V/H/S/Mixtape

Bluesky

Whilst it is to be welcomed for helping to revive the horror anthology and for giving a platform to up-and-coming filmmakers, the V/H/S series has been a bit hit and miss. It’s hard to exercise effective quality control with lots of different people working on a project like this, and it’s hard to balance the tone successfully. That begins with finding the right framing narrative, the glue that holds everything else together. This time around, it may well have been glue that inspired the solution. Sticky, messy, the unwise drug choice of resentful teenagers. What does that remind you of?

Enter GWAR, the legendary extraterrestrial metal band who may make continuity editors nervous but are guaranteed to put on a show. Starting as they mean to go on, with Grodius masturbating onto his childhood drawings in an attempt to bring them to life, they announce “Sit back, human filth, and revel in the unholy horrors that we are about to show you.” It is immediately clear that this particular V/H/S anthology will, at the very least, be memorable.

Perfectly attuned to this tone is Seventies-style children’s television show The Curious Chorus, in which cute little puppet germs representing an assortment of deadly diseases invite a child to come up from the audience to join them in a song about dancing and the inevitability of death. We see only a little of it, though, before moving on to unedited ‘how it’s made’ footage which sees a bullish and impatient TV executive (Barbara Crampton) arriving at the studio where the puppets, now over 30 years old, are stored. The small crew she has brought with her is intending to digitise the puppets so that the show can be reimagined for the new generation, but the puppets don’t like it.

Though this is a very simple story, it’s well realised, with the puppets themselves and every detail of the series fitting in perfectly with the period. The set is well designed and full of odd props which could easily inspire stories of their own, and despite being a comedy it has a deliciously sinister aspect to it.

Next up is animated tale Another Cabin, about a boy, his sometimes tyrannical grandmother, and the giant monster (with a still more remarkable giant tongue) which finds its way, one dark and snowy night, to their little forest home. This stops rather abruptly but is charming (in a violent sort of way) whilst it lasts. its landscape has something in common with the next piece, a live action segment in which a group of YouTubers – amongst the most popular victims in horror today – drive out to a remote spot near the Bulgarian border (we’re not told which) to explore an old military base, and discover within it an anechoic chamber, with predictable results.

It’s through this that the film’s theme, about music and sound, really begins to take hold. Next up we get the first of two music videos: one in which a camera Evil Deads it through black and white woods to find a monster feeding on a corpse. The second, which pops up later, features a wordless hospital drama in which a man is attacked with a syringe, then dissected, then buried with a phone in his casket. Neither is particularly remarkable in its own right but they fit well into the overall package and help to sustain its energy.

Lovecraft fans will be delighted by a later segment in which a young film student by the name of Philip Howard (Jihad Brent) takes an interest in a ‘Mr. Z’ who lives on the top floor of his apartment building and plays strange, haunting melodies on his violin. Yes, it’s a present day adaptation of The Music Of Erich Zann, but what makes it special is that Philip is using the Meta-style product commonly known as ‘pervert glasses’ to make a documentary about his life and daily encounters, so we get to glimpse the otherworldly beings that Zann’s music attracts, and even to glimpse the place they come from, from a first person perspective. For a low budget production this is impressively well done, and it lends the anthology some gravitas by tapping into ancient ideas about the cryptographical and magical potential of melodies.

Finally we get a film reminiscent of Rutger Hauer’s swansong, The Sonata. Finding a tape left for her by her recently deceased father, a musician, his daughter laboriously follows a set of instructions aimed at creating a track which might bring him back from the dead. Seduction, bondage and chainsaws will no doubt keep the audience happy, but there’s a final twist she may not have fully understood.

In and around all these fragments, GWAR get confused by VHS tape itself, introduce us to an aerobics routine, torture a slave, interview and outer god, and share their thoughts about the films. – or just get bored and demand coke. They bring something to the franchise that it had lost, and make this a contender for the best V/H/S film yet. It went down a storm at BeyondFest, and now, thanks to Shudder, it’s becoming available across most of the world.

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