Metacritic reviews

V/H/S delivers the thrills and chills craftily and with a better batting average than usual.

Sure it's fun - and painful - but it's not thin.

It also, in its best moments, makes horror out of the 21st-century obsession with self-documentation.

Refreshingly, V/H/S promises no more than it delivers, always a plus with genre fare.

An anthology of found-footage horror shorts that exudes, sometimes extraordinarily, a neophyte's sense of courage and cluelessness.

The segments vary in quality and the whole overstays its welcome at nearly two hours.

In too many of the shorts, bad acting quickly undermines the "authenticity" the aesthetics labor to achieve.

I'm not sure V/H/S is brilliant cinema or anything – indeed, I'm not sure it's appropriate to call it cinema at all – but it sure is an ingenious hybrid: part Godardian art film, part abstract video experiment, part sleazy shocker, and all self-castigating interrogation of what film-theory types call the "male gaze."

It's too bad V/H/S starts off on such a high note. Mainly, the omnibus film feels undercooked, even on the grounds of its forced technological setup.

V/H/S is an example of the genre at its least compelling.