Video/Home/System/Mixtape is the ninth installment in the Video/Home/System franchise, an ongoing anthology series where various horror filmmakers create short films around a selected theme. This year, the theme is: Audiovisual Horror. As is common for the series, the hit-to-miss ratio is wildly inconsistent and there are a few good experiments and some mediocre stuff in-between.
The wraparound story enlists GWAR of costumed, gory shock-rock infamy, for a brainless bit of exposition. GWAR play Video DJs for an MTV-like program where they play VHS tapes that have been sent in. The wraparound is directed by producer/rapper Flying Lotus, who is a bit of a mixologist himself, but struggles to center the material around the theme, losing the common series element of “found tapes” that was originally moderately appealing.
Each short segment in Video/Home/System/Mixtape, in the order by which they are sequenced:
Dance, Dance, Dance, Dance
Starting strong, Renee Zhan delivers a “mini-doc” in which Barbara Crampton (who has bad luck with puppets in general) plays a movie producer hoping to revive the puppets of an old children’s show for a reboot series. Unfortunately for her, and fortunately for us, the puppets have other plans, involving violence and twisted children’s tunes. Designed by Jim Henson’s Creature Shop, the puppets lend the short just the right credibility, and Zhan’s approach carries the gonzo premise across its brief runtime. Perhaps the best feature of the Video/Home/System entries is that they serve as launching pads for horror careers, and Zhan shows a clear aptitude for the genre. She’s primed for a feature film career. Zhan’s funhouse puppet creature film is immediately endearing and makes good use of this year’s audiovisual theme, taking a creative and colorful approach to horror.
Another Cabin
Flying Lotus has better luck with his animated short Another Cabin, a quick-hit music video where a monster with a giant tongue terrorizes a woman and her grandchild. Stop-motion filmmaking is very accessible for a project like this one and Another Cabin, while not particularly memorable, is a nice piece for the sake of variety.
Heartbeat
Call it Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Tick Tock Heart,” in which an obnoxious couple recording a performative adventure for their urban exploration YouTube channel are, blessedly, locked inside an experimental military isolation chamber, where they slowly lose their minds. Although the short is well-tuned to the series premise in general and to this entry’s use of sound in particular, it never quite takes flight, because its filmmaking method is so disruptive. The handheld approach, which sometimes feels like we’re attached to a selfie stick but never settles on a consistent perspective, is almost as frustrating as the characters themselves. And this is a personal hill I’ll die on, but Video/Home/System entries ought to feel like they were made for candid videotapes, not for the internet.
The Music of Mr. Sze
Ernest Dickerson riffs on H.P. Lovecraft’s “The Music of Erich Zann,” blending audiovisual horror with eldritch evil. Dickerson has crafted some of cinema’s most vital images, especially alongside Spike Lee (Do the Right Thing is perhaps the best-looking movie of the 1980s), but that vitality doesn’t arrive here, likely because of the very dumb gimmick that the story is being shot through a character’s AI glasses. For the record, the Blender-made effects and cutaways are not AI; the designer has shared their work-in-progress process and is firmly anti-AI. The Music of Mr. Sze has the best premise of the bunch, and despite a mild execution of its themes, its ideas about fusing Lovecraft with sound and image make it worth watching.
Premature Burial
Before he became Papa Emeritus of Ghost, Tobias Forge fronted the Swedish death metal band Repugnant, which he resurrects here during his hiatus from Ghost to pursue filmmaking and family. Seeing Ghost last year was inspiring — Forge still has the spark. The track from his old band delivers sick old-school Swedish death metal drumming with no filler. But while the burial may have been premature, so is the segment, which comes and goes without leaving any real impression.
Death Tone
The best cinema RZA has created is in the rap music he has produced. Whereas RZA’s music explores rich tapestries of culture, space, and time, his filmmaking is stodgy. Paying penance for directing one of the year’s worst-shot movies, One Spoon of Chocolate, the legendary music producer has better luck with this short form experiment. Neela Jolene plays a young woman who has lost her music producer father. He left behind instructions on how to make the ultimate musical track and some drugs to take for inspiration. When the woman shoots the drugs, the instructions become more vivid: she will torture and murder some victims in gruesome ways and use the sound of their cries for help as loops in the music. It’s a great premise handled competently and RZA shows that perhaps he just needs some limitations and the focus of a short. Maybe the runtime of a song has always been ideal for his brand of genius.
Video/Home/System/Mixtape begins to feel like an incidental collection of stray thoughts. We must suspend disbelief — the way some of these end, it’s not likely anyone’s sending in tapes — and the franchise has sort of moved away from its you shouldn’t be seeing this pitch. It’s unclear why these would be shown or packaged together by GWAR but the franchise insists upon itself, and so, we arrive at a down-the-middle collection of errant thoughts, with a few piques of curiosity along the way.