A gang of young thugs, who film petty crime for fun, and make money by selling videos assaulting women in the street, take a steal-to-order job, requiring them to break into a house and steal a VHS tape.
When they get there, they find the occupant dead, and many tapes.
Told that they "will know" which tape is needed, they begin to watch some of the tapes, the contents of the tapes form the 5 stories presented in the movie.
First things first, the wrap-around story didn't.
There was an opening, in which everything but the last line of that synopsis is played out, and in-between stories we see them changing tapes, and encountering stuff in the house, but after the final story, the film just cuts to end credits abruptly, leaving the wraparound with no closure at all.
Sadly, this is a pattern for much of the movie; every single story leaves us with unanswered questions and (at best) partial resolution.
I get that this approach is more realistic; if you were involved in one of these situations you wouldn't know the whole story - just the bits you were involved in; but the overlap between "realism" and "good storytelling" is actually quite slim; I think it was Tom Clancy who said "the difference between fiction and reality, is that fiction has to make sense".
The other problem with the stories (and I suspect that they share a common cause) is that they have very little setup, horror short stories are, virtually always, structured like a joke; Setup, hook, punch line. But by attempting to tell 5 stories (6 with the wraparound) in one movie, the writers have boon forced to breeze quickly through the setup, that we can spend as much time as possible with the hook, before the punchline kicks in.
It's for this reason that I'm not going to give you much of a rundown of any of the stories; to tell you anything beyond the most basic points would move us quickly into spoiler territory.
It's probably no coincidence that one of the beat stories (the second I think) "Second Honeymoon" is also the one in which we spend longest with the characters before the shit hits the fan - it also has one of the best uses of the found footage format I've ever seen... A genuinely creepy moment (if you watch this, I mean the sequence that starts with the sleeping husband) - sadly, the punchline isn't great, and and it suffers from the same "I want to know more" problem that plagues them all.
The first story, in which a group of 3 young men go bar hopping to pick up a woman in the hopes of secretly filming some amature porn, has one of the movies cleverer ideas; one of the lads is kitted out with a spy-cam embedded in a pair of glasses. This solves the "why the hell are they filming this bit" problem that is common to almost very found footage movie. The last story addresses this too, but in a much lamer way - a guy in a teddy bear suit has a working camera because he's dressed for Halloween as "a nanny cam".
A special mention goes to one story, which consists only of screen recordings of a skype chat between a girl and her boyfriend. It's probably the best written (hints that something other than the obvious come rolling in early), but by far the worst acted.
Rounding it out, there's an interesting story that makes the video camera an integral part of the plot, by having a killer who cannot be filmed properly (or can only be seen through a camera - it's hard to tell which).
You may have spotted a pattern here, by the way, nanny-cams, spy glasses, skype These are all things that record digitally... So why are the stories on video cassette?
In any case, it's a mixed bag, but a bit of a failed experiment. If they'd dropped two stories, and left themselves time to flesh out the other three (and end the framing tale) it could have been much better.
Hopefully, the sequel will tell us what happened after the credits rolled, at least for the wrap-around.
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