V/H/S: Viral

 So... was it bad as I remembered?

 Well, yes, it's pretty fucking bad. And I don't seem to be alone in thinking that; This third V/H/S anthology derailed the series from its yearly schedule, kicking the next film seven years into the future.

 The framing story (by Marcel Sarmiento) is beefier than usual - I suspect that if you add all its parts together, they'd add up to as much as any other of the segments. Unfortunately, the story does not. Add up to anything, I mean. It's a non-starter about a dude who gets obsessed with a slow car chase which has something to do with his girl disappearing and with people going nuts all over the place. It's bad.

 Once it cedes its spot to the first proper short things get immeasurably better - Dante The Great (by Gregg Bishop) is a mockumentary about the rise and fall of the titular illusionist (Justin Welborn), a loser who somehow gets a hold of a magical cape which has some unfortunate demonic tendencies. Things get out of hand, resulting in a sort-of live-action re-enactment of Pixar's short Presto but with an R rating. Silly, well-made, well-paced and featuring the rare V/H/S protagonist (Emmy Argo) you actually want to root for... if anyone's looking for a segment in any of these movies that needs to be rescued and transplanted to a better anthology, this one would be a really good candidate.

 Dante's a hard act to follow. Nacho Vigalondo tries his best with Spanish-language parallel dimension tale Parallel Monsters, which has some clever conceits and a good WTF reveal, but none of it did much for me.

 At least it's nowhere near as bad as Justin Benson and Aaron Moorhead's Bonestorm, though. It's the usual tale of some insufferable skater dickwads who cross the border to Mexico to do some ollies or whatever and then have to face off with a bunch of zombie-like Dia de los Muertos entities. Taken as a near-experimental exercise in how far found footage can be stretched, it's kind of interesting... but it's also near painful to watch, and there's absolutely no narrative reason to sit through it.
 That these guys made both this and Spring in the same year still boggles my mind.

 All of this would have been rounded out by Todd Lincoln's Gorgeous Vortex, but it was cut out of the anthology because the director forgot to make it as a found footage film. And maybe because it's sucks, but given the rest of the material, I somehow doubt that. I have no idea what the hell this one's supposed to be about; Self-consciously arty, slow as molasses, and as obtuse as humanly possible... The protagonist (Jayden Robison) is truly gorgeous, though, and spends the most of her time running around in various skimpy outfits - so I guess there is at least that.
 The last short is available on the bluray after the credits, or up in various streaming sites if for some reason you don't want to spend any money on this. And to be clear, you shouldn't spend any money on V/H/S/Viral, I don't care how good Dante The Great is.

Something in the Dirt

 Two strangers living in the same ratty apartment building - one a seemingly together (ex) math professor, the other one a slightly burnt-out bartender with a checkered past, discover that one of the apartments they're renting has frequent localized paranormal events. Basically, a crystal ashtray starts floating and emitting light.
 So they decide to make a documentary about it. And... there's not much more to the movie than that, except that there is. It's hard to talk about this movie without spoiling its weirdo appeal.

 That it's weird shouldn't surprise anybody who's seen any other movies from the team behind it. It's written, directed and stars Justin Benson and Aaron Moorhead (partly produced and edited by them as well; Moorhead was in charge of cinematography). But it is a little surprising just how weird it is. For all their bizarro ideas and wonky science, all their previous movies carefully incorporated Hollywood conventions and a clear narrative to at least try and make them more accessible.

 This is their prickliest, most internal and experimental film to date. Ostensibly a narrative feature, intercut with scenes from the documentary the characters are making, what it actually is becomes trickier to pin down as it becomes clear that they have been filming recreations of the events we've seen, and that we may be watching recreations of recreations.
 And it's complicated by, well, their complicated relationship. It's fraught from the beginning; Even though they hit it off initially, they're still strangers, and since the phenomena they're trying to document is in one of their rooms, there's a queasy thread of paranoia running throughout as the duo start fighting about the project.
 There's also the strange goings-on they're investigating, with a mess of weird concepts, coincidences and seemingly related factoids that start coming to light as they start digging deeper: from transdimensional emanations to Jack Parsons (!) and from there to Pythagorean Mystery Cults (!!). Not so much a single thread as a tangled web of conflicting pseudo-explanations.

Yes, the hanging Matryoshka dolls in the middle are thematic. Also, this is one of the rare scenes in the movie where the two characters are in the frame together.

 The investigation into the central mystery, then, is an exercise in futility by design. And ultimately... it's not what's important here. The characters themselves are, and most of the movie is about watching these two people who feel life hasn't served them right try to use this opportunity to make sense of  things, get lost in their personal interpretations of the event, and escalate the friction between their discordant personalities.
 It's often pretty funny, and (at least I found it to be) always engaging. The performances are fine, but the writing feels off sometimes, a little too artificial- a lot of times I could see what they were going for but it didn't really feel natural. Their theories to explain the paranormal stuff come off as superficial, too, so the 'mystery box' aspect of the movie isn't very compelling.
 And finally - and this is not really a complaint, per se, but it is something that may block enjoyment of the film: while a lot of stuff does happen, it doesn't, again by design, have a satisfactory ending or even a satisfactory trajectory if the movie's wavelength doesn't resonate with you. The movie is completely preoccupied with its own concerns, utterly absorbed in its own headspace... as befits the subject matter.

 But there's a lot to like here if you do find that you want to dig in. It all comes down (in my interpretation) to the rabbit holes we disappear into, what makes us want to go down them, and the degrees to which we refuse to come out, possibly shutting out or even hurting others. Timely.

 And if nothing else, we finally have a good companion piece to The Alchemist's Cookbook; Now that's a sentence I never really expected to write.