SuperMechagodzilla posted:

Simon Barrett and Adam Wingard's frame stories are quite underrated, and this new one hurts without them. Although none the shorts here is a total dud - Bonestorm and Dante The Great are actually fantastic, while Parallel Monsters is endearingly doofy - the film doesn't cohere into a whole. It's the difference between a collection of found-footage shorts and a V/H/S movie.

Here's the main trouble: V/H/S and V/H/S/2 were about filmmakers. Diegetically, those were put together by the immortal editors in the frame narrative, giving each film a subtly distinct style. The old man in the first film prefers mostly raw footage, while the kid in the second movie films his own stuff, edits multiple sources together, adds score, and so-on. At the same time, there was this ritual aspect to it. The old man's been in the secret society for a while, while the kid is trying to join, but they have the same system for turning a collection of unrelated tapes into something more powerful. It's like they say in part 2: if you present them in the right sequence, the effect is stronger. They may not have been super-scary, but their nuanced deadpan grounded everything else.

In V/H/S Viral's frame story, the diegetic editor is an omniscient, malevolent AI that just impersonally hates human beings. The AI is not only the editor of the film but the only one who actually watches the footage at all - it's somehow getting a direct live feed from every camera in LA, before anyone gets a chance to upload it. That's a crucial point: the content of the film is irrelevant, or even random. Why does the AI splice in a documentary about a magician? Why not, I guess.

That being said, Bonestorm is the funniest thing I've seen in years.


The joke in Parallel Monsters is that the monster world is really banal, and Monster Alfonso dreams of escaping into a happier life where his wife isn't literally a massive oval office. The real Alfonso, of course, secretly dreams of weird sexual experimentation - and the punchline is that neither one ends up happy achieving their dreams, because they themselves do not change.

The secondary joke-within-a-joke is that the satanic monster world actually is still, despite everything, completely identical to ours.