A new horror short from Demon Knight and Bones director Ernest R. Dickerson is the best reason to see V/H/S: Mixtape, but even his segment is only marginally worth celebrating. The short, which is about the young new tenant of a dilapidated apartment building who desires to make a film about the music played by his upstairs neighbor, the mysterious violinist Mr. Sze, announces itself as Dickerson’s through its stilted dialogue and hokey performance style, trademarks of his earlier genre work that only sometimes complement the exaggerated, crayon-sketched feel of his characters. Except for the smart glasses with which the main character surreptitiously films his neighbors, “The Music of Mr. Sze” is decidedly old-school Lovecraftian stuff, adapted from one of the author’s stories. It has precious few tricks up its sleeves and does exactly what you’d expect as it works itself up into a frenzy of eldritch monster violence. But the cheese and simplicity, plus the apparent signature of its creator, make this a standout amongst the anthology’s dour offerings.
Mixtape, as that subtitle might imply, uses the series’ extant fetish for analog video and extends that affinity to audio, working in a music theme that ties together each of its segments. And so, instead of the standard wraparound story that usually strings one of these movies along, we get sketches starring GWAR that are likely mildly amusing to anyone able to access the obscure frequency of their wavelength but profoundly agitating and juvenile to those of us left out in the uncostumed cold.
Kicking things off among the proper shorts is Renee Zhan and Zoe Cooper’s “Dance, Dance, Dance, Dance,” which boasts great effects work and an underutilized Barbara Crampton in a twisted story about evil puppets from a Hensonesque children’s program. But at this point the suggestion that there’s some dark undercurrent running through children’s programming is getting stale, already having been explored in media like Five Nights at Freddy’s, this year’s Buddy, or the horror video game My Friendly Neighborhood — which this segment most closely resembles. It’s not quite fertile ground, and without anything in the way of characters or motivation, Zhan and Cooper just conjure a haunted attraction of admittedly nifty spare parts.
On offer in the second short, David Moreau’s “Heartbeat,” are a handful of disorienting camera tricks achieved through the gadget repertoire of its livestreamer characters. Deep in the woods the short’s central couple find an old Soviet bunker, explore its depths, and get trapped in a soundproof experiment chamber. They descend into madness as the sounds of their own bodily functions become amplified, their own heartbeats in their ear driving them crazy. Moreau’s camera remains aggressive throughout, but the story simply has nowhere to go and the bag of tricks is mere compensation.
But the truth is, every short in V/H/S: Mixtape looks better when compared to its finale. RZA’s “Death Tone” is an ignominious example of what this series can be at its absolute worst. A cruel, pointless exercise in extremity, the film finds the daughter of a late music producer following in her father’s footsteps and trying to create the perfect beat by sampling the sounds of the incredibly gruesome murders she commits. When extreme horror works, it generally adopts the point of view of its victims and survivors, an attachment to character allowing an unavoidably punishing experience to become scary via identification. Without that, it’s just grueling. RZA just wants to inventory all the creative ways he has thought up to dismember people, but he fails even on the level of novelty. All he can offer are the reheated leftovers of 2000s torture porn and the New French Extremity, stripped of their justification.
DIRECTOR: RZA, Flying Lotus, David Moreau, Renee Zhan, Ernest R. Dickerson, & Tobias Forge; CAST: Barbara Crampton, Bob Gorman, Mike Ferguson, Alex Hsu; DISTRIBUTOR: Shudder; STREAMING: September 9; RUNTIME: 1 hr. 38 min.
Comments are closed.