V/H/S Viral

V/H/S Viral

Starring Emmy Argo, Justin Welborn, Emilia Ares Zoryan, Nick Blanco

Directed by Marcel Sarmiento, Gregg Bishop, Nacho Vigalondo, Justin Benson, Aaron Moorhead, Todd Lincoln

Synopsis:
Much like the previous two installments, "V/H/S Viral" centers around short films using the first-person POV using older cameras, but unlike the previous two installments, they don't really follow a cohesive narrative nor does it provide the scares and shocks of the previous two.

"Vicious Circles" is the film that is supposed to be the anchor that tethers all the tales together, but instead could just be a stand-alone film about a man wanting to be a "YouTube" sensation by following the police chasing a mysterious ice cream truck around town, as it oddly circles around the block repeatedly, causing some people to behave strangely.  Had some good moments, but overall it fell short.

"Dante the Great" was the first short film, which centered around a man who wants to be a magician, and when he finds a mysterious cape once supposedly owned by Houdini, he becomes the biggest magician in the world, being able to cause fires, teleport people, and other unearthly things, but with a deadly cost, as an evil spirit inhabits the cape, and desires human sacrifice.  By far the best in the bunch, but not saying much.  It abandons the whole "first person" aspect in the end with a spectacular battle, which doesn't scream horror but rather as one long action sequence.  The effects were pretty stellar too considering the small production cost.

"Parallel Monsters" was directed by Nacho Vigalondo, most known for his masterpiece "Timecrimes," and you can see his particular style throughout the film, so much so I knew it was him even before looking it up.  This film centers on a man who creates a portal to a parallel universe, where he and his parallel self swap universes for fifteen minutes.  The man discovers too soon that the similar universe is anything but, with strange reproductive organs on the seemingly human people.  It had a slow build to what happens, which was the best part, and the ending was unfortunately disappointing.

"Bonestorm" is about a group of normal skater kids (by normal I mean complete douchebags who you just wish would die) who decide to travel to Mexico for some awesome skating, but instead come across a death cult and evil killer skeletons.  The worst of the film, and one of the worst horror shorts I've ever seen, where the director seemed to just want to advertise helmet cams and offer nothing to a storyline.

After the credits there's Todd Lincoln's "Gorgeous Vortex," which was excluded from the movie for some odd reason, as it was extremely well done and unnerving, although it didn't make much sense, and there wasn't use of the first person POV.  It was a story of a beautiful woman, some people with white faces, dead girls and a mysterious bird-like creature that, in the end, made no sense, but was beautifully made.

Summary:
While the first two films centered around a bunch of shorts that blended into the anchor, "Viral" seemed to disregard that and instead gave us some lackluster shorts and a boring anchor that is a travesty to the otherwise strong "V/H/S" series.

My Rating: C