All Critics (90)
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Top Critics (20)
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Fresh (49)
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Rotten (42)
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DVD (2)
The mostly played-out found footage aesthetic has its limitations, and V/H/S doesn't escape all of them. But the collected directors do manage to make many of those limitations into the films' strengths.
I came, I saw, I hunkered.
"V/H/S" probably sounded great in the pitch meeting, but it loses all luster through some shoddy execution.
Two hours of nausea-inducing shaky cam footage that fails to tell a coherent or engrossing central story.
The film also plays to the strengths of the found-footage format, proving that sometimes the scariest things are the ones you can barely see.
"V/H/S" puts the majority of today's mainstream "scary" movies to shame; perhaps the solution is to cut them all down to about 15 minutes, and fund them on a shoestring.
A solid and entertaining anthology film...
Conceptual pedantry aside, there are things to enjoy here.
It might well be a brand-new different kind of found footage movie, but it's no better a work of horror cinema as a result.
The anthology framework works well and features enough audacious moments to merit a viewing.
This has been attracting a lot of enthusiasm from horror buffs but it is hard to see why.
A nauseating experience on every level.
A mixed bag of found-footage horror shorts, this anthology gives rising star filmmakers a chance to do something original with the genre. Of course, some of the clips are much more effective than others, and some are little more than gimmicky jokes.
Thankfully, more often than not, these five shorts work.
Several of the shorts build ingeniously, and their brevity solves the serial problem of found footage, which is how to maintain interest and plausibility in shaky-cam antics for a whole feature.
Fails to fulfil its grisly potential.
V/H/S works very well, with some of the segments genuinely inducing a sense of dread and unease while others create a videotape reality that just delights with its own twisted logic.
Spectacular hits and forgivable misses make this a surefire candidate for cult status.
A fantastic and fantastical example of how much life remains in the handy cam horror genre.
Entertaining horror anthology with strong performances, decent special effects and a handful of nice ideas, though some of the stories work better than others and the film is let down by a weak linking segment.
Like last year's Chronicle, here's another reminder that in the right hands found footage still has plenty of capacity to surprise.
Some of the segments are more successful than others, but all of them could do with better actors.
Screechy, surprising and, in places, proper scary, this glitchy genre mixtape puts invention ahead of attention span, representing a 4/6 victory for killer over filler.
V/H/S is a collection of tales of gender warfare that are scattershot, tasteless, and occasionally quite frightening.
78%
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