As you might imagine, this means I’ve never been a huge proponent of the V/H/S movies, the near-annual found footage anthology franchise. There are usually fun bits and pieces to find, often from filmmakers I like quite a bit, but as a whole I’ve always found them to be, at best, a mixed bag. And that continues with the latest installment, V/H/S/Mixtape, but definitely trending in a more positive direction.
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Themed as they all are, music, or at least sound, is the overarching through line here. The six segments are bound together by over-the-top theatrical metal band Gwar (RIP Oderus), who pop in to serve as de facto hosts of the whole affair. Your mileage may vary with these interludes depending on your tolerance for Gwar’s crass, goopy sense of humor, which is not for everyone.
The first segment out of the gate, Renee Zhan’s “Dance, Dance, Dance, Dance,” is easily the highlight of the entire anthology. It’s about an attempt to reboot a cancelled children’s puppet variety show with some dark secrets. It’s twisted and clever and features standout work from Jim Henson’s Creature Shop, and also stars genre fave Barbara Crampton, which will always earn you bonus points. There are creepy puppets, nightmare animatronics, plenty of spurting blood, and what I always imagined a midnight behind the scenes tour at Showbiz Pizza would look like. It’s terrifying. And the main song is an absolute earworm I may stop humming.
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Multihyphenate Flying Lotus checks in next with a short stop-motion-style animated tale about a long-tongued monster and a terrible grandmother. This is followed by what is easily my least favorite short, “Heartbeat,” from MadS (which is great) director David Moreau, which watches like the most generic found footage movie imaginable. Two YouTubers explore a hidden bunker in the woods and it doesn’t go well. Toward the end there are interesting concepts and tweaks to the formula, but for the most part, this plays like something you’ve seen many times and falls prey to many of the most annoying, tired tricks of the format. I also really dislike the way much of it is filmed, using a kind of swooping super fish-eye that I think is supposed to be high tech, but is mostly a distraction and occasionally nauseating.
Horror stalwart Ernest Dickerson (Tales From the Crypt: Demon Knight) is up next with a tale about a young man documenting his life in a decrepit rooming house full of off-kilter weirdos. Things begin a bit slow, but we wind up neck deep in some prime elder god mayhem. Tobias Forge, mastermind of the Swedish metal band Ghost, directs a music video from his former band, the long-defunct Repugnant. Everything wraps up with RZA’s offering, “Death Tone,” which, oddly enough, follows a young music producer. She's on a mission to follow her late fathers instructions to create the ultimate track. And it just so happens that the sounds required to complete the beat revolve around murder.
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As usual for the franchise, V/H/S/Mixtape is an up and down affair, though there are more hits than misses. One of my big complaints with previous installments is that the individual segments often long overstay their welcome, causing the whole shebang to be way too long, but at a touch over 90 minutes, this moves forward at a swift clip. Slight and inconsequential, the filmmakers lean into the goofy, lo-fi, DIY punk-as-fuck aesthetic, which serves this episode well. I don’t know that I’m going to remember much from this down the road, except for that damn song that’s destined to be eternally stuck in my head, but this is a good time, even for someone who generally doesn’t care for these movies. [Grade: B]
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