V/H/S/99 (2022) poster

V/H/S/99 (2022)

Rating:


USA. 2022.

Crew
Producers – David Bruckner, Josh Goldbloom, James Harris, Brad Miska & Radio Silence, Visual Effects Supervisor – Justin Martinez, Creature Effects – Magee FX, Inc. (Designer – Patrick Magee). Production Company – Studio 71/Blood Disgusting/Soapbox Films/Cine Pocalypse.

Shredding

Crew
Director/Screenplay – Maggie Levin, Producer – Sherryl Clark, Photography – Alex Choonoo, Music/Songs – Dresage, Visual Effects – Andy Holton, Production Design – Britt Keller.
Cast
Jesse Latourette (Rachel), Keanush Tafreshi (Ankur), Dashiell Derrickson (Chris Carbonara), Jackson Kelly (Caleb), Tybee Diskin (RC), Verona Blue (Deirdre), Aminah Nieves (Charissa), Kelley Missal (Jessie)

Suicide Bid

Crew
Director/Screenplay – Johannes Roberts, Photography – Alex Chinnici, Special Effects Supervisor – Tom Ceglia, Makeup Effects – Patrick Magee, Production Design – Tammy Trinh.
Cast
Ally Ioannides (Lily), Isabelle Hahn (Annie), Caitlin Serpos (Imogene), Brittany Gandy (Lucy), Lohan Riley (Hannah), Breanna Raquel (Helen), Chris Page (Giltine)

Ozzy’s Dungeon

Crew
Director – Flying Lotus, Screenplay – Zoe Cooper & Flying Lotus, Photography – Ben Kitchens, Special Effects – Tom Ceglia, Creature Design – Heather Mages & Mark Villalobos, Production Design – Calder Greenwood.
Cast
Steven Ogg (Host), Sonya Eddy (Debra), Amelia Ann (Donna)

The Gawkers

Crew
Director – Tyler MacIntyre, Screenplay – Chris Lee Hill & Tyler MacIntyre, Producer – John Negropontes, Photography – Nicholas Piatnik, Makeup Effects – Cody Wilkins, Creature Design – Patrick Magee, Production Design – Mars Feehery.
Cast
Luke Mullen (Dylan), Cree Kawa (Mark), Ethan Pogue (Brady), Duncan Anderson (Boner), Emily Sweet (Sandra)

To Hell and Back

Crew
Directors/Screenplay – Joseph Winter & Vanessa Winter, Producers – Jared Cook, Joseph Winter & Vanessa Winter, Photography – Jared Cook, Music – Joseph Winter, Monsters Created by Troy Larson, Makeup Effects – Mikaela Kester, Creature Effects – Chris Hanson, Production Design – Meg Cabell.
Cast
Archelaus Crisanto (Nate), Joseph Winter (Troy), Melanie Stone (Mabel), Tori Pence (Kristen)

Plot

Shredding:- A group of teens armed with videocameras head in search of Colony Underground, the site of an arts collective that used to gather beneath the city. Three years ago, an electrical fire broke out during a concert and the band were killed in the midst of the audience panic. As the group investigate, they find things still alive in the underground. Suicide Bid:- It is university hazing week and Lily has decided she wants to be in one particular sorority. She is determined to make a ‘suicide bid’ – betting on acceptance into that sorority and applying to none of the others. She is selected to undergo an initiation but this requires that she be buried in a coffin just like the legend of Giltine. Ozzy’s Dungeon:- Donna is one of the teens who appear on the tv gameshow Ozzy’s Dungeon where she must suffer various humiliations and compete through an obstacle course to have her dream fulfilled. During this, a rival contestant smashes Donna’s leg. After the cancellation of the show, Donna’s mother Debra imprisons the host and makes him undergo the same humiliations and tortures that Donna did. The Gawkers:- A group of teenage boys use their video camera to film pranks and peep on girls around the neighbourhood. Their dream seems fulfilled when the luscious Sandra moves in next door. To Hell and Back :- Two cameraman come to film a special as a cult prepare a ceremony to incarnate a demon at the moment the clocks switch over to the millennium. However, the incantation goes wrong and the two cameramen are transported down to Hell.


The V/H/S films were one of the more popular among the spate of multi-director Anthology Films that came out in the 2010s. These consisted of V/H/S (2012), V/H/S/2 (2013) and the standout of the bunch V/H/S Viral (2014). The gimmick of the series was that all of the episodes were made in the Found Footage format. The films included offerings from Adam Wingard (who also executive produced the first three of the series); Eduardo Sanchez, co-director of The Blair Witch Project (1999); Gareth Evans, Nacho Vigalondo, Timo Tjahjanto and Justin Benson/Aaron Moorehead.

