Review of V/H/S: Viral (2014) by The I — 27 Oct 2014

V/H/S 2 is everything good that can come from a sequel, V/H/S: Viral is everything that is wrong with a sequel. This second sequel feels unbelievably rushed and has themes that don't even fit in with the point of the series.

Now we're down to 3 stories, with one being taken out for some reason...?! Why? So we can spend more time in the wraparound story? While story 1 had a good set up and was interesting in its documentary style approach, it wasn't scary at all and it didn't even attempt to be scary, if one had to have been taken out, that's the one. They didn't even film most of it found footage style, most of it was filmed like any normal movie which takes away most of the point. It also explained a few things which seemed odd but it has the best visuals this series has seen and overall has less blood than V/H/S 2. Story 2 had a good premise and besides destroying time itself, was interesting. The story took a little long to kick into gear but when it finally did, it was appropriately creepy. Story 3 did its one thing right and had me completely confused throughout and just had me thinking, 'what?'. I didn't hate it as much as quite a few others did. However, it does end rather abruptly and does have some slow motion in it, which doesn't make sense because a camera wouldn't suddenly go into slowmo just because it looks cool but trust me, that's the least of this movies problems.

As stupid as this sounds I have a feeling the stories are an afterthought in this movie to the very forced wraparound story, or at least that's how it feels. When I heard about the 'viral' aspect of this, I thought it'd be a bunch of teens searching the Internet for a scary videos, which would make sense but when I heard what it actually was I thought it'd be teens trying to film scary things to get hits online. What we actually have is an incredibly forced message about how people are too obsessed with technology to become the next big thing and what it can do to people, so much so that the stories don't have anything to do with what's going on and just play randomly for some reason, there isn't even a VHS tape in sight. I understand they have to change the formula up somewhat in an effort to remain fresh and even though it has a point that I agree with, it could have been done a lot better but as it stands, is quite terrible. Having them look online would have been a fine change. All of the smaller stories, if you want to look deep enough, seem to have some sort of message of leaving well enough alone and just being satisfied with what you have, which at least ties them in, somehow, to what's going on. It also has some random imagery of the first two movies for some reason, probably in an attempt to try to cling to some of the genius of the first two. I don't know what's worse, having a segment taken out to spare us the pain or that it makes a short movie even shorter, not like it could really save the movie.

V/H/S: Viral completely goes against the whole point of the series for no good reason. The message doesn't fit in to the series and is out of place, the stories don't fit in with what's going on and seem like an afterthought, making the whole point of the series useless and tells us what we already know. Sure, I wanted to find out what was going to happen next but it wasn't very good. Also, while at least I can say the first two movies attempted to scare the audience, this one didn't even try. The closest thing we got was being confused in the 2nd story and really confused in the 3rd. It's also annoying that story 1 began to explain itself and the others didn't and for this movie that annoyed me a little. The other two movies didn't explain that much and I was fine with that but when you start to explain in detail for some of it and don't for the others, even though I know each story is directed by someone else, it's a little jarring. Like the other movies, I will return to this at some point but will just watch the stories and skip everything else. You changed for change sake and destroyed everything you had going for you... Not angry, just disappointed. At least it's short.