So this is just a series of tapes?

Actually the trailers make it pretty clear it's an anthology. The linking mechanism is the tapes themselves and the 5 chowder heads in "Tape 56" trying to find this mythical "golden tape" the 3rd Party wanted them to steal. It's really a set up for the Old Guy to fulfill his sacrifices of these dummies to whatever dark power is connected to the tapes to gain some kind of grotesque immortality. Anyways that's what the writers said. The tapes were made, again according to the writers, during supernatural events. A common belief in the field of the paranormal is that ghosts and other such boogeymen effect electromagnetic fields. So in the movie it seems that the essence of these events are trapped or collected onto the magnetic recording mediums as they happen. By playing them back in a certain order the tapes cause more supernatural hi-jinks to occur and the person whom chooses to make their own tape, while using the other tapes as a conduit, can obtain a kind of quasi-immortality by becoming a part of the tapes themselves as another monster. The prequel to "Tape 56", "Tape 49" in V/H/S 2 which is written by the same guys, goes into a little more detail about it. I grant you that explanation is as full of holes as a block of Swiss cheese but it's a horror movie and by their very nature horror movies make little sense half the time.

I actually liked the first two V/H/S films. But I don't think all the stories passed the acid test for different reasons. It's not the story content of some of them per say, (The kiddie aliens in the "Emily" episode were no more ludicrous than the 6 ft weed Stephen King turns into in Creepshow for example), but what put me off was most of the characters were so damn unlikable. And that's by horror film standards of likability. It was almost like the Saw films were you start rooting for the bad guy to kill these criminal idiots. Still, they did give a lot of attention to details you only pick up on after repeat viewings, if ever. One example is again "Emily". I've seen many a comment about the nudity, and how in "Emily" it was gratuitous. At first I agreed until I watched it with my wife, who is a nurse. She pointed out the reason the guy wanted to see Emily and the other girl's breasts wasn't because he was a perv. He was covertly checking to see how far their breasts had enlarged with milk from being impregnated with the alien fetuses and if they were ready to "harvest". And I happen to like little stuff like that.

Remember, Tuesday is Soylent Green Day.