Quartile rating: 6/10 · 1 rating
Inside a darkened house looms a column of TVs littered with VHS tapes, a pagan shrine to forgotten analog gods. The screens crackle and pop endlessly with monochrome vistas of static white noise permeating the brain and fogging concentration. But you must fight the urge to relax: this is no mere movie night. Those obsolete spools contain more than just magnetic tape. They are imprinted with the very soul of evil.
V/H/S/2 is a found-footage horror anthology that improves on its predecessor with a handful of genuinely memorable segments — notably 'Safe Haven,' a cult massacre set-piece that earns real visceral dread, and the zombie POV segment which shows creative perspective-play. Cinematography earns above-average marks for inventive camera conceits (GoPro, eye-cam, drone-cam) that push the found-footage aesthetic further than most genre entries. Novelty is above average for the era given its multi-director format and willingness to experiment within the found-footage framework, though it's still fundamentally a sequel built on an established formula. Acting and plotting are consistently weak across most segments — the wraparound story is especially thin and the characterization perfunctory, both typical anthology-horror shortcomings. The ending, including the wraparound resolution, lands weakly and feels abrupt rather than cathartic, a recurring problem for the series.