Usually, coyotes are reluctant to attack people, but it can happen. In this case,
maybe they heard some Acme Corp. executives live in the tony Hollywood Hills
neighborhood. Whatever their reasons might be, they are clearly quite ticked
off. A geeky dad has no idea why the feral pack is prowling around his home,
but he quickly starts to regret their doggy-door in Colin Minihan’s Coyotes,
which opens this Friday in theaters.
Scott
is a bit of a man-child, but the recent success in comics allowed him to move
his family into the exclusive neighborhood. His wife Liv, is a cool mom, but
obviously the grounded one in the family. Their daughter has reached the stage
where she is conspicuously embarrassed by her parents and generally surly to be
around. According to their disconcertingly intense exterminator, they are also living
with rats in their walls. Unfortunately, that won’t be the worst of it.
Since
this is LA, they could lose power at any moment, for no apparent cause, so it
is hardly surprising when a freakish storm cuts the electric lines. Unfortunately,
that tree Scott was supposed to prune crushes Liv’s car, nixing their mobility
and making him look bad. Consequently, when the coyotes attack, their only ally
will be their sleazy, unstable neighbor Trip and hi “visitor,” Julie. Frankly,
Liv and Scott never really think of a good euphemism to obscure the reason Trip
pays her to spend the night with him, which leads to many an awkward moment.
Thanks to the collector market, they are making small-batch limited-runs of new
VHS tapes again. That is good news for this franchise. In addition to the new
appreciation of analog formats, there are also plenty of weird moldy old tapes
to uncover out there. The really disturbing ones fuel the creation of urban
legends and the Cadillac of found footage franchises. Aliens get into the act a
little bit more this time, but all the V/H/S hallmarks remain present in
V/H/S Beyond, which premieres this Friday on Shudder.
In
a bit of a departure, the wrap-around segments, Jay Cheel’s “Abduction/Adduction”
are a mockumentary, supposedly investigating alien encounters at a notorious
California mansion. Some of the segments are so well done, it is disappointing
to break away to a full chapter. Fittingly, Whitley Strieber gets a lot of
deserved credit for establishing and popularizing (or whatever terms might be
more fitting) the now familiar alien abduction tropes. Frankly, it would be fascinating
to see Cheel (who helmed Shudder’s Cursed Films series) expand this into
a full film.
By
far, the scariest constituent film (or tape) is Jordan Downey’s “Stork,” intriguingly
“based on artwork by Oleg Vdovenko.” The premise is simple, but lethally
effective. An elite anti-crime police squad raids the squat house of a cult
suspected of kidnapping infants. What they find is a horror show. This is the
kind of found footage that is truly terrifying. The crack-house-style design
makes viewers crave a tetanus booster and the camera work keeps you on high
alert. Like many of Beyond’s instalments, “Stork” is not unlike several
previous V/H/S contributions, but it sure works.
That
is also true of Virat Pal’s “Dream Girl,” but to a lesser extent. Tara is a
Bollywood idol, who shares a kinship with Hannah Fierman’s Lily the Demon from
the original V/H/S (and a spin-off), as a group of paparazzi learn the
hard way. In this case, the Bollywood setting helps distinguish it from its
predecessors.
‘Live
and Let Dive,” directed by Justin Martinez (the only returning V/H/S alumnus,
from when he was part of the Radio Silence collaborative group) probably earns
the honor of the film’s second best segment. In this case, a reluctant skydiver
celebrates his birthday with his hard-partying friends, just as the aliens
swope down from the skies to attack. The horrors start in the air and finish on
the ground. Martinez fully capitalizes on the found footage genre’s potential
for what-the-heckness, staging some wild alien attacks, that actually look great,
thanks to the subgenres built-in low resolution requirements.
“Fur
Babies” directed by Christian Long & Justin Long (the Apple commercial guy
and his brother) is probably Beyond’s grossest, most disturbing component
film. It also delivers the most satiric “bite,” skewering an annoying band of
left-wing animal rights activists, plotting an undercover sting operation
against home-based kennel. However, their hubris leads to horrific comeuppance.
“Fur Babies” is rough, but it is the one fans will be talking about for years
to come.
