V/H/S: Viral (2014)

Good start, but then it gets ruined

It's funny, it's tense, it features two great performances from two actors and the director expertly creates a web of odd tension where you actually don't know what is happening for the majority of the run time.

It’s fine. It's literally the definition of a fine movie. You’ve seen it before, you know every beat and outcome before the characters even do. Only question is how much escapism you’re looking for.

Through painfully honest and emotional moments, the movie becomes irresistibly relatable

If you have seen the first two, then the third will probably be a let-down. V/H/S Viral follows the same anthology premise as the first two but the stories don't flow as easily. "Vicious Circles" was the most confusing for me. "Dante the Great" was one of the best. "Bonestorm" visually great but not the best story. "Parallel Monsters" had potential but went a bit overboard wtf.It seems in the third they tried to push the creativity and it didn't work, not for me anyway. The cast is a solid as the previous installments but the stories aren't as easy to grasp and at the end you're kinda wondering what the hell went on. I thoroughly enjoyed V/H/S/ 1 and 2 and was excited for the third, but it lost something this time around. Unfortunately it wasn't good enough for me to want to buy the DVD for the surprise "Gorgeous Vortex" segment.

I honestly don't even know where to begin. This movie was so terrible that it almost made my face bleed. Take a moment to think about what a movie is made up of...now imagine all those things being put together by a room full of adolescent chimps. Everything from the horrible camera work to the lousy acting was laughable at best, at least until you begin to think about how this movie is the 3rd installment to a great series. Then you pretty much just want to cry.Remember how the first two movies were scary and had an aura of creepiness and thrill? Yea me too but in "Viral" there isn't a shred of any type of creepy, scary, or thrill. It took me 4 attempts, over the course of a year, to finally sit down and subject myself to this poor excuse of a movie. Sure it had the series of short stories that VHS is famous for but the similarities to the other movies stops there.An incoherent main story line coupled with poorly written short stories accomplish one thing very well...they give you a glimpse into what must be running through a drug addict's head just after his first hit of the pipe. I could go on and on about how terrible this movie was but I don't feel like any amount of words could describe how awful "VIRAL" was. So without any further ranting, please do yourself a great service of NOT WATCHING this movie like I did. I can guarantee that if you do, your gonna be immensely disappointed that " Viral" made it as the 3rd movie in the VHS trilogy.Oh and just in case I wasn't clear before, DO NOT WATCH THIS MOVIE. IT IS GARBAGE FROM Beginning TO END.

Let me start out by saying I remember seeing the first VHS. I fell in love with it. I've always found the found footage genre interesting, and VHS was unlike anything I had ever seen before. The first film's ability to keep suspense by hiding things behind impurities in the video print, combined with creative and well- executed stories, made it instantly a horror masterpiece. Then I heard there was a sequel. I looked it up on Netflix, and I was satisfied with what I got. It wasn't as shocking or gripping as the first, but the idea's were still creative, the writing and acting was all around well done, and by sequel's standards, it held up well. Then I heard they were making a third film. I got hyped, and watched it the day it came on Netflix. What. The. F*ck. I'm still not entirely sure VHS Viral is part of the VHS series. The ideas were still kind of interesting, but were done terribly. Dumb executions, half-assed acting, and the encompassing storyline is attempting to be melodrama, but just ends stupidly. My advice is to avoid this movie, put on VHS and VHS/2, and live in denial of the third one.

VHS2 is one of the best horror films I've seen in recent memory. It tightened the overlong editing of the first movie and added genuinely creepy moments. I was looking forward to watching VHS: Viral after seeing VHS2, because I thought they'd gotten a solid pattern down. But no.No, instead you get skateboarding teens looking "totally rad" while fighting a group of cultists (seriously.) And then, after fending off the angry mob, the 15-year-old boys skate home.VHS: Viral offers four stories: the magician story, the multi-universe story, the aforementioned skateboarding brats yarn, and a wraparound that ties all these vignettes together. These stories all stink except for "Parallel Monsters," which is good enough to warrant its own film.If you can, watch "Parallel Monsters" without wasting your time with the rest of this sequel.