It’s that time again. Halloween is coming and as a fan of horreur, I have to up my movie-watching game. Well, I suppose I don’t have to. But it’s basically all I do for the season any more so… I don’t really know where I was going with this thought. Let’s just do the thing.
V/H/S/94
This is an anthology film, for all the good and bad that entails. In addition to the four short films that are featured in it, the framing device also has its own story. It’s about a SWAT team that busts into a warehouse to… I don’t really know what they were up to, but they find a bunch of corpses and mannequins and screens that lead into the other segments. This was by far the weakest part of the film, and honestly I would have been happier if there had just been a Crypt Keeper-style host that introduced each segment. Points for having each of the short films tie into the framing device, but it was still lame and had the worst actors by a country mile.
This first short follows a news reporter and her cameraman as they investigate a local legend of a sewer-dwelling creature known as the Ratman. It starts off with your average interviews of random townsfolk, but then the big boss demands that they actually go into the sewer to get the real story. Our heroes reluctantly comply, entering a storm drain where they find a dirty old homeless man. He creeps them the heck out, and as they run away, they’re knocked unconscious and, well, things take a bit of a turn from there. I can’t say I saw what happened next coming, and it’s definitely a much better ending to the story than if they’d just found a monster and got mauled by it. While this was the most surprising story in the anthology, I wasn’t totally sold. The whole climax was shaky-cammed to Hell and while I know that often the scariest things are what you don’t see, the obfuscation was very clearly there because they didn’t have any money to actually put the action on screen.
The second short film is probably my favourite of the bunch, even though it’s the most predictable and has very little going on until the very end. Maybe that latter point is why I like it, actually. Builds up that tension. This one is the story of a funeral home employee who is, as I understand it, stuck hosting an all-night wake. Do those happen? Anyway, nobody shows up, but she keeps hearing sounds that seem to be coming from the (closed) casket, and the weather gets worse as time goes on, with the threat of a tornado looming. Eventually some weird old guy shows up to “pay his respects”, which consists of him muttering some gibberish and then taking off. All the usual crap happens: power goes out temporarily, we learn of the deceased man’s strange death… yadda yadda. And then while our heroine is contending with some chains that have mysteriously appeared on the only exit, locking her in, the coffin falls over… You know what happens next. While there are some little surprises, the broad strokes were obvious from the beginning, even before any foreshadowing. Still, I was a more engaged with this story than the last.
Next up was the longest (or at least it felt that way) of the bunch. This one starts with a mad scientist who is kidnapping and mutilating people in an attempt to create cyborgs. He eventually succeeds, and our viewpoint switches to his first successful creation. It gets a glimpse of a news report on a missing girl, who was ostensibly the human part of our POV character, shortly before a squad of soldiers busts into the lab and murks the mad doctor. However, the lab is booby-trapped, and also another much more deranged cyborg activates and starts slaughtering the soldiers. The POV character makes a break for it in the midst of the chaos, and attempts to flee the lab, being hunted by both the soldiers and the berserk cyborg. This short is not only the longest, but also the most elaborate, featuring the most actors, the biggest and most detailed sets, tons of gore, and some spectacularly awful CGI. The stereotypical Asian over-acting was kinda funny, and though this segment wasn’t terrible overall, I wasn’t really able to get into it. I am definitely not a fan of the first-person perspective, but at least it gave the short a unique feel.
Lastly, was the segment that I fell asleep during. It’s about a bunch of good ol’ boys looking to “save America” by… I don’t know, to be honest. It starts out with them gunning down some dude they’ve got locked in their compound, and I think started zoning out about five minutes in. I remember them killing the dude a second time, which made me cock my head to the side quzzically, and that’s when I think I passed out. When I came back to, there was a lot of gunfire, and then some dude ran out of a building and exploded after another guy shouted “you’ve covered in vampire blood!” So, yeah, I suppose that guy they kept shooting was a vampire. And in this canon, vampires apparently explode when exposed to the sun? While it goes without saying since I was literally put to sleep, I cared very little for this story. Even the climax was lame as heck, and though the monster looked kinda cool, the practical effects were very lacking.
