V/H/S/2

Overview

It's not beyond the realms of possibility that V/H/S/2 contains a reference to every horror film ever made. Child ghosts, zombies, cult victims, alien abductions: you name it, you'll find it haunting, taunting, tormenting or terrorising someone in there somewhere. However, in attempting to pack more gore and perversity into 90 minutes than Quentin Tarantino could dismemberments into four hours of Kill Bill, the directors too often lose their grasp on the most devastating weapon in their repertoire – compelling storytelling.

Created by seven directors who, collectively, list The Blair Witch Project, You're Next, Hobo with a Shotgun and The Raid in their filmography, V/H/S/2, the sequel to V/H/S, is, like its predecessor, an anthology of found-footage style vignettes. We view them through the eyes of two private investigators. After breaking into the home of a missing college student, they find themselves drawn into his demon-possessed, VHS-obsessed world.

We meet a gentleman saved from blindness by a bionic eye, only to discover that the technology enables the infiltration of bloodthirsty ghouls; a pair of cyclists whose innocent, sun-kissed forest ride ends in zombie attack; a team of intrepid journalists risking their safety for an inside story on an Indonesian cult; and a party of out-of-control teenagers whose sex-fuelled teasing gets serious under threat of alien invasion.

Of the four encounters, the third, Safe Haven, is the stand out. Directed by Timo Tjahjanto and Gareth Huw Evans (of The Raid: Redemption), its depiction of a suicide cult deluded by a deranged, megalomaniacal leader is deeply disturbing in its implication that the most nightmarish of our imaginings are not necessarily far removed from the extremities of human cruelty. Well-controlled gradations in suspense and incorporation of character-driven drama give potency to the horror when it hits.

Unfortunately, the other three shorts are less effective in eliciting a genuine scare — physical or psychological. Shaky motion, erratic angles and a Go Pro camera (affixed, at one point to a family pet) aim to suggest a hand-held, home-videoesque authenticity, but, for the most part, are too self-conscious and persistent to allow suspension of disbelief. The violence is too relentless to provoke any chills and we don't learn enough about the characters to care much about why, how or when their demons deposit of them.

Even though V/H/S/2 is, unusually enough for a sequel, an improvement on the original, it still feels as though there's too much of a focus on being demented, merely for being demented's sake.