Last year's compendium of horror shorts V/H/S turned out to be a surprise hit for the Magnet / Bloody Disgusting partnership, despite the varying quality of the segments, so with the massive returns gained from such a low budget project, it was inevitable there would be a sequel!
This time the framing story is of two private detectives trying to hunt down a missing teenager, coming across a squat where he's reported to be hiding out. They find a room with a stack of televisions and VHS tapes, along with a laptop with the webcam turned on, and also some video clips, one of which is of the gang from the first movie. The other clip is the missing person explaining finding something interesting about some of these weird recordings. The P.I.s split up, one goes to search the house, the other to see if there are any clues on the tapes. She pops one in the deck and presses play.
Fool.
1. Phase 1: Clinical Trials
A patient has a prototype bionic eye transplant with a camera in after a car accident. It records everything, and he's told it may glitch a few times as the brain gets used to it. He gets home and things are going swimmingly until something moves his Xbox controller and throws his kitchen kettle onto the floor. Investigating this he notices a body under the covers of his bed, or is it a glitch? There's no one there, apart from when he turns to leave there's an image of a bloodied man right in front of him. He starts seeing other apparitions and locks himself in the bathroom and falls asleep there. The next day he's visited by another patient of the clinic who informs her cochlear implant enables her to hear the dead, and that's what he's seeing too. She explains its best to ignore them or they can get harmful. Surrounded by ghosts, she initiates sex as that's the best way to distract them. Really. It's all fun and games until someone loses an eye.
2. A Ride In The Park (pictured)
Almost entirely recorded on a GoPro helmet-mounted sports camera, we watch a cyclist head off down the trails doing rad jumps, until a frantic woman jumps out of the woods asking for help, then after puking her guts up she collapses, dead. Then she wakes up and bites our camera guy, and not long after, he joins the undead too. From then on we are given a zombies-eye view of what the lumbering infected get up to in the woods. It's quite comical, and fairly straightforward rampaging and chomping tasty humans. Filmed by the guys behind The Blair Witch Project, it seems everyone had a lot of fun with this!
3. Safe Haven
Easily the peak of the compendium, and the most well realised. We follow a bunch of young journalists trying to investigate an Indonesian cult compound, under the guise of holding an interview with the leader. Midway through the interview, a bell starts tolling, and all Hell breaks loose.
This could have easily been expanded to a full film, as the characterisation and scenario are really quite disturbing. If it had room to build up a bit slower, and omit the guy in a gorilla suit at the end, it would have been excellent. As it is, Safe Haven is the reason to watch V/H/S 2.
4. Slumber Party Alien Abduction
The parents have gone away for the weekend, so it's time for the kids to fanny about and get their mates round for a sleepover. After pranking the older sister and her boyfriend with a suprise disco while they're trying to get off, the house is overwhelmed with a loud sonic blast, which at first everyone takes as the electrics messing up. When it happens again in the front room, accompanied by a flash of grey aliens at the window, things get horrific.
Greys are the only horror trope I know that make me uncomfortable, I'm not sure why, it might have been watching Communion at an early age. SPAA however didn't work for me, I think it's because we saw too much of them, plus everything was mostly shot using Dog Cam (they had mounted the camera on their pet in the second half) so the bottom of the frame had a fake toy dog head there, making everything daft.
I enjoyed this one a lot more than the first. It seemed more cohesive and the shorts were better quality. I'm interested to see where this series goes, as long as they don't start adding a 'mythology' to the framing story, as was hinted in one of the video clips on the laptop. Doing that would lead to constraints when there's so much scope with the format.
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