HALLOWEEN HORRORFEST 2021/RATAPALOOZA NIGHT NINETEEN: V/H/S/94 (2021)

I'm calling it--this is the last night of Ratapalooza.  When my Patreon Sean Foster sent me a Ko-Fi for the last spot, I begged him not to choose a rat movie.  You can say I am ratted out.  And thankfully this last movie is only 20% rat related, as it's another anthology...in this case, the brand new entry in the V/H/S series, V/H/S 94.

As with Nightmares, we'll get to the rat-related segment, 'Storm Drain,' after we check in with the other segments...and address something right up front.

As with the other films in the franchise, V/H/S 94 is not just an anthology--a format I love--but an anthology of found footage stories.  I loathe found footage, finding it in many, many cases an easy crutch to cover up a low budget, not realizing how constricting the format is.  And credit where credit is due, there are some stories that actually turn those constrictions into a benefit.  But there are moments in other stories where you're wondering where the camera angle is coming from at certain moments...and there are moments where the overriding conceit of all of these stories as taking place in 1994 breaks down.

The framing sequence, which turns into the final story is written and directed by Jennifer Reeder and entitled 'Holy Hell' (although the closing credits list it as 'Holly Hell,' which is...confusing for reasons you'll discover below).  It's about a SWAT team raiding a warehouse that is home to a strange cult that has pulled a Heaven's Gate involving some sort of weird goop.  It's...okay, definitely competent if sometimes confusing and ends up with a twist that seems to throw out the goop stuff, which is made out to be highly significant in the first couple of sequences.  It doesn't help that two other stories also involve weird goop that is dangerous to us humans, as there's a maybe unintentional implication that all these goops are the same.

'The Empty Wake,' written and directed by Simon Barrett, is the weakest of all the stories.  It focuses on Emily (Kyal Legend) supervising a wake on behalf of her employers which is seriously underattended...and maybe with good reason.  This is the one where the 'who the Hell is filming from this angle?' feeling nagged at me--in one case, a couple of shots are shot from Emily's point of view, but Barrett doesn't explain that the employers left a handycam behind until late in the tale.  The bulk of this tale is watching Legend just hanging around, and she's a decent enough actress...but I kept getting the sense that there were a number of things Barrett wanted to let us in on that he couldn't figure out how.  There is a big ass jumpscare followed by a couple of smaller jumpscares that don't land, but the overall impression I got is that this was a collection of bits rather than a story.

'The Subject,' written and directed by Timo Tjahjanto, is my favorite story for a number of reasons.  It's about a mad scientist (Buddy Ross) with a real cyborg obsession who is kidnapping people and trying to 'enhance' them on the day that the Jakartan police find him.  The tale is told mostly through the video camera-enhanced...eye?..of Number 99, the first of his successes.  What, to me, makes this one work so well is that Tjahjanto takes full advantage of the video camera gimmick and creates a ticking clock element with it.  The first person perspective is novel, and manages to give the monstrous Number 99 a great deal of humanity; when we get the reveal halfway through of what she looks like, the reaction is not repulsion but sympathy and maybe a little pity.  Unlike with 'The Empty Wake,' there is a strong sense of who is shooting what, which I greatly appreciated.  And the ending implies...a little hope for our main character?

Finally, we get 'Terror' written and directed by Ryan Prows, which I think was meant to be blackly comic.  It's about an alt-right militia planning a terrorist attack on a government building in Detroit utilizing some goop it gets from a drifter they kill every night who turns out to be...a vampire?  This is the other one besides 'Sewer Drain' where the setting felt more like a roleplay scenario than a setting.  The militia members themselves are cartoons and, one sequence involving a rabbit to the contrary, are not as funny or chilling as Prows thinks they are.  The vampire's final incarnation sure is different, seemingly inspired by one too many viewings of Blade Two.  It's definitely a lower tier tale.

So now I can tell you about 'Storm Drain,' written and directed by Chloe Okuno, which is the first tale before you realize 'Holy Hell' was not just the wrap-around.  It's about local Ohio newswoman Holly (Anna Hopkins) and her cameraman investigating the local legend of 'The Ratman,' a creature who lives in the sewers.  Spurred on by compassion--and maybe a bit of glory-hunting--Holly decides to go deep into the sewer systems to report on the homeless who live there...and, not surprisingly, it goes pear shape as she discovers these homeless people are part of a cult that worships 'Ratma,' who is indeed some form of rat demon.  I liked this one quite a bit in spite of some of the anachronisms in the script (at one point Holly tells a militia man guarding the storm drain 'Thank you for your service,' which didn't become common parlance until after 9/11) and enjoyed the final bit, which achieves the blackly comic moment that 'Terror' thinks it does.

Now that we've talked about all the stories, I'd like to point out one thing that bugged me....namely, that three of these stories seem to put all their eggs in the 'freaky monster reveal' basket.  With the exception of 'The Subject'--which uses the freaky monster reveal trope to elicit an emotional response--and 'Holy Hell,' which seems to promise monsters but instead goes for something else, there's a sameness to the beats of these stories that only pointed out the artificiality of the found footage genre.  It's a little niggle, but it did interfere with my overall appreciation.  As a whole...I'm going to give this one a mild recommend as it did keep my interest even though I was highly resistant to the subgenre as a whole.

Thanks to Patreon Sean Foster, we're out of slots...and we reach the end of this year's gauntlet with his choice of 1988's Evil Dead Trap, which is a film from Japan that some describe as a slasher, but I suspect harkens back to an older horror subgenre...while also predicting a future subgenre.  See you at the finish line.