Oddly before watching Ghosts In The Machine (2016), I had viewed a news story on a new small retro video store in Burbank, California catering to giving people the nostalgic tape experience similar to vinyl records. This idea is essentially the plot of Ghosts In The Machine (2016) aka The House Of VHS in which six people find an old VCR in an abandoned French house. The machine turns out to be magical and a curse. A title change for this film with no ties to musical albums, songs or other works.
The script gives the impression that this was either an idea cast aside or one that was lying around and cobbled together from a shorter work. Treading the same ground as The Ringu series, Mystery Science Theater 3000 (which I detest) of wisecracking older films and the theme has now taken over by the ‘Found Footage’ genre in the vastly superior V/H/S franchise. In this oddly directed slammed-together work you have six people in the film who don’t have a history before arriving at an abandoned French country home. A holiday of some sort with no mobile phones allowed, an indoor toilet, running water, power and only one road in. The men are not worried as they have beer, and no need to wash.
The people are from six countries, the ‘Ugly’ American (Pétur Óskar) wears two different Harley-Davidson shirts with an exceptional attitude. The British Girl (Isabel McCann) wears Union Jack sunglasses and complains about driving on the left side of the road when she goes to the nearby city for food. The Frenchman (Morgan Lamorté) is referred to by the American as a Frog resulting in a silly punch-up. The Italian (Florie Auclerc) wonders what will power her hair dryer. The Belgian (Delphine Lanniel) makes sexual double entendres to all people. The leader is the Australian quintessential technical outcast played by Ruy Buchholz who finds the cache of VHS tapes hidden in a trunk and a working VHS machine despite no power.
Presenting his findings to the rest of the six, the Australian lectures on the merits of formats. How VHS won the war with Beta format is like how Blu-ray took over from DVD. He stutters over his words, giving the look that maybe he is possessed by this idea. Everyone watched these films which is the best part of the whole story as you get to see some cool clips of vintage video nasties, Italian shockers, Mexican monsters, Science fiction, alien invasions, giant monsters and a sprinkle of porn. This wears thin after a while as it is used many times. The odd discovery is that when these people watch multiple films an evening, the VHS machine gives birth to a special recording combining all the plots.
A Christmas movie and an alien movie, footage from Santa Claus Conquers The Martians (1966) and an unknown monster film fuse much to the delight of the Australian. Someone gets the bright idea to use a primitive camcorder on each other inserting themselves into a film. The sort of mayhem begins as the evil VHS machine takes control of people literally sucking them into the world of the films.
Ghosts In The Machine (2016) aka The House Of VHS is an excellent 45 minute genre film unfortunately it clocks in at 83 minutes. Quite a bit of silly dialogue, written as caricatures of foreign people at times is irritating especially the males. The women fare no better as they get to worry about nonsensical things, projecting the horny teenage motif in the slasher films. They even do an aerobic workout in skimpy outfits the only thing missing is the gratuitous nude moments.
The film does have some video effects, such as video dropouts, frame fluctuations, tape creases and video feedback giving one I suppose the experience. Oddly all these people do is huddle together on a couch, drink beer and laugh at the images and clap when the porn is on.
The footage of the films on the tapes wears thin along with an odd musical score that one goes perhaps this was a toss-in to pad this out to feature length. Watch it for the cool footage clips of some obscure films that unfortunately Ghosts In The Machine (2016) aka The House Of VHS will turn out to be not in a good way.
GHOSTS IN THE MACHINE (aka The House Of VHS) is out now to rent/buy on Amazon Prime Video in the UK courtesy of BayView Entertainment.