I pains me to say that we’re not starting off strong this year. V/H/S/94 was overall pretty boring, and usually I quite enjoy a horror anthology! But when even your best sequence is slow and nothing but clichés, well, there’s not a lot of hope. And it’s not just me! While critics apparently love this movie and it has a 90% rating on Rotten Tomatoes (just further proving that critics are morons), average movie-watchers have been less impressed, scoring it more in the range of 55%-77%, depending on where you look. And though those aren’t terrible numbers, they’re not great, either. Though I think that only the framing narrative was the only truly bad part of the film, none of the other segments really lit a fire in me in any way. It just felt like a bunch of stuff that I’ve already seen done much better many times before.
Oh no, am I becoming cynical about my favourite genre? Nah, can’t be. I watched Barbarian and Weapons last month and thoroughly enjoyed them both. It’s just that V/H/S/94 is nothing more than completely average.
Dying to Play (aka Braid)
I was all excited to start watching a bunch of spooky films, you know, real jazzed to get into the spirit of the season. But the thing about me and movies is that my passion for them is largely dependent on how I felt about the last one I watched. So when I come across a film like Hunter Hunter or Loop Track that really dazzles me, then I’m excited to watch more movies! Conversely, when I watch a movie that bores me half to dead, I find it very difficult to bring myself to commit 90-140 minutes of my time to another movie afterward.
I don’t know if other people have this same thing, but it’s how I am.
So it took me a couple of days after watching V/H/S/94 to summon up the strength to actually load up Tubi again and put on Dying to Play. Which is a shame, because I was actually pretty excited to throw it in the queue when I first heard about it. I don’t think that this really came through in what I wrote above, but after letting my thoughts on V/H/S/94 marinate for a few days, I think I kinda hate it in retrospect.
Dying to Play, on the other hand, I was very much thrilled by! And thank goodness for that, because I would have been really sad if my Halloween movie-watching excitement tanked completely in the first week.
So, the thing about this film is that since I was kind of leery about giving it such a big chunk of my time, I didn’t so much watch it as I did put it on in the background while I made a pizza. Both activities took roughly the same amount of time to finish, so that was a neat coincidence. As such, though, I was only half-paying attention to it. Which didn’t seem like too big a deal for most of the run time. It was interesting, but not really anything super engrossing. Until the last fifteen minutes. I was glued to the screen -may not have blinked the whole time- and left with my very favourite question to ask:
“What in the flying f**k did I just watch?”
Dying to Play is very much a movie that demands that you pay attention to the details. It calls attention to a lot of weird, little things as it goes, things that don’t quite seem to mean anything or that, at a first glance, appear to be contradictory. And then you start to see those things come up again. Sometimes it’s just a brief little shot that you write off as being part of a bad drug trip. Sometimes it’s a whole-ass scene that somehow seems to to have been predicted by something you saw earlier, but the timeline can’t possibly allow for. So much of this movie is deceptively straightforward, then they pull the rug out from under you. And then as you’re sitting on the floor rubbing your sore bottom, they pull the floor out from under you.
What I’m saying is, I made a grave error by not giving my full attention to Dying to Play. I missed so much! So I watched it a second time.
The second time around, I made sure to drink in all the details that I could. I paused to scrutinize details and rewound many times. I took notes. (Do not read them – watch the movie first.) I was so determined to piece together exactly what this film’s story was trying to tell me. And yet still, nothing conclusive. This is one of those pieces of media that is so open-ended that you can come up with a bunch of wild theories on what really happened, and there’s more than enough evidence to support them all.
I know I haven’t written a single word about the plot or the characters or the themes or the cinematography or really anything that you would expect to read in a normal movie review. And that’s intentional. Just get on the ride and let it take you away. Maybe you won’t end up feeling as strongly as I did about it, which will actually probably be the case because what could possibly live up to all the gushing I’ve been doing? It’s got a 5.3 rating on IMDb, so take my praise with a grain salt. All I can tell you with 100% certainty is that this movie worked for me. It worked real well.