If you’ve ever stared at a stack of unlabeled VHS tapes in your parents’ basement and thought, “I bet at least one of these contains something cursed,” V/H/S/99 is basically that thought turned into a movie. It’s loud, grimy, mean-spirited in a fun way, and absolutely allergic to subtlety—in other words, a wildly entertaining return to the franchise’s trash-gem roots.
Set in 1999, this entry ditches the usual overarching frame story and instead lets five found-footage segments crash into each other, stitched together by the stop-motion toy soldier videos of a bored teenager. It feels less like a traditional anthology and more like flipping channels between deranged home videos at 2 a.m. on a tube TV that definitely has something living in the static.
Let’s go piece by piece.
“Shredding” – Never Mock the Dead Punk Band
Maggie Levin kicks things off with Shredding, about R.A.C.K., a group of obnoxious DIY punk kids whose biggest crime—at least initially—is being extremely 1999 and extremely punchable. They host a web show (bless the pre-YouTube chaos), pull stunts, and decide their coolest idea yet is to break into a burned-down venue where a band called Bitch Cat died in a stampede.
Because this is a V/H/S movie, they don’t just disrespect the dead; they re-enact the stampede using inflatable sex dolls full of goo. It’s tasteless, cruel, and perfectly on-brand for teenagers who think empathy is a poser trait.
Then the bhoota show up.
The reanimated band returns as zombified, shredded punk spirits who are not in the mood for tribute content. What follows is a messy, strobe-lit gorefest: limbs ripped apart, bodies pulped, heads removed, and for dessert, Bitch Cat hijacks the camera to film their own comeback performance using crudely reassembled corpses as puppets.
It’s noisy, chaotic, and frankly a blast. It feels like an episode of Jackass filmed over by a vengeful ghost with a VHS camcorder and no concept of “too far.”
“Suicide Bid” – Sorority Hazing, But Make It Underground
Johannes Roberts brings us Suicide Bid, which asks: what if sorority hazing took that “ride or die” vibe a little too literally?
Lily, a hopeful pledge to the elite Beta Sigma Eta sorority, decides to do a “suicide bid”—only applying to them. Their response is to bury her alive in a coffin overnight as a test of loyalty, because nothing says “sisterhood” like light pre-murder.
Armed with a camera and a box that supposedly contains “reassurance,” Lily discovers that reassurance is actually multiple spiders. So now we have: claustrophobia, bugs, darkness, water slowly flooding in from a storm, and Lily having an existential crisis while the sisters laugh it off and run from the cops.
The segment really leans into the airless misery of being trapped: cramped shots of the coffin, the sound of earth and rain, Lily’s panic escalating. And just when you think “Okay, this is bad enough,” we meet Giltine, the urban legend sorority girl who supposedly vanished into the underworld after being left in the coffin decades ago.
Guess what? She’s real. And she’s cranky.
The twist—Lily striking a deal with Giltine, then returning as a ghoul to deliver the smug mean girls into their own coffins—is deeply satisfying. It’s petty horror at its finest: trading your soul for revenge and bringing a spiteful ghost along as your personal attorney.
If Greek life had recruitment videos like this, everyone’s parents would forbid college outright.
“Ozzy’s Dungeon” – Nickelodeon Slime, But from Hell
Flying Lotus, unsurprisingly, delivers the weirdest thing in the movie with Ozzy’s Dungeon. It starts as a parody of ‘90s kids’ game shows—think Legends of the Hidden Temple meets Double Dare if the hosts were legally allowed to be cruel.
Young Donna just wants to win so she can wish her family out of poverty. Instead, while racing through a sadistic obstacle course, she suffers a horrific leg injury while the host keeps egging her on. The show shuts down, but the trauma doesn’t.
Smash cut to later: the host wakes up locked in a basement dog cage, naked, bleeding, and facing Donna’s mom, Debra, who very clearly took the whole “stage parent” thing and drove it off a cliff. Debra, husband Marcus, Donna, and her brother Brandon proceed to put the host through bootleg versions of the show’s challenges, but now with bonus acid, torture, and emotional meltdown.
