Kicking off in 2012 and already a full-blown franchise, the V/H/S series was created as a way of showing off the talents of up and coming genre filmmakers. Each entry comprised of any number of short films, tied together with a wrap-around segment, the franchise has served to inject some new life into the found footage sub-genre, allowing those filmmakers the freedom to play around with the style and just plain have fun.

Like most horror anthologies, the first two V/H/S movies have their high points and low points, and the general fan consensus seems to be that the highs are high enough to drown out the lows. Personally speaking, I had a lot more fun with V/H/S 2 than I did the first one, finding it to be the rare sequel that trumps it predecessor. That said, both installments bring some fun ideas to the table, and those creative ideas have been the main joy of the series, for me.

Just released onto VOD outlets was V/H/S: Viral, the franchise’s third installment. This time around, a mere four shorts make up the film’s 80-minute runtime, with four brand new directors (well, five, actually) coming aboard to take the franchise into viral territory.

Kicking things off is Marcel Sarmiento’s Vicious Circles, which serves as the film’s wraparound segment. Sarmiento is one of the co-directors of Deadgirl, one of my favorite horror movies in recent years, and his entry centers on a strange police chase that a camera-obsessed dude hopes to capture and make money off of. Leading the chase is a creepy ice cream truck, and the whole world seems to be impacted by whatever the hell is going on.

A hallmark of good anthologies is that they tend to have a wrap-around that unites all the individual shorts, and Vicious Circles most definitely does not do that. Without that host film, so to speak, an anthology can easily become a disjointed mess, and V/H/S: Viral, when viewed as a complete film, is indeed just that.

Vicious Circles starts and ends the film, as well as continues between segments, and it feels more like a standalone short than it does the unifying segment that it by all means should be. Whereas the first two V/H/S movies had wraparounds that served to neatly present each film, this one doesn’t even bother to do that, and unfortunately it makes the whole thing feel like Lebowski’s apartment without the rug.

Regardless of its failure to tie together the film, Vicious Circles is also a mess in its own right, starting off with a cool concept but ultimately becoming an unintelligible watch that’s made quite nauseating by the overbearing attempt to make you feel like you’re watching a battered old VHS tape. I’m not sure if the segment was supposed to be making a statement about our video-obsessed society or what, all I know is that I totally missed whatever it was trying to say.

If there’s any segment that left me hungry for more it’s definitely Dante the Great, directed by Gregg Bishop (Dance of the Dead). In this second story, a down-on-his-luck man comes into possession of a magical cape, allegedly once the property of Harry Houdini. The cape makes the man a star on the magic circuit, and gives him untold powers that threaten to destroy everyone around him.

Though Dante the Great feels very rushed as a short film, if only because the concept provides such fertile ground for expansion, Bishop manages to cram a whole lot of fun into his segment. In addition to giving its owner magic powers, the cape also needs to be fed humans in order to ‘recharge,’ and it’s a whole lot of fun watching Dante feed his cape and do crazy magical shit.

Would love to see Bishop given more time to really flesh out the idea, as it’s perhaps the best concept on display in the entire movie.

Next up is Timecrimes director Nacho Vigalondo’s Parallel Monsters, which also has a really interesting concept. Vigalondo loves playing around with the space-time continuum and he does just that in this tale, centered on an inventor who builds a DIY portal to a parallel dimension.

Admittedly, Vigalondo’s segment is at its most fascinating in the first couple minutes, when a simple mirror trick is the star of the show, but it’s nevertheless the strongest entry in V/H/S‘ third installment. Once the portal is opened up, the man meets an alternate version of himself, and the two agree to trade places for 15-minutes. As you might imagine, this one goes to some pretty crazy places, and it’s a wild ride full of genital monsters and jack o’lantern faces.

In other words, it’s precisely the sort of thing most of us are looking for, from these movies.

The weakest segment, aside from the wraparound that fails to wraparound, is Bonestorm, directed by Justin Benson and Aaron Moorhead (Resolution). Obnoxious skateboarders are the main characters in this one, filming skate videos when they unwittingly trespass on the grounds of some sort of demonic cult. Gory mayhem ensues.

On paper, Bonestorm sounds like a blast, and though it definitely does impart a decent amount of entertainment, there’s just something about it that it holds it back from being as fun as it should be. The highlight here are some fun visual gimmicks, including a victim’s camera-strapped head being swallowed by a giant monster, but it’s altogether a disappointing segment that never quite goes where you want it go.

Executed a bit differently, it could’ve been either creepy or incredibly fun, and Bonestorm ends up being neither. Crazy cult activity was much more effectively explored in V/H/S 2‘s highlight short, Safe Haven.

While there are a handful of solid moments and ideas in V/H/S: Viral, and two notable segments that are worth watching, the anthology as a whole is the messiest in the entire franchise, lacking any sort of flow and suffering big time because of it. If only because of the segments Bishop and Vigalondo bring to the table, it’s nevertheless worth a watch, as the incredibly short runtime leaves little room for boredom.

Here’s to hoping a bit more time is spent putting the V/H/S franchise’s inevitable next installment together, because it’s starting to feel more and more like random shorts are just being slapped together to get these things out every year.