Fair warning: This is the first V/H/S movie I've watched.
I've been familiar with Brad Miska's horror anthology for a while now, but V/H/S/Beyond — the seventh instalment in the series — is the first one I've actually seen. I can't compare this new alien-themed mish-mash with films that came before it, but I can say I found it to be a fun (if patchy) gore-fest that alternates between entertaining and disappointing.
What's V/H/S/Beyond about?
Like the other movies in the V/H/S franchise, Beyond is a loosely linked collection of short horror films by different writer/director teams. This time the theme is extraterrestrials, with the segments (mostly) revolving around sightings, spaceships, and abductions (mostly because a couple of the segments, unless I missed something, don't seem to involve aliens at all).
Jordan Downey's "Stork" plays out like a first-person shooter (FPS), with a trained squad breaking into a mansion linked to a string of baby kidnappings; Virat Patel's "Dream Girl" follows two paparazzi spying on a Bollywood star with a secret; Justin Martinez's "Live and Let Dive" revolves around a sky-diving party gone horribly wrong; Justin and Christian Long's "Fur Babies" follows activists investigating a suspicious doggy daycare centre; and Kate Siegel and Mike Flanagan's "Stowaway" follows an amateur documentary maker who discovers a spaceship in the desert.
Are all of these segments equally entertaining? No, but each has something going for it, and as they're only 20 minutes long it doesn't matter too much if there are a couple you're less fussed about than the others.
V/H/S/Beyond is gory good fun.
You can tell from the trailers alone that the franchise delights in its gore, and Beyond is no exception. Downey gets things off to a blood-spattery start in "Stork", with FPS-style bodycam footage allowing zombified creatures to constantly pop out of dark doorways before being dispatched in a variety of increasingly violent ways (the denouement of this segment is both creative and stomach-churning). The Long brothers' "Fur Babies", meanwhile, despite having seemingly nothing whatsoever to do with the overarching theme of Beyond, gets points for its inventive unpleasantness as well as the ominous, Misery-esque antagonist Becky (played with true Kathy Bates-inspired terror by Libby Letlow).
Elsewhere bodies are pulled apart in "Live and Let Dive", a movie set is massacred in "Dream Girl", and Jay Cheel's documentary-style framing story ends with a visual that should under no circumstances be viewed whilst eating.
V/H/S/Beyond is patchy horror.
If the gore levels are nearing a 10/10, though, the entertainment levels are more up and down. Patel's "Dream Girl" has an awesome dance number and a fun concept, but a cliched end; Martinez's "Live and Let Dive"s sky-diving opener is one of the highlights of the entire movie, but the grounded second half doesn't quite live up to what came before it; Siegel and Flanagan's "Stowaway" is intriguing and visually impressive, but I wanted to spend more time in the alien spacecraft. All the short films struggle to flesh out characters, although arguably that's to be expected with their limited runtimes.
Ultimately, V/H/S/Beyond is a fun Saturday night popcorn-muncher that achieves what it sets out to do. It's scary and creative in parts, and a bit of a let down in others — but the good bits are enough to let you forgive the bad.
V/H/S/Beyond is streaming on Shudder from Oct. 4.
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