You're Next - Review

The home invasion sub-genre consists of some of the most unnerving films in horror. The idea of masked individuals invading your home to attack you and your family is both plausible and terrifying. The monsters aren’t supernatural. They are human. They aren’t in a place that feels foreign. They are hiding under your bed and coming through your window. Home is primarily a universal symbol of a safe place where a person can rest and escape the dangers of the outside world. A successfully made home invasion film can turn that sense of security upside down. It can make you double check the locks on your windows and leave the closet door open. It can take the safety out of suburbia. You're Next is not the first film to utilize this concept (Funny Games, The Strangers and Halloween immediately come to mind), but it employs it well while successfully mixing in dark comedic elements creating a surprisingly original experience in an arguably tired sub-genre.

Director Adam Wingard and writer Simon Barrett have pulled off another great collaboration balancing horror and comedy well with plenty of twists and turns throughout. The story is centered on the Davison family who are celebrating the 30th wedding anniversary of parents Aubrey and Paul in a secluded country mansion. The festivities take a deadly turn when lunatics donning animal masks begin picking them off one by one in gruesome ways. Although You’re Next has not been marketed as a horror comedy it easily falls into the sub-genre. Audience members around me were laughing as much as they were jumping in fright. A lot of the comedy comes from the bickering going on between the siblings. Joe Swanberg (Drake Davison) really shines as the stuck up brother who takes every chance he can to demean his siblings. Director Ti West also has a brief but memorable role as documentary film maker Tariq whose film was screened at the 2008 Chicago Underground Film Festival and prides himself on creating “art”. It’s an amusing skewering of the pretentious art-house filmmaker and his fans should get a kick out of the role.

V/H/S 2 - Review

Horror anthologies have always been a favorite of mine ever since I watched Creepshow and more recently Trick R Treat. I also love found footage films, D]despite many people’s tendency to shit on them, and think there's a lot more new and creative things that can be done with this genre. In no film is this more evident than in V/H/S 2.

V/H/S 2 is comprised of five segments, unlike six in the original, one of those being the wrap-around story. This, however, is a welcome change as it allows the directors plenty of time to flesh out their stories, one of which runs 40 minutes and is definitely worth the extra time. If there’s one part of the first V/H/S that I thought was most lacking it was the wrap-around story. It followed a group of troublemakers as they recorded themselves causing mayhem and ended at a creepy house where they have to find a V/H/S tape. Of course they slowly begin to disappear as the viewer is treated to each new story. It wasn't terrible but you didn't care about the characters at all because they were assholes and it felt like it was thrown in simply to provide a reason for all of these films to exist together. This time around, we follow a sleazy private detective and his partner on their search for a missing student when they come across.... you guessed it, a pile of VHS tapes that they can’t help but watch. I found this wrap-around story to be much creepier than the original film as the tapes actually affect them in strange ways and we can see someone else in the background watching them. In the original V/H/S we’re not given many hints to the origin of the tapes but in V/H/S 2 we are given a few more clues, though they still remain vague. The ending was a big step up from the first as well and turned out to be a bit of a surprise.