In a world where the V/H/S franchise dominated found footage anthologies, Terror Films Releasing and FOUND TV bring us U.V.F: Underground Video Films. Be prepared to feast your eyes on abominations and other questionable material not meant for normal human consumption… but still irresistibly interesting to horror fans.
Presented as a forbidden TV broadcast, this horror anthology revives unsettling short films from the world.
U.V.F: Underground Video Films, IMDB
As if we’re a client in some sort of dark web group, an announcer describes the horrid videos we are about to be subject to. Backlit by VHS static, the presenter shows videos ranging from slightly off-putting (a man eating cereal in a very gross way), to criminal (murder and police raids), and extremely troublesome (commercials and shows pulled from public TV programming). As each video segment plays, the grainy footage does nothing but enhance that unease throughout the movie; oftentimes becoming corrupted and glitchy, U.V.F feels real (don’t worry, it’s not though… right?).
A few different segments really stuck out to me: Mr. Simon Tapes, Room 44, and Rotting Love. Mr. Simon Tapes is presented as a kids show abruptly taken off of the air because of parental complaints, as the host (Mr. Simon) read stories about kids giving into the darkness. It felt very Channel Zero: Candle Cove, if you’ve ever watched. Room 44 is actually all audio played over a “No Signal” striped background. It is a man describing a room where awful things happen, such as seeing people with no skin, all while horrid thumping sounds play and his voice doubles and repeats. Rotting Love was a surprise entry because it was all stop-motion animated! Two women in a sexual relationship come into contact with the “French Disease” and begin to rot away.
I was so impressed with not only the number of segments showed (I stopped counting after 10), but of the variety of types of videos: live-action, animated, audio-only, surveillance, commercial, etc. U.V.F felt a lot like a Shorts segment at a film festival, glued together by an unknown presence from another dimension. Each story had its own feel, its own style of scares, which would make sense since a bunch of different filmmakers were involved, à la ABCs of Death. And while I usually have a lot of fun in these styles of anthology found footage movies, U.V.F made me feel on edge because it actually brought back the terror.
U.V.F: Underground Video Films truly gives off the vibes of its namesake: underground. It’s our same found footage tales we’ve come to know, love, and expect, but something about it just feels grittier, grimier, and somehow footage we shouldn’t be watching. There’s something about watching a film that feels a little to real. It’s our obsessive pull towards voyeurism that both keeps us wary but also keeps us interested. U.V.F inches closer and closer to the reality line the further into the runtime we get. And while I’m definitely weirded out and scared, I’m not changing the channel.
UVF: Underground Video Films is streaming exclusively on FOUND TV on October 9th. For more, visit Terror Films and FOUND TV on Instagram.
