VHYes Blu-ray (original) (raw)

Oscilloscope Pictures | 2019 | 72 min | Not rated | Jul 14, 2020

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VHYes Blu-ray Review

Reel to real.

Reviewed by Randy Miller III, July 19, 2020

It's certainly not for all tastes, but Jack Henry Robbins' VHYes caught me on a good day. Or night, rather. The kind of late Friday night when it's so hot and humid that the A/C's still on full blast, sleep is setting in, and things just feel a little...unearthly. Clocking in at just over 60 minutes before the credits roll, it's an imaginative celebration of the VHS mixtape you might have made in your younger days: a collage of goofy commercials, cable access clips, and other nuggets that only make sense in random order. This is all original content, however, with most of its short skits almost passing for the genuine article at first glance. Things gradually lean sideways before _VHYes_reveals its surprisingly brilliant narrative twist, a moment that ended up hitting a very narrow sweet spot in the back of my brain.

Without venturing too far into spoiler territory, VHYes begins innocently enough with the revelation that its main character -- for lack of a better term -- is Ralphie (Mason McNulty), a young boy who's eagerly playing around with his new camcorder on Christmas morning, 1987. He just grabbed a blank VHS tape from below the entertainment center and Ralphie's already at work recording...well, anything. Himself, his best buddy Josh (Rahm Braslaw), and low-budget late-night programming like infomercials, public access shows (including the Bob Ross spoof "Painting with Joan"), softcore porn, you name it. In-between these clips, we also catch stray glimpses of a wedding with two lovebirds that look an awful lot like his mom and dad in their younger days. Whoops. But the real trouble begins when Ralphie and Josh tape themselves exploring an abandoned sorority house...which doubles as the scene of a brutal murder and arson some 20 years earlier, as hinted at by a few _Unsolved Mysteries_-style segments recorded along the way.

This makes VHYes sound like a mixture of channel surfing and The Blair Witch Project, which it kind of is. But it's so carefully constructed and features such a satisfying conclusion that the whole thing ends up making sense. That's really the best compliment you can pay anything that, on the surface, reads like a bizarre mish-mash of loosely-related junk. Two fun facts: the whole thing was shot on VHS and Betamax, and was also the spin-off of two 2017 Sundance shorts that birthed a successful Kickstarter campaign. OK, make it three: director Jack Henry Robbins is also the son of actors Tim Robbins and Susan Sarandon, who make brief cameos during VHYes along with other recognizable faces.

It all adds up to a bizarre candidate for Blu-ray, but who cares? These are bizarre times we're living in.

VHYes Blu-ray, Video Quality

Recorded entirely on VHS and Betamax, there's only so much that Oscilloscope's 1080p transfer can pull from VHYes' source material. If you've ever seen this format on Blu-ray before (Emmett Otter immediately comes to mind), you'll know what to expect: poor image detail, motion blurring, stray jagged edges, mushy colors, almost no depth, and about a dozen other unavoidable defects. But within those _very_strict boundaries, VHYes looks decent enough for what it is: a straight port of material that most of its target audience grew up with. Everything runs at a reasonably high bit rate, and I wouldn't be surprised if the image on this Blu-ray perfectly matched its original analog source.

VHYes Blu-ray, Audio Quality

VHYes' audio does not go for authenticity (probably a good thing), as the included DTS-HD 5.1 Master Audio track features a few ambitious sonic tricks along the way. For the most part, though, it's a front-loaded affair with relatively crisp dialogue, strong dynamic range for some of the added music cues, and modest channel separation that gives everything an occasionally strong presence. Optional English subtitles are also included during the film.

VHYes Blu-ray, Special Features and Extras

• Sundance Film Shorts (21:47) - These 2017 shorts, seen several times during the film, include Hot Winter (17:28) and Painting with Joan (4:19).
• Extended Scene: Sexy Swedish Aliens (10:52)
• Theatrical Trailer (1:35)

VHYes Blu-ray, Overall Score and Recommendation

Jack Henry Robbins' VHYes is a future cult classic that gets in your head and stays there. It caught me off guard on a strange night and hit almost all the right notes on the way to its surprisingly effective conclusion. I've got a feeling that parts of VHYes are very personal to this up-and-coming director, and I for one am interested to see what he'll do next. Oscilloscope's Blu-ray presentation feels like A/V overkill for this SD-shot production, with the only real drawback being a high price tag considering the amount of content. It's still worth a look for fans of off-the-wall retro cinema.

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