Horror Movie Review: VHS: Viral (2014)

V/H/S: Viral is a found footage horror anthology film produced by Bloody Disgusting. It’s the third film in the V/H/S franchise. Much like the previous VHS films, Viral features a series of found footage shorts.

V/H/S: Viral’s segments include the story of a deranged illusionist who obtains a magical object of great power; a homemade machine that opens a door to a parallel world; and teenage skaters who unwittingly become targets of a Mexican death cult ritual. In between each short are segments of the frame story which follows Kevin, an amateur videographer obsessed with capturing a viral video.

Viral is by far and I mean by far the worst V/H/S film of the three. In fact, it’s one of the worst found footage films I have ever seen. Firstly, the filming throughout is so damn jarring. There’s is an over usage of screen distortions, it’s ridiculous.

You must suspend your disbelief with found footage films as to why someone would continue to record certain moments when filming would be the last thing on your mind. I felt the previous films in the series did a better job of explaining why filming continued than this one did.

The acting feels like a bad soap opera especially when combined with some very cheesy soundtracks. I didn’t like any of the characters in the film, if you can even call them characters. I wanted to see most of the die horrible deaths to be honest.

Admittedly, I quite enjoyed the “Parallel Monsters” short. Unfortunately, I could not get the English subtitles to work on my version of the film. I had to watch the whole thing in Spanish and I still found it to be superior to the others. The concept is really good and it leads to some genuinely creepy scenes. Sadly, it all ends in extremely hokey fashion which sort of ruined it all.

Viral Suffers the fate of the majority of anthologies, the concepts are not outright terrible but they’re given such little runtime and budget that it just doesn’t produce anything very good. To be fair, there are some decent looking effects and ideas here. However, the lack of gore and heavy usage of CGI instead of practical effects points to the obvious, this film had a low budget.

Overall, V/H/S: Viral focuses on the idea that people these days are willing to do anything and everything in the hopes of going Viral. At this point I’m not even sure I understand why it’s called V/H/S. Why are there tapes? Who has a VHS player anymore? Anyway, it’s the weakest in the franchise up to this point. Not completely devoid of originality but I’d for sure recommend skipping it, unless you want a headache of course.