V/H/S/Beyond, the latest in the V/H/S found footage anthology series, mixes sci-fi with its horror, featuring several weird vignettes about aliens. And human/dog hybrids.
Stork, from director Jordan Downey, is filmed in the style of a first person shooter, with a police team storming a house where they believe abducted babies are being held. The cops are attacked by strange zombies and encounter a stork-like alien creature. It doesn't make a lot of sense but does deliver plenty of gore, including some juicy chainsaw mayhem.
Dream Girl, directed by Virat Pal, sees two Indian paparazzi sneaking their way onto the set of a movie in Mumbai to try and get some candid footage of rising star Tara (Namrata Sheth). The actress turns out to be a bloodthirsty monster/cyborg. This one doesn't make much sense either, but I'm a sucker for a Bollywood song and dance routine...
In Live and Let Dive, a group of friends on a skydive narrowly escape a mid-air collision between their plane and a UFO, but encounter the hostile extraterrestrials once they reach terra firmer. This one is fast paced and gory with one particularly well-executed jump scare.
Actor Justin Long and his brother Christian seem to have derived inspiration from Justin's film Tusk for their segment, Fur Babies, which revolves around forced body modification at the hands of deranged dog lover Becky Baxter (Libby Letlow). It's suitably bizarre, although Letlow's performance is quite annoying - kinda like a bargain-basement Annie Wilkes from Misery. No aliens.
Kate Siegel's Stowaway is the final tale, in which a woman investigates a UFO that lands in the Mojave desert. When the craft leaves Earth with her inside, traveling at close to light speed causes her body to be torn apart, but she is reassembled by nano-technology with horrific results. This is probably the best story of the bunch (the downbeat ending is great) but the grainy found footage style makes it hard to watch.
Overall, I didn't enjoy this V/H/S movie as much as the last few films in the series: the documentary-style wraparound is dull, and several of the segments outstayed their welcome and ended without resolution, leaving me yearning for more exposition. Is it too much to ask for decent stories to go with the blood and guts?
