Shudder Saturday: V/H/S/85 (2023)

Although it has had a number of wobbles here and there, the V/H/S series has become an enduring, and largely satisfying, horror anthology series. Others may disagree, but that's my opinion and this is my space for sharing my opinions on movies. I appreciate the commitment to the aesthetic, I have loved some of the wilder tales, and some of the imagery has been up there with the weirdest and wildest in the horror genre. So I was looking forward to this latest instalment, V/H/S/85.

I'm not even sure to begin with this review. I suppose I should simply say that I REALLY disliked this. It is easily the worst in the series, taking that position previously held by V/H/S: Viral, and the worst part is that very few of the stories have that sense of glee present in the rest of the series. Although two "punchlines" worked well enough to make me smirk.

There's a wraparound tale, helmed by David Bruckner, about a life-form being observed in a lab. The first of the main tales, directed by Mike P. Nelson, then shows us a group of people fooling around by a lake. All is well and good until it isn't, and this was my favourite tale, especially when it connected and was given a proper resolution later in the film. Then it's on to Gigi Saul Guerrero's tale of people trying to escape the devastating effects of an earthquake that has caused carnage in Mexico. Natrasha Kermani then brings us a retro-tech tale that delivers some gore while also mocking pretentious performance art. We then get Nelson returning, his second segment as enjoyable as it is disappointingly brief. I would rather have had more of this than the time wasted with a couple of other tales, including the next one, a twisted serial killer gorefest directed by Scott Derrickson that has a young man being able to record dreams that prophecise the future.

As well as the directors just mentioned also writing their segments, with the exception of Bruckner and Kermani, who are given story credits, writing comes from C. Robert Cargill, Zoe Cooper, and Evan Dickson. I cannot muster the enthusiasm to specify exactly who is responsible for each segment, so everyone can share the blame and the small amount of praise in equal measure. 

As for the cast, most of them do perfectly fine within the limitations of the style, although the only people who stand out are those involved in the segments helmed by Mike P. Nelson, thanks to the fact that they are given a decent amount of time to show their interactions with one another, making them more realistic and fleshed out, before things start to tilt into the crazy horror.

I don't want to give anything away, the aim of each tale is still to deliver a fun surprise at the end, and some people may find the whole thing much more satisfying than I did, but I am struggling to think of anyone who will really enjoy this. Even if you find it passable, which I didn't, then I suspect you will still find that it suffers greatlin in comparison to almost every preceding instalment in this series. I'll still watch another one if the series continues, and I still love the VHS aesthetic, but I hope it is a marked improvement after this disappointing nadir.

4/10

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Wrong Turn (2021)

At the last count, I think there were approximately twenty films in the Wrong Turn movie series. I could be misremembering, but I'm fairly sure that I'm correct. Every movie was pretty much the same; some inbred cannibals pick off numerous victims, often using some traps dotted around the vast woodlands they call home.

This Wrong Turn is a reboot written by the same writer of the original film, Alan B. McElroy, and there's enough here to keep horror fans happy. But there are also a couple of key points that may work against it. I'll come to those later.

Matthew Modine plays Scott Shaw, a father who arrives in a small town near the Appalachian Trail on a search for his daughter, who he hasn't heard from in about six weeks. Jumping back to six weeks previously, viewers are shown what happened to his daughter, Milla (Charlotte Vega), and the friends that she was travelling with. And what happened to them involved some woodland traps, an accident or two, and a self-sufficient community known as 'The Foundation', headed up by Venable (Bill Sage).

Directed by Mike P. Nelson, Wrong Turn is a well-balanced mix of nasty gore gags and attempts to be more seriously disturbing. Helped by McElroy's script, fans of the series will like the fact that they get something very much the same, but different. Traps are used, unwitting travellers are caught unawares, and the main villains are a very tight-knit "family". 

Vega is a decent lead, she's allowed to show some real strength in the moments that have her character doing whatever needs to be done as she keeps survival in her sights, but no other members of her troupe really stand out, unfortunately. Sage is an impressive head villain, always a threat and always seeming one step ahead of the protagonists. Modine does well with his supporting role, and gets more involved with the main events during the third act. The other main person to mention is Tim DeZarn, playing a local who may or may not be wishing misfortune upon the young travellers. 

And yet the small differences are enough to stop this from feeling in line with the pure horror entertainment vibe of the original movie. It may seem churlish, but the plotting here, the use of 'The Foundation' instead of those crazy cannibals, stops it from feeling like a Wrong Turn film. Although McElroy may have wanted to revisit his earlier work and rework it, perhaps it could have been better to just have it as a new, original(-ish) horror property. Although that would leave them unable to sell this as a recognisable brand name.

Overall, it's a decent film, especially if you don't pick apart all the holes in the logic of it. It's worth a watch. It just doesn't seem to fit alongside all of the other movies with Wrong Turn in the title.

6/10

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