V/H/S/Beyond

This is I believe the seventh of the V/H/S franchise to come out and this one has a theme focus on sci-fi horror and creatures from other planets. As with the other films, it is made up of several shorter segments telling various stories through the use of "found footage". The found footage horror genre is one that gets a pretty bad name from what I've seen, but I've personally found the V/H/S films to be some that do this better than most, however I felt this one fell a bit flat. I am actually quite surprised at the high rotten tomatoes rating on this. This is probably the least entertaining of the V/H/S franchise so far and the tie-in's with alien abduction tales was weak at best for most of the segments. The resorting to gore for most of the horror elements was a cheap replacement for telling a good story through the use of the found footage medium and style. Part of what made Blair Witch so terrifying was that you never saw the witch. You were terrified because the characters were terrified. I wasn't terribly engaged by these, nor was I disturbed as I have been from others. In other films I've found myself impacted and unable to stop thinking about at least one of the stories but for this one they each devolved into shock and gore and just left me bored.

This anthology series is a bit of a mixed bag, as they often are, but for horror fans, I almost reluctantly admit that I was entertained! I've seen a lot of horror but I had a blast with these varied stories. It's absolutely worth a look. While there's a theme threading through the segments, not all entries stick closely to it, which makes me think some of these may have been salvaged from earlier V/H/S projects, perhaps due to deadline or editing limits (I know what you're thinking but no - I dont think they were b-roll fillers). The UFO element doesn't resonate that much with me personally so for me it was no big deal. It's a solid horror, creatively executed.

The 'V/H/S' movies are always a funny one. They're very inconsistent and there's rarely more than one great segment per film. But you keep watching each one in the hope that a magical segment will come along that will blow everything to pieces and make it all worth it.

My ratings of the 5 segments (skipping the wrap-around one):

Stork: 4/10 Dream Girl: 3/10 Live and Let Dive: 6/10 Fur Babies: 8/10 Stowaway: 4/10

Fur Babies was the pick of the bunch for me, but mostly because it appealed to my tastes more than the others. It had a real 'Tusk' vibe to it.

Stowaway was disappointing considering Mike Flanagan wrote it. I was hoping he would have done something special and they were saving the best for last.

Overall the alien theme didn't really do it for me and I preferred the variety the other films had. A generous 5/10.

I love the V/H/S franchise with all my heart. Each year I am very excited to see what new AND interesting spooky stories we will get to experience.

Beyond focus on aliens which is new to the serie! The narrative story felt alright to me, i wasn't very much intrigued like the previous entries, but it did manage to laydown properly the fondation of what we were going to see.

Now into the fun spooky stories! Without going into spoilers, for me V/H/S Beyond started with what I can only consider one of the best story of the whole franchise. I can safely say it will remain with me for a while. After this one I was afraid that because it was so good, the remaining ones might be a let down, but I was wrong. The second and third story were also very new and fun! Didn't expect it at all to dive (pun intended) into this direction. I was hooked and couldn't look away!

Sadly, the 4th story is where things fell of for me. It just felt boring and not very spooky. It felt very off beat compare to the other stories. Nothing that will remain in memory for me. The 5th story althought it did feel more inline with the main narrative, felt also a bit boring. Its extremly slow and predictable. It's intended too, but the way this is shot is so dark i kept trying to see what was going on. Sadly, these two last film take about 50minutes and killed any momentum the movie had for me.

You are left with the final snippet of the story narrative and it was weird and a bit dull. Overall, VHS Beyond lacks a bit of charmed but had some memorable stories that still makes the movie worth the time. I would have reorder stories to leave the first one as the last. The last two VHS movies were better, but Beyond is far better than Viral, definitely the worst. Don't expect too much and you should like it!

I was a big fan of the VHS series of movies, but I've been very disappointed in the last two movies. HOWEVER, this one is pretty good! The first two movies in the VHS series were very well done, with some unique stories and good scares. I rated them an 8 out of 10.

But the next two were near absolute garbage to me. Not sure what went wrong but something went very wrong with them.

But, with this new movie they get back to what made the VHS series so great. This movie had very unique stories and a couple of decent scares. The main focus was aliens this time.

So if you didn't like the last two movies, give this one a chance, I think it is very well done. 👍

7/10.