Saturday 27 October 2012

DEDfest Part 3: V/H/S BC Premiere

If you have been wondering why it has been taking me so long to pump out these mini reviews, it's because I've been distracted by a little thing called my Halloween costume (photos to come before Thursday). Anyhow next up is the BC premiere of the first Bloody Disgusting (produced?) film V/H/S. Read more to see my review.

I actually found a poster for the festival!
Now for starters I just want to say how annoyed I am with the found footage trend. It is rarely done well and usually just makes up for a lack of plot with a gimmick. There are a few instances where the films are great (Trollhunter & Chronicle amongst them), but generally the sub-genre is just a distracting nuisance. I'm finding it that way in this film which all I can tell so far is that a group of criminals are robbing a dead man's house with a bunch of vhs's in it. In the first story of the movie some jerks want to find random chicks at a bar and make a sneaky sex tape, they get what they deserve. I felt this story was poorly written and only able to get away with it due to the found footage style.The second story makes me never want to make home videos, well really the whole genre makes me want to avoid home videos and was a bit too on the boring side for me. When it cuts back to the connector story the dead old man has disappeared then reappears.
Cool poster, lame story.
Now that we are on to the third part of this anthology which is the most interesting story so far. I thought that the technique of a killer your can't really see on film, only a distortion of the film. Also the girl sacrificing her friends for a failed attempt at revenge was pretty cool.
Another cool poster, this time for a better story.
I also enjoyed the fourth story even though I know a lot of people hated it. I found the use of skype as a form of filming an interesting take on found footage (how there is an interesting take on found footage I'm not sure). Also that fact that no one dies in it made it even creepier for me like watching the movie Plaguetown (I'm not going to give away the more specific reason it reminded me of that film).
Pretty sure the chick wasn't blonde in this one...
Now back to the inbetweener and it turns out the old man is a zombie. I never saw that coming. Then we come to the fifth and final instalment of this anthology. For this part I would say again, lame plot, BUT the effects in this one really drew me in. Maybe found footage makes CGI look less hoaky, I don't know. For me that was the redeeming factor of this random "living house, cult sacrifice, Halloween, ghost girl" thing.
I don't even know what this one was actually about. It had way too much plot going on for a short film.

The final instalment of DEDfest will be the BC premiere of Famine, a film made in BC.

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