What If Nickelodeon’s ‘Legends of the Hidden Temple’ Was a Horror Movie?
The continuing success of the V/H/S franchise is due not only to its anthology format and found-footage conceit but, just as crucially, to its raggedy analog shaky-cam visuals, which allow the films to hide their ghastly sights slightly out of view, to shock audiences with terrifying reveals, and to create anxiety and suspense through helter-skelter movement. Factor in audio-video distortion, tracking-related fuzziness, and action that’s suddenly interrupted and replaced by underlying recordings, and the series proves a work of carefully controlled aesthetic chaos, all scuzzy static, rewinding-and-fast-forwarding reverb, and jarring surprises emerging—figuratively and literally—from below. Stylistically speaking, it peddles warped, disorienting insanity tailor-made for tales of the macabre.
While V/H/S/99 doesn’t boast a unifying framing device like its predecessors, in most other respects it’s cut from the same magnetic tape. That’s true when it comes to its tattered visions of the unholy and undead, as well as with regard to its all-over-the-place quality. There’s yet to be a V/H/S venture that’s solid from top to bottom, which would be a more damning indictment if the same couldn’t also be said about similar horror collections. The good news is that this fourth go-round—premiering in the Midnight Madness section of this year’s Toronto International Film Festival—boasts two amusingly wacko efforts that shrewdly blend the sinister and the surreal. They may not generate much in the way of screams, but at their best, they elicit laughs of an astonished, I-can’t-believe-this-is-happening variety.
Rife with shout-outs to the turn-of-the-century culture in which it purportedly takes place, V/H/S/99 references everything from Hot Pockets and Limp Bizkit to Blockbuster Video, Radio Shack and Ace Ventura: Pet Detective. The last of those is featured in one of the film’s standout chapters, “Ozzy’s Dungeon,” a tongue-in-cheek tribute to the Nickelodeon kids game show Legends of the Hidden Temple. Director Flying Lotus’ segment begins as a straightforward riff, with a group of kids wearing bright shirts, helmets and goggles while going head-to-head in juvenile games on a television set decorated with Styrofoam props and lots of goo. The show’s host (Steven Ogg) is a smarmy jerk with a bushy mustache and a thin microphone, and he hams it up in semi-mean fashion as he prods contestant Donna to become the first contestant to make it through a final obstacle course whose prize is having the mythical Ozzy grant her a wish. As far as cheesy recreations go, it’s a solid one, and peaks with Donna suffering a brutal leg injury before completing the challenge.