V/H/S/Mixtape Review - A Mixtape With Only One Track Worth Keeping
Following in its annual tradition, the V/H/S franchise has delivered another entry for the Halloween season, the ninth in the series, this one comprised of seven short films built around the theme of sound, with one of them being a framing device that ties it all together. The last few V/H/S installments have marked a genuinely strong return to form for the franchise, so it’s unfortunate that this one is such a misstep, and a disappointing one.
First, there’s the framing narrative, “Gwar is…” The shock-metal icons of Gwar serve as hosts, and your reaction will depend on your appreciation for their specific brand of antics. They offer some funny gross-out dialogue, and they are what pushes the film toward gory horror-comedy rather than true horror. That self-awareness softens the film’s weaknesses somewhat, but the segments are shot so cheaply that the whole enterprise feels dated.
But the best reason to see V/H/S/Mixtape is Renee Zhan’s “Dance, Dance, Dance, Dance.” Zhan, an emerging animator, makes the strongest case for the film, and she does it by centering the segment around a behind-the-scenes look at a long-canceled kids’ program called “Curious Chorus” that quickly becomes a cruel satire about Hollywood greed. The puppets are original creations from Jim Henson’s Creature Shop, and Barbara Crampton plays an arrogant studio executive. It doesn’t take long for the puppets to dispatch their first three victims in amusing and inventive ways, while the fourth meets a prolonged end that is gloriously uncomfortable to endure. The segment’s strength is its control over the inevitable, and its power comes from the brutal deliberateness of its torture.
The rest of the segments are far less successful. David Moreau’s “Heartbeat” sends a pair of urban explorers into an underground facility, and it plays like a version of The Descent, but nowhere approaching that level of quality. Ernest Dickerson’s “The Music of Mr. Sze” is just as frustrating, because the veteran cinematographer, a longtime Spike Lee collaborator, brings real visual sophistication to a boarding-house mystery involving a film student wearing smart glasses and a violinist, but the moment the two characters meet, you can see where the story is headed, and you wonder what might have happened with a better screenplay. RZA’s “Death Tone” fares little better. Neela Jolene plays a young sound engineer grieving her father by trying to recreate the brutally violent methods his musical achievements relied on, but the story sputters from one encounter to the next, leaving a choppy number that should have been much shorter. Tobias Forge’s contribution “Premature Burial,” a directorial debut from the Ghost frontman, is astonishingly forgettable, and Flying Lotus offers a moonlit animated interlude called “Another Cabin” that barely concerns itself with the theme, though one wishes the filmmaker had tried for something more interesting.
This unevenness is encoded in the franchise’s DNA by now. The series, created by Bloody Disgusting co-founder Brad Miska, has survived weaker entries than this since its streaming-era revival led to the annual releases we’ve come to expect today, but none of that has erased its core identity, and Zhan’s segment proves it can still introduce horror fans to interesting new filmmakers.
Being in on the joke does not quite save this particular film, but the franchise has earned our patience, and I am still optimistically hoping that next year’s V/H/S: SCP delivers where this one failed.
V/H/S/Mixtape is streaming now on Shudder.