V/H/S ** Another found-footage film? – this portmanteau piece attempts to do something new with the verisimilitude of horror but suffers ultimately from a lack of surprises.

V/H/S opens with that oh-so familiar shaky camera style that has featured so heavily within the found-footage horror compendium. Although the notorious video nasty Cannibal Holocaust(1980) was probably the first incarnation of this full-on, documentary style of filmmaking - since the success of The Blair Witch Project(1999), the found-footage genre has generated some interesting output; such is the case with Matt Reeves’s Cloverfield(2008) which shared similarly enigmatic qualities to Blair Witch. Nevertheless, the sheer volume of found-footage horrors in the last ten years has dispelled most of the genre’s initial fear and mystery. V/H/S has an over-arching narrative that involves a violent gang who commit crimes, cause damage and do reprehensible things to women. Very early on the gang are given the job of burglarising a house to find a VHS tape and we subsequently become witness to the contents of a scratchy video comprised of a series of short spliced together horror vignettes.

In its defence, V/H/S does try to reimagine the found-footage format. The individual stories are told though several different camera mediums and often the damaged or disintegrated aesthetic of the individual recordings are used effectively to obscure the appearances of the horrors within. This is relatively innovative if you can get over the issue that V/H/S seems to paradoxically break the rules of its own genre- why is there a webcam chat, a home video recording and digital camera footage all on a single VHS tape?

Although some of the individual stories are quite creepy, they rely an awful lot on salacious voyeurism. The film also has a particularly prurient sensibility in the portrayal of its female characters which only has the effect of making you squirm instead of inciting actual fear. V/H/S is far too long and although the chilling unexplained strangeness of some of the stories is passingly compelling, many of them were just trite, boring rehashes of other, better, horror ideas. 

Pain and Gain *** Pain and Gain sees director Michael Bay working on a stripped back budget with this bodybuilding crime caper.

Based (apparently)on a true story - Mark Wahlberg plays Daniel Lugo, a bodybuilding personal trainer who believes achieving physical perfection, unlocking his full potential and making use of his “gifts” will help him strive towards the American dream. However, these desires are undone by the fact that Lugo is a total plank. With the help of  the equally dense Adrian Doorbal(Anthony Mackie) and Paul Doyle(Dwayne Johnson) the trio hatch an ill-conceived plan to extort a fitness client, which all goes horribly wrong.

Pain and Gain struggles initially with figuring out its comedic tone and there are a few missteps where it doesn’t really know whether it is a dumb gross out comedy, a black comedy or indeed, trying to satirise the bodybuilding community. The result is that it ends up doing a bit of all three. For better or for worse, all of the Michael Bay directorial traits we have come to expect are present – although there are less explosions than his typical blockbuster staples - the film is still incredibly loud, brash, pumped up fare with deliberately meretricious, oversaturated visuals. Dwayne Johnson plays a real knuckleheaded character and is the funniest thing in the movie and Mark Wahlberg is also very amusing, demonstrating once again, a real flare for comedy. It is hindered by its overlong run-time and often the humour and indeed the purpose of the film get lost amidst its own ramped up, erratic stupidity and violence. Pain and Gain is nonetheless, entertaining.