V/H/S/Beyond (2024)

Not rated, but let's be honest.  This is as R-rated as it gets.  The V/H/S movies have prided themselves on being low-budget special effects gore movies that want to show you every second of carnage.  There's language all throughout.  It's absolutely brutal to watch and that can be a bit much.  Also, there's an excessive amount of faces removed for one movie.  Still, not rated.

DIRECTORS: Jay Cheel, Jordan Downey, Christian Long, Justin Long, Justin Martinez, Virat Pal, and Kate Siegel

I keep saying that I'm leaving this franchise behind.  Then it's spooky season and I hear mildly good things, so I feel like I have to keep going.  It's a thing with me and franchises.  I hate not having seen every one of them.  I'm really resisting catching up on the Despicable Me movies and the Minions spin-offs because I think that would be a bit brutal...even though I'm powering through V/H/S movies.

As with most anthology films, I'm going to treat this as a series of mini-reviews.  If I do it the way that I want to do it, I'm going to close up the last day of spooky season with a final scary movie.  I don't know if I can do it, but it would be fun if it all worked out.

"Abduction" / "Adduction"

I want to love this.  So much about this is aesthetically pleasing.  Honestly, if I was to make an entry into the V/H/S franchise, I would want it to look like "Abduction."  I love the idea of a documentary --a fully funded documentary --being a way to tell the story of something unexplainable.  That's what the initial conceit of V/H/S was (a franchise, by the way, that is no fun to type out).  The idea was that someone found these old videos and they showed us the impossible and lost arcana of reality.  It was a way to look at the Deep Web of real life.  And, honestly, the documentary format almost works better than simply "Ooh, I found these old tapes."  

It seems like I would really like the "Abduction" framing narrative.  First of all, I miss the days when the movies used the framing devices to tie in all of the anthology stories.  That's not happening here.  What is happening is that there are stories that are contained to their own little segments, and then there is the one story that we keep coming back to.  Unfortunately, the story that we keep returning to has little to nothing to do with the other stories (except for the fact that all of these are sci-fi horror and that three out of the six stories have something to do with aliens).  But man, does this kind of crap the bed when it comes to the reveal of what the actual footage showed.  I was way more into the talking heads and the lore of this Asian family who moved into a scary old house than the actual footage of what was shown.  Maybe some of that comes from the fact that I've just been watching two hours of very similar gore that the big needle drop came across as anticlimactic.  It's a bummer, because I was going to preach about how much I dug the entire thing.  I'm pretty sure those YouTubers who do special effects are real dudes.  For all I know, all of the talking heads were someone important and I'm just not in those worlds to comment on them.  Still, I have to give the short film points for accidentally nailing what it is like to watch a bit of a disappointing documentary.  There's all this investment with real answers and then we just see some stuff we've seen before.  Perhaps our imaginations are far more interesting than what reality can show us.

"Stork"

Thank goodness they didn't tell us the title of the shorts beforehand or that title would have served as a major spoiler.  Also, you know my policy on spoilers. (Okay, I don't know my policy on spoilers.  It's amorphous.  Sometimes I give you a heads up.  Sometimes I don't.  Just be prepped for spoilers if you weren't already.) "Stork" went from one of the dumbest concepts of anthology films to potentially being the most fun of the group.  Listen, I'm preaching anti-gore.  These movies tend to be gore-aggressive.  "Stork" really wants to gross you out with what it shows.  If anything, "Storks" job is to be memorable for just how much violence you can fit into a short.  So keep that in mind when you are watching this.

For a long time, I was annoyed by how Resident Evil the whole thing was.  It has the acronym "W.A.R.D.E.N." hopefully as something so self-aware that you have to laugh at it.  But the point was almost like this was a Left 4 Dead style video game where this elite task force has to clear areas of spooky zombie like creatures --in this case, creatures from a meteor --using guns and other weapons.  There's the rookie, which is very video-gamey, who is videoing the whole thing. Sure, there's a subplot about one of the cops having lost an infant to these creatures.  I don't hate that, but I don't love how gore-heavy movies tend to love to show terrible things happening to babies.  I remember in Zack Snyder's Dawn of the Dead being horrified by the unborn zombie.  That was the first and last time that I could give any movie the "gnarly" answer towards scary undead babies.  It's just trite at this point and, if the big reveal didn't save it, I would be lambasting the movie.  The eponymous stork does make the entire thing a good time.  It's such an absurd concept for a horror movie that I couldn't help but kind of applaud how macabre the whole thing was.  It's silly, and the short does just the right job of winking-without-mugging at the camera.  It's pretty solid, despite the fact that it checks off every annoying thing that the V/H/S movies do.

