There is an idiom in popular culture today known as "nuking the fridge". It refers to the scene in the movie Indiana Jones and the Crystal Skull where Jones climbs into a fridge to ride out a nuclear explosion, and is defined as "to exhaust a Hollywood franchise with disappointing sequels." The fact that I'm starting this review of V/H/S Viral with a discussion of this phrase should really key you in to things not boding well for the third and final chapter of this anthology series.
So, we all know how this goes now: there are several short films by various directors; all of them are found-footage and all of them have an overall 'theme' that links them together; and there's a wraparound segment that also has a rough story all about the mythology of the tapes that we're watching but really, who watches an anthology film for the wraparound segments? (We'll get to that in a bit.) This time the segments are Dante the Great, by Gregg Bishop (and incidentally, he's also directing a feature-length movie based on Amateur Night from the first V/H/S), about a wannabe magician who gets hold of a mysterious cloak that gives him the power to perform real magic; Parallel Monsters, by Nacho Vigalondo (we previously saw his work in The ABCs of Death as A is for Apocalypse), about a physicist who builds a device that allows him to cross the dimensional barrier. He meets his seemingly-identical double and they agree to briefly explore the other's world for science, only to each find that their worlds are terrifyingly different; and Bonestorm by Justin Benson and Aaron Moorhead, about a group of skateboarders who travel to Mexico to make a skateboarding video and stumble into a strange ritual that apparently raises the dead. The wraparound segment deals with a young man chasing after an ice cream truck that has apparently kidnapped his girlfriend, along with the police and several other people all wanting to catch footage of the chase, and the carnage the ice cream truck causes as it travels through Los Angeles.
(There was also supposed to be a fourth segment called Gorgeous Vortex, by Todd Lincoln, which was apparently about a mysterious group tracking a serial killer, but that segment was removed before release. It was supposed to be bonus footage on the DVD and Blu-Ray releases of the movie, but apparently that didn't happen in the UK and so the only way for me to see this segment right now would be to install iTunes and buy it there, and I'm not willing to put my computer through that. So incomplete review it is!)
As is tradition with the V/H/S series now, I watched V/H/S Viral with my other half, so we could see which segments we liked and disliked the most. For the first time, however, we found ourselves in complete agreement - Dante the Great was our favourite segment, because it was both relentlessly dark and fun (and we spent some time debating whether that cloak was part of the Cthulhu Mythos or not). Parallel Monsters was a close second, because it was mindblowingly original and freaky, but more than a little confusing as to just what exactly was going on in the "other" dimension. Bonestorm, unfortunately, did not win us over, primarily because we just could not stand the main characters (part of me fears we've now become old enough to become part of that "Damn skateboarders!" shakes fist group), although I was at least impressed with the indestructability of the skeleton-monks and there was some humour in it.
And then there was the wraparound segments. The overreaching theme for V/H/S Viral was "the price of fame", and so the main character of the wraparound wants to become famous by filming the next viral video, only to end up losing his girlfriend to the rampaging ice cream truck that he's trying to film. The rest of the wraparound segments are all about him chasing the truck on a BMX, while the ice cream truck broadcasts a signal that causes people to have nosebleeds and then go nuts (you know, that dodgy plot point that was introduced in the wraparound segments of V/H/S/2 along with Johnny Chinless). The end segment attempts to bring a conclusion to that whole theory; a rather apocalyptic version of "Can't stop the signal," which has two problems - one, it's cuckoo-for-coco-pops insane; and two, nobody cares about the story in the wraparound segments. V/H/S Viral falls on its face because it forgets what it started off doing and did so well - short found-footage films by up-and-coming directors that explored various horror themes - and ends up thinking that the vague mythology that it created to roughly tie the films together was more important. Sure, creepy dead guy in the chair in the first movie was a bit interesting and scary, but the film didn't live or die on him.
So, here ends the V/H/S trilogy. It started off strong, had a universally-agreed high spot in its second chapter, but then sadly fell on its ass for its final chapter. It's a shame too, as I'd really really hoped it would end on a high note, but hopefully the only resurrection it will have is the occasional full-length feature based on the better of its shorts, like the afore-mentioned Siren coming out next year...
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