Delayed Reaction: V/H/S: Viral

What I Guessed It Was About: Given the structure of the other movies and the title of this one, I can only assume the next story of this movie is about finding a Youtube for snuff.

How I Came Into It: I love the first two V/H/S movies. They'd been in my top five of the years they came out without question. They are inventive, scary, disgustingly beautiful at times, and linger with you. Being an anthology, I realize that there's not a lot of connective tissue from one to the next, but the hit percentage of those movies is exceptional. As soon as I heard about Viral, I was as excited for it as anything I've seen in the last year.

Why I Saw It: There's still an attempt to be inventive in the style that each story is told. I quite enjoyed the Spanish story in the middle, told through a series of handheld cameras. I don't know how much the experience would be changed if I knew what was being said, but I loved that it didn't have subtitles. The performances spoke for themselves. Even the other mini-movies, which I enjoyed less, were different from what had been done before.

Why I Wish I Hadn't: I've heard that the plan is for this to be the last V/H/S movie and after seeing this, I'm glad. For as much as I liked the first two, this was a major let down. The magician story looked like a violent episode of Goosebumps. The skateboarding story wasn't very engaging. The bridging story didn't really make sense. I'm not sure what all the viral stuff was about (Were they trying to make a point? Was that actually supposed to be scary? I don't know!). Unless you are really hard pressed for a new horror movie, I'd strongly recommend stopping after V/H/S 2. This is too much of a drop in quality.

Verdict (?): Weakly Don't Recommend