The V/H/S franchise has always run on the anthology model's central gamble: put enough shorts in a bag and shake it, and statistical probability alone should deliver something memorable. V/H/S/Mixtape shakes the bag around a music-and-sound theme, with Gwar — the theatrical metal band — providing interstitial connective tissue in full costume, cracking Halloween dad jokes that set the register correctly. This is not serious horror. That's a choice, not a failure. The best entry is Renee Zhan's opener, Dance, Dance, Dance, Dance, despite the review noting it drags slightly. Murderous puppets — designed by Jim Henson's Creature Shop — take revenge on studio executives who want to "reimagine" aging IP. The funniest gag is the bright major-scale death song the puppets sing about how all things must die. It's a real joke, constructed with real timing, and it earns its gore. The fact that the puppets came out of the Henson shop makes the whole thing gleefully wrong in the right way. Flying Lotus's Another Cabin works precisely because it doesn't overstay. Stop-motion, a rural cabin, a mean grandmother, a tentacled demon tearing the roof off — it's lean enough that its weirdness doesn't calcify into tedium. The characters' resemblance to The PJs cast (the early 2000s stop-motion series) is jarring against the material's register, but Flying Lotus gets in and out before the viewer has time to fully process the dissonance. Ernest Dickerson's The Music of Mr Sze is the most visually accomplished entry — unsurprisingly, given Dickerson shot Do the Right Thing and Malcolm X for Spike Lee — and the most narratively unsatisfying. An aspiring filmmaker becomes bewitched by violin melodies from his upstairs neighbor, and the story escalates into trippy imagery that Dickerson and the review both agree tips into borderline incomprehensibility. Beautiful craft in service of a story that never commits to what it's about. RZA's Death Tone is the anthology's clearest misfire. Neela Jolene plays the daughter of a famed music producer who follows her late father's instructions — and his narcotic supply — to make the perfect song from the recorded screams of victims. RZA is clearly amused by his own gags. The problem is that sound-booth humor doesn't travel: what makes the room crack up when you're in on the joke reads as self-indulgent when you're not. David Moreau's Heartbeat, a Poe riff set in a Bulgarian military base involving trapped YouTubers, lands somewhere between those two poles — not actively bad, just thoroughly forgettable. The practical effects across all five are deliberately over-the-top, rubbery, and absurd — more Evil Dead 2 than Hereditary. If you go in looking for genuine dread, you'll leave empty-handed. What the anthology offers instead is gleeful grotesquerie with an unpleasantly warped sense of humor. That's a coherent identity; it's just not a very ambitious one. The best analogy for the overall package is a Halloween party playlist: a few tracks you'll come back to, a few you'll skip next year, and one you'll wonder why anyone included.
