V/H/S/Mixtape (Various, 2026) Review

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“It smells like a gloryhole in here.” The annual outing for the Shudder-resurrected V/H/S franchise of portmanteau horror, but with a patchy track record – and two disappointing years in a row with 2025's V/H/S/Halloween and 2024's V/H/S/Beyond – can a music-themed iteration reignite the spark and send us back on an upswing?...

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“Fuck you, Fungal Boots!” The wrap-around of the film is, unusually for the V/H/S franchise, not any kind of tale at all. Instead, it seems to be some vague kind of television presentation of the films by the band GWAR – known for their gruesome costumes, grotesque sense of humour, and fondness for gooey fluids spurting every which way. It never goes anywhere, develops any kind of idea, and just seems like a bit of a chaotic mess – a brash idea that someone thought was a good notion, but the end result increasingly bodes ill-will for the remainder of the film with each flimsy segment.

“No one likes a reboot. It's a reimagining for a modern audience.” Film #1 is “Dance, Dance, Dance, Dance”, written by Zoe Cooper and directed by Renee Zhan. It gets off to a wobbly start, hindered by a host of annoying and unlikeable stock characters (although George is okay – but what is it with the V/H/S franchise and its obsession with characters who are just mean-spirited shit-talkers?) Despite the inclusion of Barbara Crampton (who at one point seems oddly unbothered by having a limb torn off), this story feels a bit lacking, as she – a studio executive leading a reboot of an old children's television show called The Curious Chorus – and her lackeys attempt to digitally scan the original puppets for the planned 3D computer animation 'reimagining' that they're working on.

George, and his beloved puppets, aren't too keen on this idea. The setup is solid enough, and there's the most fun to be had when the puppet shop of horrors comes alive … but there isn't a scare to be found in the whole thing, and this, sadly, is the case with every single short to follow. It is also troubled by an absolutely wretched character behind the camera, the sort of incessant babbler who can't stop with their ceaseless commentary on every single thing that flits in front of their eyes like they are some kind of flea-brained streaming service algorithm seeking to dumb everything down for the 'second screeners'. There are a couple of nice kills that reference two classics of 1980s horror, though – a face-melting akin to that of The Fly II, and the bisection of a head that is very reminiscent of Intruder.

“I can't fucking find the sound I'm looking for.” Film #2 is “Another Cabin”, directed by The Flying Lotus and, in an unexpected turn, is the franchise's first excursion into stop-motion animation, although how this actually fits in with the idea of 'found footage' is anyone's guess. Every V/H/S movie seems to need a strange outlier, and perhaps this is it.

This short is also the briefest story in the franchise's entire history and features no dialogue at all (indeed, there is also no short that is not-in-the-English-language in Mixtape, another break from tradition). A boy and his nasty grandmother are living in a cabin in the woods when a giant monster emerges from the trees to attack them. That's really about it. The animation is fun and very well made with a real sense of style and some nice flair to the direction, even though it doesn't fit with the established aesthetic in any logical way, but it's so brief that you could almost blink and miss the whole thing.

“I can hear my blood.” Film #3 is “Heartbeat”, written and directed by David Moreau. While it stumbles with irritating characters (a couple of urban exploring vloggers) and the range of authentic camera angles will no doubt unsettle those with motion sickness, this short contains the best idea of the bunch. The vloggers have tracked down a secret bunker in the woods called '854', so they break-in and discover that it is a Cold War era Soviet experimentation base.

However, their gleeful exploration takes a disturbing turn when they suddenly find themselves locked inside a 'silent room'. With time losing all meaning, they are soon driven mad by the sounds of their own bodies – for they can hear nothing else – and the human body is a loud organism. It ends a bit abruptly with no real conclusion, but the central idea, and the way the aural nightmarescape is played with, does make this a quite interesting entry and probably the highlight of the entire film.

“I'm making a documentary and I'd like to put you in it.” Film #4 is “The Music of Mr. Sze”, written and directed by Ernest Dickerson, and features an annoyingly bland film student who moves into a boarding house, only to become obsessed with the music being played all night by the mysterious neighbour upstairs in the attic room. The central protagonist is poorly written, lumbered with endless amounts of exposition and commentary on every thought and action that sweeps into his brain.

