petronomicon-06376 the first two were a little hard to follow but had some linear story to tell. This mess was filmed with water damaged tape by a 1st gen VHS camera and quadruple spliced by some dude who just polished of a bucket of KFC without washing his hands. The transitions with staticky blue screen, glitchy tape, and mixed in cell phone screen was confusing, loud and annoying. Too bad because the stories were still a bit better than the first VHS installment.I still don't understand the role of the ice cream truck. Was it broadcasting it's viral video while being made, which corrupted the brains of its viewers? Why did people fall off bridges or get run over? Why was it circling and why the hell didn't the cops simply cut it off. Beyond the plot holes, you have to have a high tolerance for jerky "found footage" camera style as the last story dishes it out like a bad elementary school casserole. The skateboarders were simply annoying punks and their behavior was extremely uncharacteristic of kids in a fight with weirdos. Your tolerance for bad, jerky camera work is put to the test with this installment, and be prepared for the "reaction cam" view in the third story as you get a lot of skateboarder faces in your face. Blech! Only worth seeing if you've seen 1 & 2 and even then set expectations low.

Scarecrow-88 While a viral virus outbreak seems to be spreading across the internet superhighway, as the film follows a teenage young man biking through a city searching for his love who seems to have been kidnapped in an ice cream van (that has seen better days), we are privy to a series of recorded episodes where characters face incredible, supernatural events.The first tale doesn't follow the found footage format religiously as the fourth wall of the popular subgenre is broken as pieces of it are shot by a "cinematic camera". It involves a trailer park magician-wannabe named Dante (Justin Welborn) who finds a demonic black cape (supposedly discarded by a frightened Houdini!) and exploits what it can do for great success. He records his cape's magic tricks and what the cape allows him to do with his hands and mind when wearing it. However, the cape is a carnivore (I can't make this stuff up!) and demands human nourishment (!) in order for Dante to be given access to perform with its magic. So a number of magician assistants wind up missing, and Dante records (why?) the process of the cape's feeding from them! In found footage, the obviousness of recording events which defy common sense, reeking of implausibility, finds its way into another example of the genre. You just kind of have to accept that what we mostly *wouldn't* record will be in order for us to experience what the characters do. This tale is a special effects showcase where the cape does some amazing things. Arial stunt work (climbing walls, the cape teleporting a person from one place to another and a rabbit from one place to another), bodies of a police task force suffering crushed bones without actually being touched by Dante, a rabbit being split open by Dante with him just moving hands right above it, the cape "eating" victims, and Dante performing fireball maneuvers that develop and fly from just his hands and mind making them appear; the tale has plenty of effects work to dazzle. The stunning red head, Emmy Argo, is the assistant who might just get the upper hand on Dante due to how much he likes her. Her boyfriend's fate is particularly ghoulish. Irony of the cape's feeding habits doesn't stop at just Dante's victims…he had better watch out as well! The second tale deals with parallel alternate universes *meeting* as two scientist Alfonsos (Gustavo Salmerón) discover each other after building successful dimensional machines in their basements. Exhilarated by their mutual encounter, the two Alfonsos decide to cross over into each other's worlds for a fifteen minute visit. One of the Alfonsos realizes that the alternate universe he crossed over into isn't necessarily to his liking…it seems the people in this universe are a bit biologically different (that is an understatement!). The horrifying addition to this is the alternate Alfonso has a particularly unique penile difference from his counterpart which might have bit of an overbite! Alfonso's alternate wife, Marta (Marian Álvarez), might just also have a biological, anatomical overbite all her own! Just its premise is creepy and unsettling enough to leave quite a Cronenbergian impression hard to forget (even if you *want* to unsee it!). The creation of the basement teleport machines certainly cause more harm than good to their creators! The third tale features skateboarders traveling to Tijuana for the ultimate experience, but the perfect location to vert presents more than they bargained for: true Mexican occultists in Day of the Dead skull makeup and attire arrive to attack them! An arm pulled from one of the boarders causes blood to leak on this chalk symbol which seems to awaken something evil. Eventually the occultists who die at the hands of the boarders awaken as ghouls! Even a monster seems to emerge thanks to the black magic that responds to the blood of the boarders! Mostly seen through the cameras hooked onto the helmets, with one boarder shooting from a hand-held, this features gruesome violence from skateboards, animal bones, and even a sword! The most virtuoso and exciting use of the POV approach of found footage. The stoner characters aren't exactly ingratiating, but they sure defend themselves well (well, two of them do!).Other found footage additions include a woman whose nude recording was posted on a website getting revenge on the blogger in a taxi and a Spanish harlem gangster soirée erupting into chaos when the lead hood gets enraged by the fork-stabbing of his pet dog! The wraparound story isn't anything to write home about. It has a young man chasing after a van (a van dragging a biker across a paved road is nuts!), eventually finding it with no one inside, perhaps left with a decision to make which could affect the entire city, maybe even the world!