It’s darkly funny in that “oh, this is so wrong” way. The host is disgusting, Debra is terrifying, and Donna—rotting leg and all—is chillingly quiet through it all.
Then it gets properly unhinged: the host offers to take them to the real Ozzy. They go back to the abandoned studio, slip through the backstage door, and find themselves in a cave temple where Ozzy is an eldritch thing being worshipped by former show staff.
Ozzy’s monstrous metamorphosis and the gleefully nasty ending—with Donna’s “wish” granted via face-melting energy beam—is pure, deranged catharsis. Childhood TV, but make it body horror.
“The Gawkers” – Teen Voyeurism Meets Mythology
Tyler MacIntyre’s The Gawkers is what happens when horny teen boys meet myth and get exactly what they deserve.
Brady is a socially awkward kid making stop-motion videos of toy soldiers (the interludes we’ve been seeing between segments). His older brother Dylan and his idiot friends use the same camera to film pranks, skate tricks, and creep shots of women in the neighborhood.
When a gorgeous woman named Sandra moves in across the street, they collectively lose their tiny minds. Brady actually meets her and, in a twist none of them deserve, she’s kind and invites him over to help set up her computer and webcam.
The older boys promptly bully Brady into installing spyware so they can watch Sandra undress without her consent. It’s vile, all too believable, and makes what happens next feel… surprisingly righteous.
Because as it turns out, Sandra isn’t just hot—she’s a gorgon. As the guys watch her on the hacked webcam, she casually peels off her scalp to reveal hair made of snakes. She spots the camera, realizes what they’re doing, and immediately dives out her window like a mythological SWAT officer.
The horror that follows is quick and delightful: she invades Dylan’s room, kills his friends, and then turns both Dylan and Brady into stone. She doesn’t accept Brady’s apology, and honestly? Good for her.
The final image of Sandra slowly approaching the camera, surrounded by statues of horny idiots, is the kind of poetic justice the internet could use more of.
“To Hell and Back” – Literally
The Winters (Deadstream) close things out with To Hell and Back, which is basically: “What if two awkward videographers accidentally got teleported to Hell on New Year’s Eve and had to speedrun their way out?”
Nate and Troy are hired by a coven to film a ritual meant to summon a demon named Ukabon at the stroke of midnight, Y2K-style. They assume it’s cosplay nonsense. Then an uninvited demon named Furcas shows up, drags them under the altar, and suddenly they’re in Hell, which looks like a cave system made of meat, bones, and OSHA violations.
This segment is surprisingly funny and surprisingly sweet. As they stumble through Hell—dodging demons, traps, and horrors—they meet Mabel, a strange, archaic-speaking damned soul who decides to help them in exchange for them writing her name in the witches’ book so she can be summoned back to Earth.
Mabel is lovable in a tragically deranged way, like a medieval NPC trapped in a doom level. The trio’s banter, panicked problem-solving, and general “we are not qualified for this” energy gives the segment a demented adventure vibe.
The finale, with Nate possessing the vessel back on Earth, the witches freaking out, Troy bleeding out while scrawling Mabel’s name, and Hell’s bureaucracy briefly glitching, hits that sweet spot of horror and dark comedy. It’s messy, creative, and somehow kind of touching.
The credits audio hint that Mabel’s coming back, which frankly feels like good news for the franchise.
Final Thoughts: A Beautifully Nasty Time Capsule
V/H/S/99 is not a polished horror film. It’s scrappy, uneven, occasionally juvenile, and absolutely soaked in late-’90s chaos—pop culture, camcorder grime, nu-metal attitude, and all. But that’s also its charm.
It leans into:
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Analog nastiness – the fuzzy aesthetic, shaky cams, DIY gore.
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Mean little morality tales – terrible people getting gloriously awful fates.
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1999 nostalgia – the game shows, the fashion, the early internet sleaze, the Y2K panic.
Not every segment will be everyone’s favorite, but together they form a gleefully deranged mixtape of “remember when the world felt like this?”—right before the millennium flipped and everything got even weirder.
If you like your horror anthologies messy, inventive, and a little bit evil, V/H/S/99 is like finding an old tape in the attic, pressing play, and realizing it’s full of the worst home videos imaginable—and you can’t stop watching.
