FrightFest

6/10 - magician story was good, dimension door was OK, skaters were a decent idea wasted. Link story was pointless. Docked one point for pointless static & ugly picture distortion - which was always a bit naff, but there isn't a VHS-based linking story here to justify it...

That's a very good point. The only VHS involvement in this one was the tapes the magician kept. The rest of it- notably the surrounding story- it should have been called MPEG:Virus or something.

One of the weakest of the festival for me. The Vigolonda segment was good and Dante the Magician quite entertaining but the rest was just blah. 5 / 10

How would you compare this against the other two V/H/S films ? I thought the first one was good and the second one was better thanks to the excellent zombie and cult segments

Well and truly lost me. I always have an annoying tendency to fall asleep in cinemas but this sent me straight to the Land of Nod.

I enjoyed Dante the Great, missed half of the next bit (Nacho Vigalondo overload, I think) then woke up to see Tombs of the Blind Dead with skateboarders, which seemed quite cool but couldn't keep me awake. Then I did wake up properly and thought there must be at least one segment left... but was all over! The linking story was total nonsense, as usual.

So.... I'm not really in a position to judge. But it did seem the weakest of the three V/H/S movies so far.

Personally I thought it was the strongest of the three VHS films overall. Whilst no one segment was as good as the 'Safe Haven' segment of VHS 2, a couple of them came pretty damn close ('Parallel Monsters', 'Bonestorm') and the remaining two ('Dante The Great' and the wraparound 'Vicious Circles') were also better than average.

My only question is... what happened to Todd Lincoln's 'Gorgeous Vortex' chapter? It seems to have been completely cut out of the final film.

Thanks for the responses.

I loved the first two segments (Dante the Great and Parallel Monsters) and while the skateboarding story took a while to get going it came good in the end. It was just that wraparound/linking tale about the possessed ice cream van being chased by the cops that irritated thanks to the overuse of distorted picture break up and ear splitting interference on the audio. That got really annoying really quickly. Otherwise I thought it was on a par with the first two, if not better. I agree with others though in that it seemed a bit short (it felt like we should have had another segment in there). 7/10.

kickasschewgum wrote:My only question is... what happened to Todd Lincoln's 'Gorgeous Vortex' chapter? It seems to have been completely cut out of the final film.

I would like to know too... I was surprised it ended so quick as I could have done with another segment!

I hated the first one, liked the second one less still and only resignedly wandered into this because I was put off going to get some food by the atrocious weather.

I actually really enjoyed it, probably because of the marked reduction in the terrible wobblecam that makes me nauseous - I hated the wraparound partly for this reason but mostly because it was crap, and didn't enjoy the skateboard segment either because of it but I thoroughly enjoyed the parallel universe one and even more so Dante the Magician (which reminded me of something that could have turned up on the old Tales Of The Unexpected TV programme I was always fond of).

It seemed short to me too, and I hadn't read anything about it because I wasn't planning on seeing it. Was there a bit missing?

A quick bit of Googling reveals there was meant to be a segment about "a sinister, shadowy organization that is tracking a serial killer".

Assuming I wan't asleep throughout, I don't think that happened.... Was that Todd Lincoln's segment?

Oh no, I did see that bit. They'd just hastily snapped it off the main film and retitled it Xmoor.

Ah, that makes perfect sense... I was watching Extraterrestrial instead of Xmoor.

Yeah, just watched the trailer and there's definitely an extra story in there. Some guy with a blank white mask in some kind of surgery setting and then later a woman lying in what looks to be the same operating theatre with a machine moving over her.

Maybe this was some kind of hurried edit for its world premiere?

Having been a big fan of the first two V/H/S movies I found this one a bit of a let-down. The Dante segment was OK, but didn't do much for me, the Parallel Monsters one was good fun as was Bonestorm, but that wraparound was utter bilge. It lacked any scares too. That robot eye one in Part 2 creeped me out completely, but nothing came close to scary in Viral.

Interested to see if the fourth segment ever surfaces in a later edit of the film.