A group of amateur punk-rock teenagers in 1999 break into a condemned concert venue (The Rack) to film a music video for their terrible band, “R.A.C.K.” They hope the edgy location will help them win a local battle of the bands. Inside, they discover a secret room where a failed performer named “Gore” apparently immolated himself during a stunt. They find tapes of his other failed stunts. As they film their video, they accidentally trigger a supernatural curse tied to Gore’s rage. The segment ends with the band members being painfully and grotesquely merged into a grotesque, screaming wall of flesh (a “human video wall”), forced to perform forever. A VHS tape of their fate is labeled “V/H/S/99.”
The framing device is functional but weak. The characters are intentionally annoying (as mock-punk teens), and the horror payoff is effective in its body horror but the segment lacks the eerie coherence of the best wraparounds (like V/H/S/94 's storm drain or V/H/S/2 's investigators). v h s 99 2022
franchise. Set in the final days of the analog era, the film skips the traditional "wraparound" narrative in favor of five distinct segments tied together by a loosely connected "tape" aesthetic and short stop-motion interludes. Movie Overview Release Date: Premiered September 16, 2022, at TIFF; released on on October 20, 2022. A group of amateur punk-rock teenagers in 1999
The strongest segment of the bunch. A college freshman, Lily, is forced to join a sorority hazing ritual that requires her to spend the night buried alive in a coffin as a “prank.” The twist? The cemetery’s groundskeeper is not the one digging above her. Something else is. Roberts masterfully uses claustrophobia and the static hiss of a camcorder. The monster design—a massive, muddy, skeletal hand—feels ripped from a late-90s Are You Afraid of the Dark? episode on steroids. The ending is bleak, ironic, and perfectly captures the “mean girl” culture of 1999. As they film their video, they accidentally trigger
A savage parody of 1990s Nickelodeon game shows (specifically Legends of the Hidden Temple and Double Dare ). A team of young contestants competes in “Ozzy’s Dungeon,” a physically brutal obstacle course hosted by a manic, sweaty man-child named Ozzy (a brilliant, creepy performance). One contestant, a girl named Riley, is critically injured during the “Guts Splatter” finale (a giant padded rolling pin). The show covers it up. Her furious, grieving parents kidnap Ozzy and force him to play a twisted, homemade version of his game in their basement. They demand he win a “wish” from a stone idol from the show. When Ozzy fails, the mother mutilates him. Eventually, the idol cracks open, releasing a demon that kills the parents. Ozzy, now mutilated and insane, is last seen worshiping the demon.
V/H/S/99 is “messy but fun,” delivering “gnarly practical effects and a strong sense of late-90s dread.” Most critics praised Ozzy’s Dungeon and To Hell and Back as highlights. The film was seen as an improvement over V/H/S/94 in terms of variety and ambition.