The found-footage anthology’s latest round is built on music, and for one segment, Renee Zhan’s singing puppets, the idea pays off. The rest is a sampler of six directors’ habits, some of them good, few of them frightening.
The V/H/S films have been running found-footage shorts past us since 2012, and the rule has never changed: a frame story, a pile of tapes, a handful of directors given a few minutes each to frighten us. V/H/S/Mixtape adds a theme. Every tape is about music, and the six directors are RZA, David Moreau, Renee Zhan, Ernest Dickerson, Flying Lotus and Tobias Forge, the last two of whom also write the score. It runs 98 minutes under an 18 certificate, and about a third of it is good.
The frame narrative belongs to GWAR, or at least to their characters: BalSac The Jaws of The Death (Mike Derks), Blothar The Berserker (Michael BIshop), Jizmak Da Gusha (Brad Roberts), Beefcake The Mighty (Casey Orr) and Bonesnapper The Incredibly Boring Cave Troll (Bob Gorman). They are in full costume and they shout. It is a joke that lands once, on arrival, and is then asked to carry us between every tape, which it cannot. By the third return we were waiting for them to stop.
Renee Zhan’s segment is the reason to watch. Her puppets perform a song that is bright and tuneful and about something horrible, and the distance between the tune and the words is the whole effect. We laughed, loudly, and then found we had stopped laughing and were still watching the puppets’ faces, which was not comfortable. It is the only part of the film in which the music is the idea rather than the setting. It is also over quickly.
“The Music of Mr. Sze” has the best title and a good lead. Alex Hsu plays Mr. Sze with a stillness that reads as politeness for a while and then as something else, and Jaki Lauper’s Mrs. Blandi is the right kind of ordinary opposite him. Michael J. Sielaff is credited as Creepy Starer, which tells you what he does, and he does it well. The short has a sound set-up and no real third act, which turns out to be the anthology’s recurring fault.
Forge and Flying Lotus write the music as well as directing, and the score is the most consistent thing here. The cues are built to sound as if they had been found on a cassette, muffled, a touch too fast, with the hiss left in, and when a segment is dying the music is often the only thing in the frame still working. That is a compliment to the composers and not to the writers. The writing credits are shared between Moreau, Matt Landsman, Zoe Cooper, RZA and Dickerson, and the thinness is spread evenly among them.
The remaining tapes, from RZA, Dickerson and Moreau, are the kind of thing these films have always carried: competent, grainy, a scare at the end you could see from the start. Dickerson, who shot Do the Right Thing for Spike Lee, still knows where to put a camera, and his segment is the best looking. Moreau made Them in 2006, one of the leanest home-invasion films of its decade, and nothing here is as lean as that. RZA’s tape is the one we would struggle to describe to you a week later.
Against the series’ own record this sits in the middle. The first V/H/S had a format nobody had worn out yet and used it to make us dread the moment a camera was set down. Mixtape has a theme instead, and a theme is a weaker engine than a form: it tells six people what to make a film about without telling them how to make it frightening. The reviews so far are split roughly down the middle, and we can see why; the good segment is good enough to carry the argument for either side.
Watch it at home with the volume up and the remote in your hand. It is a mixtape, and the honest thing about mixtapes is that you skip. Start with the puppets.
