I took a much needed break from Tubi to watch the annual V/H/S release. This one is V/H/S Mixtape.
Each movie in the V/H/S series has a different throughline that is supposed to bind the stories together. The throughline for this one was GWAR, the heavy metal/art project band. I’m not a fan of the band, though they usually bring a smile to my face when I see them in movies. This time around, definitely not a fan. There was no real story to their segments and the endings felt forced when they had to pop in a VHS or cassette tape.
As for the segments themselves, most of them were boring. My favorite was probably the first story: Dance, Dance, Dance, Dance, where television producers visit a puppet shop in order to “reimagine” an old children’s show that featured a set of four puppets. The second story, Another Cabin, was a nice piece of stop-motion animation but the story felt…lacking. I’m not sure what it needed…maybe to give voices to the characters? I don’t know. It was just fine.
The rest of the segments all fell flat. Heartbeat was two YouTubers trapped in a sound dampening room in an abandoned Russian military facility. The Music of Mr. Sze should have been the big piece of the series. A college student documents a strange but beautiful violin song he hears playing in the attic above his apartment. But we didn’t get any context on how Mr. Sze was related to the monsters we saw. I think we should have lingered less on the weird guy that had no bearing on the story at all. The Premature Burial was directed by Tobias Forge of the band Ghost. This is set up as a music video. The story is fine, though you may have to watch it more than once to really get the context out of it since it keeps cutting back to shots of the band. Finally, there is Death Tone. This one was just gross. It wanted to be a slasher that lingered on the killings. I kept covering my face.
Of all of the V/H/S movies I’ve watched, this is my least favorite. Last year’s V/H/S Halloween was much better.
Rating: Dance then get the hell out of there