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.