"Dream Girl"

Oh man, this one does the opposite of "Stork" does. While I was wildly annoyed by "Stork" at the beginning, only to kind of love it by the end, "Dream Girl" had so much promise.  I love the fact that we could spread out to the idea of international horror, especially in the context of a Bollywood movie.  It was something different.  It had a different sensibility to the whole thing.  This is me playing a lot of shorthand with what I just watched, but I also kind of stand by it, especially in context of the next short.  American characters in horror movies is a specific kind of trope.  They have very American concerns.  Often, these characters are looking for a good time when something unfortunate happens along the way.  That's what "Live and Let Dive" did.  With "Stork", these guys were action movie archetypes.  We have such a shorthand for these kinds of characters that, especially with anthology storytelling, we don't need to do much heavy lifting.  But with "Dream Girl", we have this whole subculture that might not get widely recognized in American storytelling.

Also, the fact that they shot a pretty fun Bollywood dance number goes a long way with me.  The one thing that I kind of give props to Beyond for is the notion that we're not stuck on VHS anymore.  The idea of telling through Go-Pro or a phone is at least acceptable at this point. At one point in time, I would have gotten really upset about this. But everything about the look of the Beyond movies lets me forgive a different way to shoot the same style of movie.  But I love the idea that, if these characters are on a Bollywood set, some things would have been shot in 4K.  Yeah, we didn't need to have a Bollywood dance number, but I also love that nothing really seemed to be held back in the process of recreating the experience of a Bollywood dance piece.

It's just that, once the other shoe drops, the movie almost makes no sense. I don't hate the idea that the Dream Girl (whose name I refuse to look up right now because I have the perfect tabs open right now and I'm lazy) is the creation of a studio so they can just program actors.  It's AI adjacent and I can get behind that. But it does nothing with that. Beyond that (no pun intended), it just kind of becomes murderous based on very little info.  The protagonist tells the robot --not knowing that she's a robot --that she's a goddess.  So she rips off her own face and murders everyone?  Also, there's a lot of intentional wording to make the thinly veiled surprise happen.  It starts off so strong and then just becomes another V/H/S entry.

"Live and Let Dive"

This one is almost not a movie.  It's not bad.  But do you know what vibes I got from the movie?  This felt either like an R-rated Universal Studios park ride or a VR experience that would have been fun.  I'm not saying that's a bad thing.  I bet that part of the mission statement behind making "Live and Let Dive" was to give the audience an adrenaline rush unlike anything that they've seen in the franchise up to that point.  If that's the goal, absolutely nailed.  But the problem is...that's not what I was looking for.  If anything, it came across as kind of...dumb?

This is almost a criticism for most of the V/H/S movies.  These movies tend to be incredibly vapid.  They're meant to be distilled scares.  "Live and Let Dive" is giving me the excuse to make a comparison, so bear with me if I don't talk about this specific short a ton.  There's almost nothing to analyze with "Live and Let Dive".  It's a fun time that involves a skydiving set piece and being hunted by an alien.  Okay.  That's fun.  But I think that there's an expectation that anthology horror can't be thought provoking.  I put to the argument that Black Mirror fundamentally proves that wrong.  Both V/H/S Beyond and Black Mirror are sci-fi horror.  I will concede that Black Mirror has a ton of time to get the nuance of a complex story down. But both are anthology stories.  The thing is, V/H/S prides itself on its love of gore and special effects.  There are plenty haunting Black Mirror episodes that do nothing with gore or special effects.  Instead, they're there to make you question what is acceptable with science fiction.

"Live and Let Dive" doesn't do anything with the sci-fi element.  I'm now coming to the realization that the science fiction elements of this entry were kind of squandered.  I've always been in the camp that science fiction is meant to comment on who we are as people and a society.  "Live and Let Dive" is just survival horror.  Again, very VR.  If you want to feel like you are falling, cool.  Don't hate that.  But we get almost no characterization in this movie.  The Go-Pro Birthday Boy is our hero and people have to tell us that he's afraid of heights.  That's not characterization.  Mind you, the V/H/S movies are about the camera acting as avatar for the audience.  Maybe it's intentional that the guy behind the camera tends to be a bit of a blank slate.  But while I'm incredibly impressed by the production element of "Live and Let Dive", I was getting a little tired by this point in the movie.

