More anthology nonsense, but this time (with the possible exception of the final alien segment) each found-footage first-person story actually has a reason for having cameras present – though again these are all digital cameras and there’s no reason they’d have all been transferred to VHS, besides that ever since The Ring people think videotapes are haunted.

Framing story is by Adam Wingard associate Simon Barrett – a private-eye/video-blackmailer couple is hired by a mom to find her college kid who is presumed missing, but has actually disappeared into a cult of haunted VHS-tape trading.

Phase I Clinical Trials by Adam Wingard, since I am accidentally determined to see every Adam Wingard movie. He also made the terrible A Horrible Way To Die (terrible’s what it is). I think the lead guy who gets a cybernetic eye is Wingard himself. He sees ghosts, and soon meets a nose-ringed girl with cybernetic ear who hears ghosts and wants to have sex with him in order to drown out the ghost sounds. This doesn’t work for long. Ghosts drown the girl and he ends up cutting out his fake eye with a knife as the ghosts slowly approach. Presumably this is a remake of Johnnie To’s My Left Eye Sees Ghosts.

A Ride in the Park by Sanchez and Hale, two of the original Blair Witch guys, brings some fun and comic zombie mayhem to the proceedings. A dying girl interrupts a biker, then he gets bitten and they both become zombies. But his helmet-mounted GoPro is still running, and records his attack on a family picnic. Happy ending: he recognizes what has happened and blows his own brains out.

Safe Haven by the guy who made The Raid movies and a guy who made a couple of Indonesian horrors, has a camera crew interviewing a commune death cult. It’s an odd segment because the camera crew is incompetent, full of relationship drama and uncharged batteries and general lack of preparation, so why is this the organization the reclusive cult finally allows into their compound on the day of mass suicide / zombie apocalypse / demon summoning?

Slumber Party Alien Abduction is by the Hobo With A Shotgun team, and as with that movie, the title says it all. Parents are away so the kids invite friends over and they all have sex and throw water balloons and torment each other, until aliens come for them.

Fun movies to watch on weekdays in Shocktober when I only have 20 minutes to spare (The ABCs of Death is for when I only have three minutes to spare). Still not so great, but surely better than part one.