Watch enough of these modern horror anthologies and you quickly catch on to an annoying running theme: without a lot of room to build enough runway for a meaningful narrative, many shorts devolve in to horrible people committing over-the-top violence with very little justification, until circumstances escalate so much that something crazy happens and you move on to the next short.
It is pointless and often times just weirdly mean for no good reason. There's no good ending, there's no bad ending, but everybody's dead now whether they deserved it or not. It is horror at its most basic, where creative kills are more important than anything surrounding them. Personally speaking, I wish for more.
V/H/S/99 has a lot of those kinds of stories. And lots and lots and lots of name drops to things that existed in 1999, in that super obvious way where an actor will practically look straight in to the camera and say "let's listen to Limp Bizkit and eat Hot Pockets, then later do you want to hang out at Blockbuster, or Radio Shack?" because they know and you know that's something from 1999. It's the Stranger Things school of nostalgia. A life only defined by its pop-culture branding.
Still, it's better than some of the other V/H/S sequels, so at least there's that.
The truly standout short here is the finale, "To Hell And Back", by the same group that did this year's equally awesome Deadstream for Shudder. It's also the only short to specifically refer to 1999 as being the turn of the millennium. It may have redeemed the entire anthology for me.
It is pointless and often times just weirdly mean for no good reason. There's no good ending, there's no bad ending, but everybody's dead now whether they deserved it or not. It is horror at its most basic, where creative kills are more important than anything surrounding them. Personally speaking, I wish for more.
V/H/S/99 has a lot of those kinds of stories. And lots and lots and lots of name drops to things that existed in 1999, in that super obvious way where an actor will practically look straight in to the camera and say "let's listen to Limp Bizkit and eat Hot Pockets, then later do you want to hang out at Blockbuster, or Radio Shack?" because they know and you know that's something from 1999. It's the Stranger Things school of nostalgia. A life only defined by its pop-culture branding.
Still, it's better than some of the other V/H/S sequels, so at least there's that.
The truly standout short here is the finale, "To Hell And Back", by the same group that did this year's equally awesome Deadstream for Shudder. It's also the only short to specifically refer to 1999 as being the turn of the millennium. It may have redeemed the entire anthology for me.