Anthology film series often dip and peak in quality from one installment to the next, just as each individual anthology features segments of varying quality. Each series is bound to the caprice of film production, as they depend on whatever filmmakers they manage to assemble to bring the goods. We saw the effects of this random chance with this year’s The ABC’s of Death 2, which turned out to be quite better overall than its predecessor. Heck, even V/H/S/2 was an improvement on the first. And the pendulum continues to swing with V/H/S: Viral, the third iteration of the found-footage horror film anthology, but in the opposite direction. This is a thuddingly awful collection of shorts.

Vicious Circles

For some reason, the V/H/S series persists in using a framing device that is, on its own, one of its shorts. This is a dicey enough proposition for any anthology, but it’s absolute anathema to the effectiveness of horror. It’s impossible to build atmosphere when the story has to keep getting interrupted for entirely different stories.

As for the short itself? Well, it’s where the film gets its “viral” subtitle from. It follows a young man whose girlfriend is abducted by a berserk ice cream truck that’s leading police on a wild chase all around Los Angeles. Wherever the truck goes, it seems to seed chaos in its wake. The guy, scrambling after it (and constantly filming everything on his phone, for some reason), keeps encountering strange situations that (weakly) set up each short. It’s all trying to say… something … about YouTube fame. What it is, I have no idea. Giving filmmakers the premise of “well, everybody’s goin’ CRAZY!” is dangerous, because it can lead to dull throwing-shit-at-the-wall antics. Such is the case here.

Grade: D-

Dante the Great

Okay, this one isn’t even found footage. It’s a fake documentary, except it’s interspersed with snatches of video whose existence is completely unexplained. Who is filming these scenes that this fictional crew presumably had no access to? Who knows! Who cares? The fake doc is about the eponymous magician, who finds fame after buying an antique cloak and putting on a series of stunning performances. Could it be that the cloak is… REAL MAGIC?!

Yes, of course it is. Anyway, it turns out the cloak is carnivorous, Dante the Great feeds some people to it, he catches the attention of police, his assistant suspects something, blah blah blah. None of it is scary. It’s barely trying to be. It’s more of director Gregg Bishop trying to show off whatever low-budget special effects his team can pull off… even though most of those are shoddy as well.

Grade: D-

Parallel Monsters

This one actually isn’t bad. It’s fun, even! An inventor builds a portal to a parallel universe and meets an alternate version of himself on the other side. They mutually agree to explore each other’s universes for 15 minutes. Solid story in place! Heck, the found footage angle is even fully justified, because these two guys are scientists who want to document what they’re looking at. There is, of course, a nasty twist once it turns out that the alternate universe is a lot less pleasant than it first appears. Some aspects of that twist up the enjoyment, while some of it just plays out the same fixations a lot of filmmakers bring to V/H/S (namely, genitalia-related unpleasantry). And the pacing is a bit off — once events go bad, the film’s all over too quickly. But all things considered, this is a solid entry.

Grade: C+

Bonestorm

Ugh.

Some skateboarding shitheads who like filming their escapades take a day trip to Mexico. Once there, they fecklessly stumble into a vague demonic ritual. Cultists close in, but a bunch of idiot kids prove surprisingly adept at fending off dozens of full-grown adults. Even though the adults are able to rise from the dead (remember: cultists initiating a demonic ritual). There’s no plot here to speak of. This short plays out like watching someone else play a really boring, repetitive video game. And that’s probably intentional (the video game part, not the boring part), since the use of GoPros on helmets consistently gives the audience a first-person view of the action. Like Dante the Great, this is less a film than an excuse to show off some low-rent FX work. Except this FX work is actually not terrible. Pity the film is so racist (MEXICAN CULTURE IS SCARY!!!), dull, and pointless.

Grade: F

Overall Grade: D-