"Fur Babies"

This is a short about course correction.  While "Stork" gets a little silly, but holds back the mugging, "Fur Babies" embraces the heck out of the mugging.  On the whole, "Fur Babies" is actually kind of fun.  The horror prioritizes itself over the science fiction with this one.  We have to accept that grafting dog parts onto humans necessitates science fiction.  I guess I can squint and pretend that the treatise of the film is intact, but I don't necessarily agree.  That's not the real problem.  Honestly, once the reveal happens with this one, I'm more on board than the beginning.  

The bigger problem is that "Fur Babies" knows it's a silly premise.  I hate that.  I don't hate a silly premise. But a lot of this entry doesn't take itself seriously.  Part of it comes from the over-the-top, almost comical archetypes of the protagonists.  The movie is taking pot shots at two separate philosophies.  It's making fun of psychotic pet people while simultaneously trying to take down social justice advocates like Peta.  Okay.  But we're so busy doing silly things that we only have a few minutes where the horror can actually have a little bit of weight to it.  When the horror does show up, I'm on board.  But if we're breaking this down, the short starts with the antagonist making a really goofy local commercial.  Then we see equally goofy animal rights activists stepping on each other's toes to be more culturally sensitive to the humor of all.  I'd like to point out: none of these jokes land.  If anything, they just seem lazy and underdeveloped.  Similarly, we don't actually have enough information for who are villains are.  It's a fun concept, even from someone who doesn't like gore. But otherwise, what is happening here?

Also, there's one thing that is vital to the plot that doesn't make a ton of sense.  The cameraman is investigating the antagonist's house because they saw all these stuffed pets on the mantlepiece.  The antagonist reveals that these pets died of natural causes and she couldn't bear to say goodbye to her loved ones.  Okay.  I don't realistically see this as being a priority for animal rights activists.  Seriously, there seem to be way bigger threats.  Maybe the characterization is that these guys are too small time for any serious issues.  But when the cameraman loses his cool, blowing their cover, I don't really get the incentive behind it.  Maybe I'm out of the loop on the taxidermy thing, but it's a weird choice.

"Stowaway"

Again, I almost gave up.  It's when I almost give up, that's when I'm sold.  Is it THE Mike Flanagan who wrote this?  If so, round of applause.  The reason I got so annoyed is that it felt like it was stepping on the toes of the other skits. Half of the skits were about alien abductions because that's where the brain goes when it comes to talking about sci-fi.  On top of that, this is a found documentary?  It's the thing we just came back from when we saw the framing narrative right before hand.  Honestly, I thought for a second the framing narrative was still going on. 

But "Stowaway" does more with the alien abduction doc than "Abduction" does. Part of it is that we completely embrace something hilariously tiny and make it the foundation of our horror doc.  As an alien investigation story, we keep waiting for the alien to show up and be this horrid creature that rips us apart, like with "Abduction" or "Live and Let DIve".  But the tech on the ship becomes this real bad guy.  If every other story is about death, I love the notion that the real horror in "Stowaway" is the burden of eternal life.  There's this scary moment where the nanites first appear and she thinks its poison.  It's great.  It heals her finger that she cuts, but leaves a little healing scratch behind.  I though, "Weird.  Technology is good enough to stop bleeding, but not enough to completely heal a finger?"  But that is such a cool foreshadowing for the nightmare of what is about to happen.

Now, as much as I liked this one, I was a little disappointed that the way I was going to write this one didn't happen.  We kept on getting this footage of a little girl's birthday party, where the documentarian discovers in the course of looking at her own footage, that she erased something precious to her.  She then drops this cool factoid about the Andromeda galaxy and how time is relative based on speeds and location in space.  Now, while I love --in the worst way possible --that the documentarian keeps getting pulverized as the ship travels at near light speed and then repaired as a concept.  I thought that the real horror was how much of her daughter's life she was missing with these two week jaunts through outer space.  I mean, the foreshadowing was right there, but instead we get body horror.  Very V/H/S.

Overall thoughts

I hate that I didn't hate it.  I keep wanting to leave this franchise behind.  It was way better than the last entry.  But that also didn't mean it was great.  It's a lot of gore and I want these movies to be smarter.  I don't need to be grossed out every two seconds.