What starts out as unpromising shaky-cam antics quickly turns dark and compelling in this low-budget horror showcase featuring the directorial talents of David Bruckner, Glenn McQuaid, Ti West, Joe Swanberg, Adam Wingard and the four-person collective Radio Silence.
Several young thugs are recruited, for hazy reasons, to burglarize a rambling old home and steal a VHS cassette. But which one? We see the contents of five tapes, all of which contain chilling (and mighty gory, be warned) found-footage vignettes about men and women on initially carefree ventures — a night out at a club, a road trip, a Skype chat between lovers — that go very wrong, in genuinely surprising ways.
Scrappy and unsettling, “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.