I like the found footage genre so if you don’t like it, read no further. V/H/S is a horror anthology film that has one overarching frame narrative that encompasses the whole film. Think The Twilight Zone meets Tales from the Crypt but instead of a debonair host breaking the fourth wall, bro or dude criminal culture misfits stumble around unwittingly. The overarching narrative is that a bunch of thugs who record their illegal antics on poor quality video are hired to retrieve a VHS (remember those!!!) tape from an empty (?) house, but there are tons of VHS tapes so the guys watch five of them and so do we. There are few sympathetic characters-actually you may be happy when they die. The stories vary in quality and can be quite predictable, but what gives V/H/S its freshness is that the genres of each story vary wildly so I never knew what the next story was going to be about, whether they were related to each other or when or how it would end. V/H/S is also mercilessly bleak. The gruesomeness feels like retro Italian horror films. V/H/S is probably the most amateur of the franchise-I got the sense that this was the first rodeo for most of the people involved. Here is how I rank the stories: 10/31/98, Tuesday the 17th, The Sick Thing That Happened to Emily When She Was Younger, Amateur Night and Second Honeymoon. If you like tv shows like The Outer Limits, but think that the lesson is a waste of time, V/H/S is the perfect movie for you. Warning: you must have a high tolerance level for jackasses.