'V/H/S/99' (2022)

I know I've said it before but I'll say it again, I have a real soft spot for the 'V/H/S' franchise. It's not perfect by any means but the ratio of Good Stories to Bad Stories always seems to work in my favour and these movies also occasionally throw up a classic in stories like 'A Ride In The Park' and 'Safe Haven'. You can't ask for a lot more than that; well, I can't.

'V/H/S 94' proved to be a very solid entry to the franchise so when I saw that 'V/H/S/99' was a thing, I got very excited and settled down, last night, for a watch. I suppose that falling asleep, halfway through the movie, should have warned me that something wasn't quite right this time round...

I'd normally write a little bit here about the 'wraparound plot' that frames the rest of the stories but... There wasn't one this time round. What we get instead are a series of stop motion animations that tie into one of the other stories. I was kind of half and half about this approach... On the one hand, the animated sequences were genuinely quite funny but it felt like the movie, as a whole, needed a little bit of context that the 'wraparound' segments normally bring (despite the varying quality of these in previous instalments). It felt like there was a bit of disconnect here, just random stories thrown together rather than being discovered.

Anyway... Onto those stories. Things didn't start off too badly with 'Shredding', a story where you absolutely knew what was coming but with enough jump scares, when it counted, for it not to matter too much. Nice visual effects too. And then we moved onto 'Suicide Bid' (a sorority horror, not... you know) and that is where things started to get a little dodgy with another story where you absolutely knew what was coming but with no real jump scares to balance that out. 'Suicide Bid' had a little go at playing on my fears of being buried alive (thanks for nothing Edgar Allan Poe) but didn't enough with that to be truly memorable.

And then it was onto 'Ozzy's Dungeon' which was where my brain and body both gave up and decided to take a little nap. I got the concept but the execution quickly became incoherent and all I kept thinking was, 'that girl could have wished for anything, what led her to wish that her family's faces would all melt off?' Seriously, the story doesn't hint at a reason and we're just expected to go along with it? It looked cool but I was after a little more than that.

Things did pick up with 'The Gawkers' but it was too similar to 'Amateur Night' (in the original 'V/H/S') to really hold my interest. 'Amateur Night' wasn't perfect but did it a whole lot better than 'The Gawkers'. 'To Hell and Back' was the highlight of the whole movie for me, really funny and properly creepy all at the same time. And Mabel was brilliant, I would watch an entire movie about Mabel. I wish the rest of 'V/H/S/99' had met that standard.

A bit of a disappointing movie then but enough scary visuals, over the course of the stories that didn't cut it, to keep my interest and then 'To Hell and Back' at the end was like a 'well done' for watching the others. And I was pleased to see the veggie masher make a cameo appearance ;o) I hear that there's a 'V/H/S/85' coming up soon(ish). Of course I'll watch it, I'm just hoping that it will be better than 'V/H/S/99'.