V/H/S/94 (2021) was the fourth in the series and the first to be made specifically for the Shudder Network. V/H/S/99 was the second of the Shudder films, with both airing around the October Halloween season, and was followed by V/H/S/85 (2023). As with all the previous films, V/H/S/99 is produced by Brad Miska, as well as Radio Silence, the quartet that include Matt Bettinelli-Olpin and Tyler Gillett, who later went on to make Devil’s Due (2014), Ready or Not (2019) and Scream (2022), whose careers were launched by the 10/31/98 segment of the first film.

The first episode here, Shredding, comes from Maggie Levin who had only previously made short films. It is easily the worst of the bunch. Sometimes all the affected amateur filmmaking of Found Footage just looks like unprofessional filmmaking. This is amateurishly shot and edited and ends up being so choppy that it is impossible to tell what the performances are like. The whole episode hinges around a group of teens venturing down into an underground area where an alternative band was killed in 1996 – only for the resurrected band members to appear and attack them amid some occasionally good makeup effects.

Suicide Bid comes from Johannes Roberts, a British director initially of low-budget films who has been on the rise in the last few years with films such as The Other Side of the Door (2016), 47 Meters Down (2017) and sequel, The Strangers: Prey at Night (2018) and Resident Evil: Welcome to Raccoon City (2021),

Steve Ogg as the host of Ozzy’s Dungeon in in V/H/S/99 (2022)
Steve Ogg as the host in the Ozzy’s Dungeon episode

This promptly becomes one of the best episodes of any of the V/H/S films. After the initial set-up, Roberts heads for a premature burial story. Once he has Ally Ioannides in the coffin, Roberts elicits a sense of claustrophobic terror, including unleashing a box of spiders in the coffin with her and then having it start raining and the coffin flooding with muddy water. By the time of the fairly perfunctory appearance of an actual ghost, it seems a hardly necessary cap on the nightmarish proceedings.

I was almost entirely put off watching V/H/S/99 by the name of Flying Lotus on the credits. Flying Lotus (in real-life Steve Ellison) is better known as a rapper and has produced various albums as Flying Lotus. Billed only as Steve, he previously made the full-length film Kuso (2017), a bizarre melange of gross-out surrealism so incomprehensible that it made this site’s Worst Film of 2017 list.

Given my low expectations of Flying Lotus, the surprise is that he makes a halfway decent episode. The first half is a mock-up of a cable tv show – or perhaps even more so a mimicking of the bizarre sadistic happenings that occur on Japanese gameshows – with a group of kids having to fight through a maze, before Amelia Ann has her leg badly broken. The sets look cheap and chintzy, and the gore extremely fake, although it is hard to tell if this is intended or not. The second half of the episode has Steven Ogg, the only recognisable name present, a regular on tv’s The Walking Dead (2010-22), undergoing a series of humiliations as he is tortured by the girl’s mother (an amazingly demented performance by the late Sonya Eddy). The episode goes off at a bizarrely surreal tangent at the ending where Ogg leads them backstage to an imprisoned obese person that somehow manifests as an otherworldly entity, manifesting energy discharges and tentacles.

Cultists conduct a ritual at the hour of the millennium in the To Hell and Back episode of V/H/S/99 (2022)
Cultists conduct a ritual at the hour of the millennium in the To Hell and Back episode

The Gawkers comes from Tyler MacIntyre who previously made the horror films Patchwork (2015) and the darkly hilarious Tragedy Girls (2017) about two schoolgirls who conduct a killing spree to raise their social media profile and the slasher film It’s a Wonderful Knife (2023).

The Gawkers is another standout episode. It is the only one of the episodes that uses the Found Footage format with some cleverness ie. all the other stories could be shot with regular photography and it make no difference. It shows the teens doing exactly what teens of the era did – things like shooting themselves pranking others and trying to peep in on girls undressing or look up their skirts. It is also one of the few episodes that grounds itself amid the cultural referents of the era in terms of namedrops of bands, films, tv etc. It is all a set-up for a fine twist that reminds a good deal of the Amateur Night episode from the first V/H/S.

The final episode To Hell and Back comes from husband and wife team Joseph and Vanessa Winter who had previously made assorted short films together and a month after this released the feature-length Found Footage horror comedy Deadstream (2022).

To Hell and Back is a gimmick episode. We are introduced to an occult cult conducting a ceremony that will culminate on the turning of the millennium. This goes wrong and two camera people are transported to Hell (with cameras still running!). Thereafter the episode becomes the two frenetically running around a rock arroyo in the desert in the dark as various demonic entities and makeup effects creations pop up. All before the episode reaches an amusing sting of an ending.


Trailer here


Director: , , , , ,
Actors: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,
Category:
Themes: , , , , , , , , , , , ,