October arrives and with it comes another outing in the found footage analogue horror series and, well, it feels like we’ve taken a major step back. Shock rock legends GWAR present dumb as fuck numbers involving grossness and stupidity and it’s the first time in a long time my eyes roll so hard it gives me a headache. I guess congratulations are in order for being the first of the series to have me consider just turning it off about a minute in and watching something entertaining. Good job? I understand this is GWAR’s thing and the underlining (loose) thread of this outing is music but as someone who doesn’t really care for a whole bunch of nothing painted up as something thanks to toilet humor and splatter, I guess I’m not the audience. They will return to do ”skits” of no discernible value throughout the film which are somehow far more aggravating than the social media bullshit they are sending up. Unless you’re into GWAR, then I imagine this is maybe entertaining? Dance, Dance, Dance, Dance starts things off with a children’s show by the name of The Curious Chorus. A little kid named George is the audience participant in the puppet-starring tomfoolery, singing a song about death. Years later George is now running the same workshop that produced and performed The Curious Chorus. A digitally-rendered reimagining is in the works for the retired puppets under the aggressive eye of a studio executive Vanessa (the always welcome Barbara Crampton) who is filming a making-of with her asshole son Sam behind the camera and producer Chris explaining what they’re doing. George isn’t happy about the digital “resurrection” of his beloved “friends” but Vanessa isn’t about to take his bullshit. She threatens to take the puppets from him which leads to George reluctantly handing them over to be digitally scanned. His protestations that the puppets don’t want to be scanned are dismissed and when the cameraman comes across a disturbing tape, things get messy and people get slaughtered. It’s… uh… it’s just kind of there but it features some passable splatter to go along with a threat that’s not all that threatening. Much like GWAR, I’m not all that thrilled by puppets behaving badly. So, others may get more from this than I did. Flying Lotus returns to the series (he offered up a less than entertaining segment in V/H/S 99) with Another Cabin. A horrible grandmother and her grandson live in an isolated cabin where a massive monster with a giant tongue inhabits the surrounding forest. It attacks the cabin and absorbs the grandmother who is constantly using the child as a human shield. As it’s completely animated it doesn’t really feel like it belongs in this series and it runs less than three minutes so who gives a fuck anyways? Content creators Maya and West trespass into a supposedly abandoned Soviet military building near the Bulgarian border in Heartbeat and it goes very wrong when they get trapped in a test chamber and foolishly fire up the auditory program. Insanity and bloody death happens. I’m fine with obnoxious dopes meeting their maker but in a movie that’s already pushing the limits of my patience, I didn’t need more of them. It’s fine and I always love me an abandoned facility but in a movie that has yet to break above middling, it’s not the piece that was needed. The Music of Mr. Sze is mostly Lovecraft’s The Music of Eric Zann. A young man rents a room in a boarding house and begins recording his daily encounters with his irritatingly strange landlady and the various other dopes who share the building with him. The reclusive musician who lives above him on the top floor produces some haunting music which fascinates the young man. Philip convinces the reclusive Mr. Sze to let him record his violin work but a certain song begins to turn our documentarian obsessive and his subject becomes cautious until eventually refusing to have any contact with Philip. It’s too late, Philip has tapped into a world he was never meant to know existed and some horrifying entity has taken notice. Do you like silly wigs? I sure do and we get some spectacularly unconvincing ones here that match the unconvincing performances. Fun monster shenanigans bring it to a close. Premature Burial is a music video from Tobias Forge of Ghost fame and is a visual storytelling of the revenge that a female doctor takes on her colleague after he sexually assaults her. She ends up preparing the scumbag’s body for his funeral and sneaks a radio into his coffin because whatever she injected him with will eventually dissipate and he will wake up. He awakens and the doctor places a nice head-removing kick to his noggin. It ain’t my kind of music but the lo-fi second generation bootleg aesthetic reminds me of a tape with Skinny Puppy music videos I got from my bestie Ivana in high school and I’m all for it. Sadly, outside of the look, it’s another piece of a puzzle that feels rewardless to piece together. Death Tone from RZA is the best of the batch and mercifully the final installment in this failed experiment. The daughter of a deceased music producer decides to honor his memory by mixing music from his old demo tapes. On a tape with her name labeled on it, her beloved papa lays out an occult ritual involving the composing of music from organic sounds that can guarantee their reunion. Of course, these sounds necessitate the torture of a human subject and Lydia begins bringing home folks to get to work. It helps that the drugs in her system make it make sense. A detective is looking into the rash of disappearances and Lydia’s father shares some final instructions that put his daughter in the way of harm. An actual narrative (as silly as it may be), dark humor and solid performances complement the impressive splatter and show exactly what has been lacking from this flick. The only V/H/S entry I had considered just turning off multiple times which is a sad claim to fame.
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