The solid found footage anthology gets another entry a few years after the so-so third installment. In the cheesy wraparound Holy Hell, a S.W.A.T. team performs a drug raid on a sinister compound. Inside they find some eyeless corpses sitting around staticky televisions and disturbing messages blasting over an intercom. They come across some strange crap and we get to watching various tapes. Storm Drain focuses on a suburban urban legend named the Ratman, supposedly residing in the small town’s sewer system. A TV reporter is sent into the sewer with her cameraman in tow to catch footage of the possible monster. Seeing it as a means to expose the sad situation of the American homeless population, they go deeper than they should and encounter something awful. Standard fare builds in to something a bit more fucked up than expected. Put it in the win category. The Empty Wake has a young woman hired on to film a wake, unfortunately for her a bad storm has kept any visitors from making it in and has the power on the fritz. She’s working through the night to keep switching the tapes and some strange noises coming from the coffin have her on edge. The night goes on, the storm gets worse and the awesome-looking corpse springs back to life. Simple and fun with an impressive boogeyman. The Subject has a mad scientist adding “enhancements” to unwilling patients in his scuzzy lab. He creates some human/machine hybrid and we watch from her POV as everything goes to hell. This one gets wild and only suffers from some iffy digital violence but that’s a minor complaint in the grand scheme of things when it comes to just how wonderful the damn thing is. Terror finds a group of religious survivalist nut-jobs (I don’t know if that word is needed following “religious survivalist”) on the eve of a “mass cleansing” looking to make some noise by toppling a federal building using a secret weapon. Said secret weapon is the dangerous blood of an undying man they have imprisoned, which we’ve seen cause a rabbit to explode when hit by the sun. A night of celebrating before carrying out their plan leads to massive alcohol consumption and this, of course, leads to bad decision making which leads to the militia’s messy downfall. It’s darkly hilarious and probably has one of the best 90s aesthetics of the film. There’s also a Veggie Masher infomercial featuring that lovable Astron-6 goofball Connor Sweeney. The wraparound has some shitty acting but the whole thing is an obvious love letter to 90’s SOV insanity, so I can’t help but love it. The only weakness lies in the wraparound but it’s nowhere near as haphazard as Viral’s.
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