While a viral virus outbreak seems to be spreading across the internet superhighway, as the film follows a teenage young man biking through a city searching for his love who seems to have been kidnapped in an ice cream van (that has seen better days), we are privy to a series of recorded episodes where characters face incredible, supernatural events.The first tale doesn't follow the found footage format religiously as the fourth wall of the popular subgenre is broken as pieces of it are shot by a "cinematic camera". It involves a trailer park magician-wannabe named Dante (Justin Welborn) who finds a demonic black cape (supposedly discarded by a frightened Houdini!) and exploits what it can do for great success. He records his cape's magic tricks and what the cape allows him to do with his hands and mind when wearing it. However, the cape is a carnivore (I can't make this stuff up!) and demands human nourishment (!) in order for Dante to be given access to perform with its magic. So a number of magician assistants wind up missing, and Dante records (why?) the process of the cape's feeding from them! In found footage, the obviousness of recording events which defy common sense, reeking of implausibility, finds its way into another example of the genre. You just kind of have to accept that what we mostly *wouldn't* record will be in order for us to experience what the characters do. This tale is a special effects showcase where the cape does some amazing things. Arial stunt work (climbing walls, the cape teleporting a person from one place to another and a rabbit from one place to another), bodies of a police task force suffering crushed bones without actually being touched by Dante, a rabbit being split open by Dante with him just moving hands right above it, the cape "eating" victims, and Dante performing fireball maneuvers that develop and fly from just his hands and mind making them appear; the tale has plenty of effects work to dazzle. The stunning red head, Emmy Argo, is the assistant who might just get the upper hand on Dante due to how much he likes her. Her boyfriend's fate is particularly ghoulish. Irony of the cape's feeding habits doesn't stop at just Dante's victims…he had better watch out as well! The second tale deals with parallel alternate universes *meeting* as two scientist Alfonsos (Gustavo Salmerón) discover each other after building successful dimensional machines in their basements. Exhilarated by their mutual encounter, the two Alfonsos decide to cross over into each other's worlds for a fifteen minute visit. One of the Alfonsos realizes that the alternate universe he crossed over into isn't necessarily to his liking…it seems the people in this universe are a bit biologically different (that is an understatement!). The horrifying addition to this is the alternate Alfonso has a particularly unique penile difference from his counterpart which might have bit of an overbite! Alfonso's alternate wife, Marta (Marian Álvarez), might just also have a biological, anatomical overbite all her own! Just its premise is creepy and unsettling enough to leave quite a Cronenbergian impression hard to forget (even if you *want* to unsee it!). The creation of the basement teleport machines certainly cause more harm than good to their creators! The third tale features skateboarders traveling to Tijuana for the ultimate experience, but the perfect location to vert presents more than they bargained for: true Mexican occultists in Day of the Dead skull makeup and attire arrive to attack them! An arm pulled from one of the boarders causes blood to leak on this chalk symbol which seems to awaken something evil. Eventually the occultists who die at the hands of the boarders awaken as ghouls! Even a monster seems to emerge thanks to the black magic that responds to the blood of the boarders! Mostly seen through the cameras hooked onto the helmets, with one boarder shooting from a hand-held, this features gruesome violence from skateboards, animal bones, and even a sword! The most virtuoso and exciting use of the POV approach of found footage. The stoner characters aren't exactly ingratiating, but they sure defend themselves well (well, two of them do!).Other found footage additions include a woman whose nude recording was posted on a website getting revenge on the blogger in a taxi and a Spanish harlem gangster soirée erupting into chaos when the lead hood gets enraged by the fork-stabbing of his pet dog! The wraparound story isn't anything to write home about. It has a young man chasing after a van (a van dragging a biker across a paved road is nuts!), eventually finding it with no one inside, perhaps left with a decision to make which could affect the entire city, maybe even the world!

VHS2 is one of the best horror films I've seen in recent memory. It tightened the overlong editing of the first movie and added genuinely creepy moments. I was looking forward to watching VHS: Viral after seeing VHS2, because I thought they'd gotten a solid pattern down. But no.No, instead you get skateboarding teens looking "totally rad" while fighting a group of cultists (seriously.) And then, after fending off the angry mob, the 15-year-old boys skate home.VHS: Viral offers four stories: the magician story, the multi-universe story, the aforementioned skateboarding brats yarn, and a wraparound that ties all these vignettes together. These stories all stink except for "Parallel Monsters," which is good enough to warrant its own film.If you can, watch "Parallel Monsters" without wasting your time with the rest of this sequel.

I don't understand why so many people hate this movie so much. While not as good as the first two installments in the series, I still found V/H/S: VIRAL to be a pretty creative and entertaining movie. Admittedly, the plot of the wrap-around that surrounds the individual segments is really confusing, but it's still fun to watch. One thing that bothers me a little is that the movie didn't really have that one killer segment that really stood out like the first two movies had: There was the creepy "Amateur Night" in V/H/S and the totally insane "Safe Haven" in V/H/S 2. There's no such show-stopper in V/H/S: VIRAL. Nevertheless, I think all the segments were well-made and entertaining. Not really creepy or scary like some segments from the first two movies, but I enjoyed V/H/S: VIRAL nonetheless. My guess is that many people don't like this movie because it lacks the concept of the individual short movies being watched on a VCR as it was the case in the first two movies. I don't really mind that.

It took me 2 attempts to get into the first VHS movie and then I loved it. 3 attempts for the follow-up and then I really liked it. It could be another 15 attempts for the third installment, and I probably still won't like it. Of course, that won't happen. This is will probably be the first and last time this lame attempt at milking the one and only decent found footage series gets seen by me. Virtually nothing new or creative here and even less coherency appears on screen. And this is sad as some of the segments appeared to have a slightly elevated budget. But, alas, this felt rushed and the first draft for each was used in order to, ah-hem, roll this out to the viral community. Be kind and rewind…the first two and watch those instead.