V/H/S (2012)

My rating - 6.5/10

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A group of yobs are hired to break into a house to find and steal a very rare VHS tape. Once inside they discover the owner seemingly dead in an armchair. They start to search through the tapes and view some which uncovers some very dark footage.

A found footage anthology with 5 stories. There's lots of shaky cam throughout so if you're not a fan of that or found footage movies then this won't be for you. For the rest...

Story one is "Amateur Night" and features three guys who rent a hotel room then go out on the town to see if they can pick up some girls to take back for a night of sex, but once back at the room they discover one of the girls is not what she seems. One of the guys wears a pair of glasses that has a hidden camera in it and that's the POV we get in this one. This story has nudity and some good gore but the main male characters are highly unlikeable but I guess that was the point. Hannah Fierman is the star of the show here and is wonderfully creepy as the strange girl who takes a liking to one of the guys. One of my favourite stories in the whole franchise.

Story two "Second Honeymoon" is about a young couple who are travelling along route 66 on their honeymoon. They are stalked by a strange figure who breaks into their hotel room who steals money, rinses the guys toothbrush in the toilet and runs a knife over the woman's body. The next night the stranger breaks into the room again and kills the guy by stabbing him in the neck. While cleaning the knife she's discovered by his wife and things take a disturbing twist. Not a bad story and the gore at the end is pretty good and quite nasty. Sadly for me it takes to long to get to the payoff.

Story three "Tuesday The 17th" follows a group of young adults who take a trip to a forest. While filming on a digital camera the picture keeps glitching and showing images of mutilated bodies. It soon becomes clear they all being stalked by a strange glitching killer and that one of the girls has lured them all there as bait so she can kill it. I quite like this one and it has a couple of decent gore effects. The killer is quite interesting too.

Story four "The Sick Thing That Happened To Emily When She Was Younger" follows a young woman who spends her time chatting to her doctor boyfriend over Skype. She thinks her new apartment is haunted and over the next few nights she becomes more and more freaked out and she starts to cut herself in a place she has a bump that she got as a child. The ghosts are actually aliens though and her boyfriend may know a lot more about what's happening to her than he lets on. An okay story that has a couple of quite creepy scenes and one quite gory one.

Story five "10/31/98" is about a group of friends that go to a party on Halloween night. When they turn up at the wrong house they think they're the first to arrive so take a look around. They find a group of men in the attic tying up a young woman and performing some sort of ritual. When the men start to die they try to rescue the girl, but their heroic actions may have doomed them all. I like this one and it has some decent effects, the hands coming out the wall are actually quite creepy. The least gory of the five stories this one plays more on atmosphere.

The wraparound story is fine and does offer a couple of genuinely creepy moments. Overall it's a decent movie with, for me at least, the first and last stories being the best. The acting and effects are good, but as said if you're not a fan of shaky camerawork then you'll probably end up feeling quite sick watching this one.

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