V/H/S/Halloween (2025) (USA)

⭐️⭐️⭐️1/2

The long-running found footage anthology is back and this time it’s got a Halloween theme… probably don’t have to tell you that. Unusual videotapes get watched and present another string of horrific analogue encounters with terror. Testing on a new soft drink made from real poltergeist extract leads to test subjects falling afoul of violent paranormal activity. Probably shouldn’t make a haunted soda and Diet Phantasma proves this. This will play out throughout the movie and it gets more entertaining the more it goes on. Coochie Coochie Coo follows two best friends with college on the horizon spending one last Halloween night together dressed as overgrown babies and doing things they’re already much too old to do. They find an isolated house with pulsating lights in a neighborhood where a cheerleader went missing a year before and assume it’s a homemade haunted house. Like idiots, they decide to go in. It’s a big ol’ Halloween fail, as a local legend stakes its claim on the girls and they have to navigate the spooky house of deformed horrors and Mommy’s horrifying “family”. Kayleigh is an idiot and Lacey is a Cautious Clara but both of them are fucked. Its leads may be mostly annoying but the fright-house hijinks are fun as hell and the weird-ass inhabitants of the impossible home do well at being freaky. Police, interviewing a young man claiming he is responsible for the horrific deaths of his friends while they were partying at an abandoned manor, have a hard time being convinced as there’s no evidence and Enric doesn’t remember anything. Police and lawyers bring him back to the murder site hoping they can recreate the timeline in Ut Supra Sic Infra and it does not go well. The most interesting of the batch so far, it works pretty damn well as it shifts between phone footage taken by the doomed partygoers and the filming being done for the investigation. Throw in a backstory with some effort and it’s the most engaging yarn thus far. A quartet of trick or treaters (again, way too old to be doing it) get dragged into a candy bowl after one of their number goes for seconds of the weird-ass candy contained within, even though a note told them to only take one. They end up in a factory warehouse with the company’s mascot in hot pursuit. Fun Size suffers because it follows the best of the batch but is ridiculous enough to climb above its unfortunate placing. It also explains why one of the candy pieces looked just like a human dong and I appreciate that. Kidprint is the name of a service Tim Caplan offers as a public service at his electronics store. He interviews children and teens so they can be easily identified if they are ever kidnapped. This hasn’t stopped a string of child abductions and murders but when a girl vanishes, the police ask Tim to grab her tape. Tim discovers the tie his business has to the child slaughters and he’s in for one heck of an awful night. Any fun you may have been having with this sequel is curb stomped to death with this massively downbeat and unsettling offering. That’s fine for an anthology but it may kill some momentum because there is no sliver of ridiculousness to keep it in line with all the other mayhem we’ve witnessed so far. It’s pretty fucked up. Home Haunt brings things back to the realm of the supernatural and concerns the embarrassed son of a local haunted house creator (he’s grown out of playing Igor now that he’s an angsty teen) catching a night that goes to hell on his camera after his father grabs a dangerous record from an antique (junk) shop. It summons Samhain and things get messy and the cheap scares you’d expect in a labor of love from a fan of the holiday are manipulated into death-bringing entities. The teenage boy films the experience and it’s fairly wonderful, finally offering something up that feels like it belongs to the season. Glad somebody understood the assignment. For anyone who has ever wanted to journey off the designated path at Disney’s Haunted Mansion. The whole thing really could have felt more in tune with spooky season instead of just lazily adding trick or treat angles to stories that would have worked just as well without them but it’s still has some solid moments and at least two sections I thoroughly enjoyed. That would be Paco Plaza’s Ut Supra Sic Infra and Home Haunt from Micheline Pitt and R.H. Norman. Bonus point for Chat Pile playing over the closing credits.