Brilliant and touching

Absolutely brilliant

The story-telling is good with flashbacks.The film is both funny and heartbreaking. You smile in a scene and get a soulcrushing revelation in the next.

All of these films share one commonality, that being a kind of emotional center that humanizes a cast of monsters.

A horror anthology of five short films tied together by a sixth short that weaves a narrative around the entire stuff, V/H/S merges found-footage style with anthology format and allows up-n-coming filmmakers to showcase their talents by giving them free creative reign over a blank canvas but it's an opportunity wasted, as most of them chip in with mediocre entries.The basic premise of V/H/S follows the exploits of a criminal gang who are offered a large sum of money by a third party in exchange for breaking into a desolate house and acquiring a particular VHS tape. Upon searching the house, they discover a dead body and hundreds of unmarked VHS tapes but the longer they take to find the right tape, the more danger they put themselves in.The problem with most anthology films is that they almost always fail to maintain a consistent tone and rarely are they effective as a whole. V/H/S is bogged down by the same set of issues, for some of its shorts are genuinely creepy & competently crafted while the rest are simply absurd. Even the frame narrative, directed by Adam Wingard, fails to keep things tight and lacks a proper closure.In addition to that, all the stories have more or less the same narrative structure, and each one of them feels longer than they needed to be. Rarely much happens in any of the stories for the most part and when it does, it's too quick & over before you know it. The POV camera-work itself varies in execution, ranging from excellent to terrible, while Editing fails to trim out the excess fat from each tales.The only one that I really liked was Amateur Night which follows a group of three friends who bring two women back with them to their hotel room and plan to record the activity on a hidden camera but are one of the women isn't what she seems to be. For the most part, it's just as mediocre as the rest of the shorts but its ending is powerful, chilling & frightening. A couple others come close but this is the only one I enjoyed sitting through.On an overall scale, V/H/S neither captivates as a found-footage horror nor impresses as an anthology feature. All the shorts suffer from weak & boring story lines, none feature a compelling character, each episode is poorly edited, hand-held camera-work is all over the place, and it packs more gore than genuine scares. Anthology films are either a hit or miss, often the latter on most occasions, and V/H/S is another disappointing addition to that particular list.

This is no masterpiece by any means. I went into this movie with low expectations, from what I have heard this movie was pretty horrid with not much much horror. Luckily for the film I had some time to kill. So I turned off the lights in my room, got comfortable and turned on the movie. Surprisingly I did not hate this movie as much as I thought I would have. VHS not something you should take serious as a film but, I also don't think its trying that hard to be taken serious either. Throwing my artsy opinions about films away I had a fun time. Check it out you might have an okay time like I did.

Let me start by saying that the VHS series is one of the best movie series of the millennium. Not only does it have an interstellar cast of, Randy Newman, Paul Rudd, Kate Olsen, (The Black one), and probably my dad. You may be asking yourselves why i'm taking the time and effort to type out a movie review about probably one of the most obscure and stupidist movie franchises in all of my asshole, its because i trying to convey the meaning and thought that VHS is probably one of the most brilliantly executed and most well thought out movies of our generation. If anyone out there named Joe Regal, specifically think other wise, your gay and smelly.VHS is a masterfully shot and marvelously executed piece of drama and art. The tender care and Thought that went into every alien dance sequence, and Hilarious and side splitting fart joke truly holds up when Paul Rudd's character, "stinky" gets a call from the E.R saying his mother died from the impact of the collision, and stinky throws his arms into the air and shouts "BAZAANGLE BOJANGLE" The plot of VHS still holds up even after its release in 1867 B.C, real quick- I think that that and that alone is enough to divorce your wife and cut all previous ties with your family and to go see this work of aspiring art.A quick summary of the plot, Randy Newman's and Kate Olsen's (The Black one) characters get into a heated argument in whether or not Kettle corn is gross or not (which it clearly is and stop trying to say its not.) Well, Kate Olsen (The Black one)'s character says its not, and Randy Newman's character decided to give up because his family is probably dead after 400 years of arguing and are probably really gross and smelly. Kate Olsen's character, (The Black one) takes out a bag of succulent little kernels begins to one throat each one of them and walks away, but then she explodes, because in the previous scene she just ate an entire 32" pizza even though she is lactose intolerant. I think this scene and this scene and this scene alone perfectly describes how well all three installments of the VHS series blends and choreograph's into this nice clean consistent work, and truly symbolizes the inner meaning and dialogue of the characters and writings.this is exactly what happened and how the movie plays out and if you don't think so, then your flat out wrong and poopy. Especially if your name is joey and you are a hoey, then your reeeaallly poopy and stinky.I give the Boxcar Children a solid 9.8/10

I don't consider myself a fan of the found footage genre, but I've seen V/H/S show up on several lists of the best of the genre, so I thought I'd check it out.There's some semblance of story setup (bunch of thugs break into a house to steal a tape, but find a dead body and a bunch of other tapes instead). Then it dives into a series of unrelated short films.In a feature you need a story; in shorts you can get by with a gag. I'm going to give the writers a tip of my hat and admit each of the shorts has an effective gag. Some of the shorts work better than others and some just don't work at all.A few of the shorts feature some head-scratching, WTF moments. There are a couple of scenes that almost threw me out of the movie, but I'm glad I continued to watch.I think the team put most of the film's budget into the last short and it shows. I feel it was the best of the batch. I was going to rate the film a 5 but as I think about it, the effectiveness of that last short warrants a higher mark.If you're a horror fan and/or a found footage fan in particular, you can't go wrong streaming this.