There is Lovecraftian scale to the finale, although how that would be imprinted on a digital video device is, again, lacking internal logic, but the whole thing just feels a bit dreary and dull. The worst offence of this short is the very unnatural-sounding dialogue, which again feels like the Netflix approach of dumbing-down by jamming-in expository lines to aid the understanding of 'second screeners' at the expense of millions of people who are still capable of focusing on one screen at a time. Frankly, that alone becomes infuriating long before the finale.

“You heard my music.” Film #5 is “Premature Burial”, directed by Tobias Forge, and it is another curious outlier (so that's double the usual amount in this year's outing) in that this second-shortest of all six tales is actually a music video for a Nordic black metal band called Repugnant. The look and feel is authentic to its 1991 setting, with the video telling the story of a woman who gets revenge on her abusive boss, but again, there's little else going on here. It's a music video. The end.

“You look too sweet to be making heavy beats.” Film #6 is “Death Tone”, directed by RZA who co-writes with Matt Landsman, and it may be one of the goriest of the films, but it also feels the longest, unfortunately allowing the film to end on a somewhat draining note. A grieving daughter wants to honour her music producer father's memory by creating a new beat … so naturally that means killing a bunch of people and recording the sounds of their agonising deaths.

Again, like most of the shorts in Mixtape, this one suffers from an unlikeable protagonist spouting iffy dialogue. Now, a 'likeable' protagonist doesn't have to mean someone doing good things, but it does mean they have to not annoy the audience (who should be compelled to want to spend time with the protagonists!), and unfortunately – like most of the characters in this film – the killer blonde making the beats is little more than irritating. By this point in the film, the will to continue has long since been sucked out of the viewer, so its placement as the denouement offers it no favours.

“I'm acting like I give a shit about the whole fucking thing.” V/H/S/Viral has been the low point of the franchise since its release in 2014, but V/H/S/Mixtape gives it a run for its money for that piteous distinction. Feeling like one of the most rote and generic outings for this film series, Mixtape stumbles along at a meandering pace, even with a relatively brisk running time of 93 minutes when the credits roll. The V/H/S series has frequently suffered from bloated running times thanks to five films and a wrap-around story, often featuring one short that could have easily been jettisoned entirely, but Mixtape – with six films and a half-assed wrap-around wedged into twenty fewer minutes nonetheless winds up as a total drag. By the sixty-minute mark one glances at their watch and despairs that there's still half an hour to go.

Despite a couple of generally solid stories – “Dance, Dance, Dance, Dance” and “Heartbeat” – which nonetheless suffer from featuring near-universally unlikeable characters who are, at best, baseline irksome and, at worst, outright infuriating, V/H/S/Mixtape is one big shrug of a movie. It is Lisa Simpson slouched on the sofa gazing blankly at the television and uttering “meh” incarnate, it is a bowl of tepid gruel with a dead fly resting on its lumpy surface, it is wallpaper paste congealing on a floorboard.

“A room without a view.” Mixtape is a misguided and entirely un-scary flop, focusing on silliness and cookie cutter exposition-spouting stock characters over anything else. Indeed, at least V/H/S/Viral attempted to grasp tension, suspense, and horror … so, perhaps Mixtape really has achieved something after all: it is now the worst entry in the V/H/S franchise. V/H/S/Mixtape is the limpest and most uninspiring the franchise has ever felt, despite its scrappy attempts to change-up a thing or two. Perhaps the film is best summed-up by the sight of a member of GWAR jizzing on a crudely-drawn picture of himself, which comes to life and results in them both have a jizz war as they blast green and red coloured goo all over each other's faces before their 'mother' enters the room, disappointed that she hasn't been invited to the jizz fest, and so blows her brains out.

This movie will fade in one's memory as quick as the usual slice of streaming service slop, some of it already deteriorating in the brain pan before the credits have even rolled. So that is now three annual disappointments in a row, all dwindling downwards to this new low point. There needs to be either a complete change in the stewardship of the V/H/S franchise with completely different people put in charge, or the series needs to be ended once and for all, because V/H/S/Mixtape – when taken as a whole – is a waste of time.