12-year-old budding home-video director Ralph begins accidentally taping over his parents' VHS wedding tape. As he overwrites the magnetic echoes of their pre-Ralph past, he commemorates his love affair with the format by using the versatile tape to make new memories of himself with his parents while also employing it to tape eccentric pioneers of late-night cable television. Shot entirely on VHS and Beta.... (Full plot summary below)
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12-year-old budding home-video director Ralph begins accidentally taping over his parents' VHS wedding tape. As he overwrites the magnetic echoes of their pre-Ralph past, he commemorates his love affair with the format by using the versatile tape to make new memories of himself with his parents while also employing it to tape eccentric pioneers of late-night cable television. Shot entirely on VHS and Beta.
Leave your thoughts about VHYes.
| Film ThreatLorry KiktaCheck out VHYES if you want to see the most original film to come out in ages. |
| PolygonKaren HanThe strangeness of the material isn’t VHYES’ primary attraction; it’s the atypical mode of storytelling and sense of sincerity. |
| Paste MagazineAndrew CrumpThink of the film as an extended cousin of Too Many Cooks, where parody gives way to weirdness, which gives way to surrealism, which gives way to genuine horror by the end. Bonkers as the combination sounds, and it is unimpeachably bonkers, the effect of their marriage is hypnotic. |
| Austin ChronicleMarc SavlovTelevision is reality, and reality is less than television. And that is, by the end of the 72-minute-long VHYes’ gleefully immersive, intermittently profound “found footage,” a lesson Ralph osmotically absorbs through the VHS viewfinder of his life. |
| Screen DailyWendy IdeDeliberately scattershot and naïve, this engaging, absurdist collage, shot entirely on VHS tape, smuggles a serious message beneath its 80s poodle-permed public access television pastiche. |
| The A.V. ClubA.A. DowdUnfortunately, this handheld coming-of-age story is frequently interrupted by variably convincing stretches of channel surfing, as though someone recorded over much of the former with the latter. And even with pros like Charlyne Yi and Kerri Kenney lending their deadpan chops, real weird TV is funnier. Weirder, too. |
| The Hollywood ReporterJohn DeForeThough hardly groundbreaking in either its content or its aesthetics, the film is more serious than it initially lets on, and can only benefit from the VHS nostalgia that has, often irrationally, taken root in some quarters. |
| The Film StageC.J. PrinceA lot of the times the jokes feel reliant on the video format and its limitations, as if the video tracking and purposefully bad production qualities can fill the gap between ideas and execution. Instead, the gap gets filled with memories of shows and movies that do a better job at the same thing. |
| Slant MagazineClayton DillardThe film settles much too comfortably into the well-trodden footsteps of other works. |
| VarietyDennis HarveyThe best thing the film has going for it is editor Avner Shiloah’s scrambled channel-surfing assembly, which seldom sticks with any bit long enough for it to get too stale. Still, VHYes feels overextended even at the 66 slim minutes it takes to reach the final credits. |
