VHS Nasty is an amateur YouTube-level documentary that looks and sounds like an A-Level video project.

The content itself is unoriginal, but I think there’s value in hearing from the contributors. As a whole package, though, there’s no real narrative through-line – just a scattershot tour through whatever footage the filmmakers have managed to collect and throw together. The quality of that footage is so variable they’ve even overlaid the whole thing with hokey VHS-style noise and lines, presumably in a hamfisted attempt to apply some kind of visual coherence. But it doesn’t really work. 

It also looks like some people have been interviewed at home in their kitchen. One guy is sitting – I’m guessing in his living room – against some pretty awful wallpaper, and a ‘set’ of sorts has been created by placing an iPad really close to the camera with a movie poster filling its screen! It looks so bad I almost wanted to design them a few pop-up banners to place in the background for a more professional look. That would have cost them all of, what? £100? If you want to make a film that you expect other people to watch, that’s got to be pretty small beer.

The budget is clearly low on this one, though, and not in a good way. The opening narration sounds like someone’s dad was recorded in a pub toilet. It might have been an intentional artistic choice, but frankly I don’t believe that for a second.

Ultimately, this should have been some kind of roundtable discussion episode of an audio podcast. Or nothing at all.