This is the latest of a whole series of horror films, none of which I’ve watched as I’m not a particular fan of these things. They are anthologies in the found footage genre, though I find that their commitment to the narrative device varies by each film. This one consists of four separate short films plus a frame story in between the others. The production quality is deliberately bad as an inherent aspect of the found footage style but I find that by now this actually detracts instead of adds to their verisimilitude. There are some clever ideas and the inclusion of one Indonesian film is just amazing, but by and large I am not impressed.
A SWAT team conducts what is at first thought to be a drug raid on a warehouse turns into something more as it is revealed to house a weird cult. The film returns to short clips of the ongoing raid in between the other four stories. The first one has a television reporter and her cameraman investigate a storm drain where townspeople have reported seeing a strange rat-like creature. The second story involves a young funeral home worker who has to host an overnight wake for a corpse but no one seemingly comes to the wake. The third is the Indonesian one, about an archetypal mad scientists who abducts people to carry out his experiments with cybernetic implants on them. The last story is about an extremist militia group who are training to blow up a government building. Yet here too not all is as it seems as we watch them repeatedly shoot a prisoner they hold in the head on different occasions and they intend to use his harvested blood as a weapon.
The individual stories, made by different filmmakers, have little in common with each other save for being supposedly found footage in the VHS format. I’m irritated by the lack of sincere commitment to the conceit however. In The Empty Wake for example the perspective switches between handheld and multiple security cameras so often and so conveniently for the benefit of the audience that it’s questionable this even counts as found footage. None of the films are truly scary. At most they are disgustingly gory with the Indonesian film The Subject being a full-on action film that doesn’t hold back on the violence and bodily harm. I didn’t find them to be very original either, except perhaps for the last film Terror which teases you with the possibility that these crazy rednecks may actually be justified in their terrorism if the US government is controlled by the undead. Unfortunately even there it’s just a hint that is never developed as the stupid militia members predictably get sloppy and so their prisoner gets loose to wreck havoc among them.
Apart from this, the ideas behind these stories may be sound but they are as dated as the VHS conceit and 1990s setting. I think I would have liked these films better if they pretended to be smartphone videos and were set in modern times. As it is, the inspiration behind these stories are too obvious and old. The storm drain story is of course directly inspired by the chaos cults of Warhammer or similar sources. The wake film is a pretty standard restless corpse story. The VHS conceit justifies the deliberately poor video quality and that it turn helps make up for low budget special effects. Even so the effects here look so cheap and campy that you can hardly expect anyone to be truly scared, as opposed to fun, squealing scared. The Indonesian goes so far overboard with the gore and the mad scientist esthetic that it’s not trying for any verisimilitude at all. It seems serious about taking the Frankenstein theme of creating a monster but it’s not like it adds anything new to a thoroughly explored territory.
As a long-running series, this must have its share of fans but it’s not for me at all. Monster-type horror that is all about visceral gore and unrestrained violence doesn’t do much for me. I prefer more cerebral, conceptual horror and more subtle use of visual effects. Instead of blood and entrails, give me stories about attacking the mind and someone’s personality, changing memories and destroying their relationships. Barring that, adopting a more serious tone with less of the tongue-in-cheek, this-is-all-in-good-fun attitude would help. As it is, I admire this project as a launchpad for the careers of the filmmakers involved, but I don’t actually like the films themselves much.