Bryan Kluger Back in 2012, a new horror anthology graced the big and small screens and gave us new horror filmmakers, great stories, and scared the living daylights out of us. That anthology was called 'V/H/S', named after the popular home video format from the 80s and early 90s and consisted of 4 different short films with a 5th overall wrap- around movie to tie everything together. Each segment is directed by someone different in the horror genre and every filmmaker's unique stamp is imprinted in their own portion.Since the first 'V/H/S' was so successful and became an instant cult hit, the following year, they made 'V/H/S 2', which followed the same formula and was even better than the first go around. Now in 2014, we have the third installment and possibly the final film called 'V/H/S 3: Viral'. This time around, there are only three segments with a wrap around storyline, and instead of the whole VHS angle, this is more about things being filmed with a mobile phone and being uploaded to the internet, hence the 'Viral' aspect.The wrap around story is quite cool and features a a young couple watching a live police chase happening in their neighborhood. Once they see it coming down their street, they boyfriend uses his mobile phone to record the police chase in hopes that it goes viral online. That brings us to our first segment called 'Dante The Great', directed by Gregg Bishop (Dance of the Dead), which tells the story of a famous magician and the mysterious murders and disappearances of his female assistants. Dante (Justin Welborn) comes across a cloak, which is said to belong to the great Harry Houdini. Once he has the cloak, he is able to pull off any illusion with great ease, but there is something sinister about the cloak that might be the key to all these murders. This segment had both the found footage aspect as well as a straight narrative, but the special effects were pretty amazing, and Welborn did a great job as a sadistic and mad magician.The second segment was by far my favorite and was directed by the legendary Nacho Vigalondo (Time Crimes). His segment is called 'Parallel Monsters' and was the right amount of screwed up and scary that he can make a feature length movie out of this. This short starts off with an inventor who builds a machine in his basement that connects him to a parallel universe. Once this is open, he sees the mirror image of himself and his house. The two dopplegangers are friendly and are equally excited about this invention. They both decide to take 15 minutes to cross over into each other's universe and explore the similarities and differences. But once they do, we see that there are more things that are different than the same as we see bags dripping with blood and guts hanging around the house, blood orgies, sirens, and a satanic cult presence everywhere. And just when you think you've seen it all, Nacho adds a level of horror and shock that would make the Japanese horror film genre beg for mercy. It's quite amazing.And the last segment is called 'Bonestorm' and is directed by Justin Benson and Aaron Moorhead(Spring). This piece is all sorts of fun and the premise is very simple. We meet a few jerk-off skateboarders who are trying to make their 'sponsor' video by pulling obnoxious pranks and skateboarding on city property. The four skateboarders head to Tijuana, Mexico to film their last scene in their video when a satanic and supernatural demon cult shows up and starts attacking them. Then this film turns into a video game like simulation as the skateboarders in first person mode use their skateboards, ninja swords, and anything else they can get their hands on to kill these demons from hell. It will keep you on the edge of your seat throughout the entire battle.I really hope that this isn't the last film in the 'V/H/S' series, because if it is, I feel like it would have went out with a whimper rather than a bang. That being said, this third installment still has some fantastic moments that is guaranteed to thrill you, chill you, and fulfill you.

thesar-2 It took me 2 attempts to get into the first VHS movie and then I loved it. 3 attempts for the follow-up and then I really liked it. It could be another 15 attempts for the third installment, and I probably still won't like it. Of course, that won't happen. This is will probably be the first and last time this lame attempt at milking the one and only decent found footage series gets seen by me. Virtually nothing new or creative here and even less coherency appears on screen. And this is sad as some of the segments appeared to have a slightly elevated budget. But, alas, this felt rushed and the first draft for each was used in order to, ah-hem, roll this out to the viral community. Be kind and rewind…the first two and watch those instead.