an initiation ritual. Next comes Flying Lotus' “Ozzy's Dungeon,” which follows a girl horribly injured on the set of a kid's game show. Years later, her family tracks down the host for revenge. MacIntyre's “The Gawkers” shows a group of teenage boys attempting to spy on the sexy woman across the street, unaware of what she really is. Finally, “To Hell and Back” has the cameramen for a coven of witches sucked into the infernal abyss while attempting to summon a demon. They improvise a plan to return home.
Things start to improve with “Suicide Bid.” This is a found footage take on a classic urban legend, of a sorority initiation ritual gone wrong. Watching it unfold is still effective. Seeing the protagonist panic inside the coffin is suspenseful. As it starts to rain, and her sisters run off, things get much worst. If “Suicide Bid” had just ended there, it would be horrifying enough. A supernatural element is then introduced, with a properly freaky inhuman face bursting into the scene. The only element of “Suicide Bid” that struck me as unnecessary is the twist ending, which puts too fine a karmic point on everything.
“The Gawkers” does the best job of capturing the year 1999. The hair styles and fashion choices the teenage boys make are hilariously on-point for this year. I'm talking mesh jerseys and frosted tips. 1999 appropriate technology, like transparent Apple monitors and cam-corders, are present. The boys are fittingly obnoxious but, unlike the kids in “Shredding,” I could relate to this level of douchy, teen boy horniness. The exact nature of the woman across is heavily foreshadowed, spoiling some of the fun in the monster-filled finale. (It also recalls the first “V/H/S'” “Amateur Night” a bit.) Yet I had a lot of fun with that one.
Overall, “V/H/S/99” is a solid addition to the found footage franchise. I don't know if there's anything here as freaky as “V/H/S/94's” “Sewer Drain,” part two's “Safe Haven,” the first film's final segment. It definitely does feel like, five entries in, that the specific ambiance of depravity that characterizes the first two movies has been lost. Yet I still really enjoyed this one. It gets off to a bit of a slow start but the last three episodes are all tons of sick fun. Bloody Disgusting and their associates are determined to keep this series going. Next year's installment, “V/H/S/85,” has already been announced. Hopefully that one will lean hard into the retro aesthetic you'd expect from that year. [7/10]
How many movies have named an entire home video company? Something Weird Video has been putting out extremely obscure and exceptionally strange motion pictures on VHS, DVD, and now Blu-Ray since the early nineties. The company's ability to dig up everything from monster kid backyard home videos, to vintage nudie flicks, to the lowest depths of exploitation schlock makes them one of the greatest archivist in the business. And, of course, the company founders took their name from Herschell Gordon Lewis' 1967 feature. Even by the standards of Lewis' particular style, “Something Weird” lives up to its name.
Mitchell is an electric company lineman who gets smacked by a live wire. The event leaves his face hideously burned but also gives him psychic powers. He encounters a witch named Ellen, who promises to heal his face in exchange for becoming her lover. It is at that point that the U.S. government recruits Mitchell. They specifically want his help tracking down a serial killer, whose been strangling women around the city. Mitchell and Ellen, whose spirits are intertwined, get involved with other people as the investigation carries on. A dose of LSD is what Mitch needs to uncover the killer's identity.
One does not watch a Herschel Gordon Lewis movie expecting any of the cohesion or smoothness of a Hollywood production. Even by 1967, after making movies for six years, Lewis' techniques could best be described as crude. The framing is stationary and awkward. The sound mixing is off, with all the actors being badly dubbed and the musical score – largely composed of a jazzy bass riff – drowning everything out. The editing is shotgun blunt. The special effects were probably purchased from a dime store. The make-up made to turn shapely Elizabeth Lee into a hideous hag is unconvincing, to say the least. Foot chases ramble on for far too long. Not to mention the plot is a bizarre, incoherent mishmash of events. All of this stuff is part of the trash-cinema charm of Lewis' work. The stilted weirdness of Lewis' movies transport you to another world. They are outsider art, even if pure crass commercialism was always the director's intention.
The result might be my favorite Lewis joint. As much as the gore movies have a special place in horror history, they could get tedious at times. Even “Two Thousand Maniacs!” drags a little. “Something Weird” is pure insanity from start to finish. It has the depravity of his horror movies, as the strangulation are plenty sleazy, but rolls along at a manic pace. (Insomuch as the zombie-like gait of Lewis' dialogue could be called manic.) It's even funny on purpose, I think. While I would never promote the usage of mind-alternating substance, “Something Weird” is as potent as a dose of good acid would be. Truly, nobody made 'em like Herschell did. [7/10]
I was impressed with the episode of “Room 104” – HBO and the Duplass Brothers' anthology series that could be about literally anything, as long as it was confined to a single hotel room – that I watched last year. I decided to sample another one of the scary episodes. “A Nightmare” is a starring role for Natalie Morales, of the short-lived but much loved “The Middleman.” It follows Jess, a woman sleeping in a hotel room. She awakens in the middle of the night, only to be confronted with a faceless man with a knife. She startles upright in bed, the scenario only being a nightmare... Only to awaken into another nightmare. She finds herself trapped in one horror after another.
“A Nightmare” was directed by Jonah Markowitz, of “Diary of a Teenage Girl.” He shows an aptitude for horror here. You figure out what's happening soon enough, that our protagonist is stuck in a cycle of nightmarish scenarios. Yet Markowitz' command of shadow and tone makes each scenario fittingly tense. In fact, the less elaborate “A Nightmare” goes, the more unsettling it is. The scariest scene in the episode involves Jess calling her mother, whose conversation grows increasingly more frenzied and concerned. Each of the set-ups here – a man in the room, a snake in a suitcase, hands under the bed – are universal enough that we can all understand them.
In 2020, I watched a trio of British Public Information Films. Those are educational shorts shown to children in school that often became accidental horror movies, due to their blunt and violent content. The most intense of these films is “The Finishing Line,” a practically apocalyptic warning to kids to not play on railways. That one was so gory and grim that it was quickly pulled from circulation. It was replaced with “Robbie.” The titular lad is a schoolboy with two passions in life: Football (soccer to us yanks) and trains. While on the walk home from a game one day, his friends peer-pressure him into walking across a railway. Tragedy strikes as the boy is crossing. He's hit by a train and left horribly mangled.
Compared to the “Battle Royale”-like horror of “The Finishing Line,” “Robbie” is a much more traditional public service announcement. It's narrated by avuncular British television personality Peter Purves, whose calm voice provides a generally even-handed mood to the entire short. He even talks over the actual kids speaking, making this seem all the more like a wise elder communicating vital information to a little child. The film's primary goal is education. It ends with a lengthy segment actually devoted to the mechanics of railways and what train operators see. There's also multiple versions of the film, to educate about the different types of rails that exist. No doubt useful information to British school kids in the seventies, though not very entertaining.
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