ABC of Death

The ABC's of Death offers audiences twenty-six different ways to die. The film is an anthology where 27 different directors produced 26 different chapters each corresponding to a letter of the alphabet. Given free rein, the only rule they had to apply was corresponding their short film to their assigned letter which would represent the manner of death that is portrayed on screen.

The producers then set out to find the best, most eclectic group of directors willing to participate in this ambitious project. Their efforts resulted in names such as Ti West (House of the Devil), Jason Eisner (Hobo With a Shotgun), Yoshihiro Nishimura (Machine Girl) and Adam Wingard (V/H/S) each attaching themselves to a specific letter in which to thrill, repulse and amuse the audience.

The film shorts go in the order of the alphabet (A,B,C..etc) with director Nacho Vigalondo (Time Crimes) first out of the gate with his A-themed short titled Apocalypse. Next up was the B-themed short, Bigfoot followed by the letter D's entry titled Dogfight. I think you get the picture from here.

The shorts all range in running time, but none is more than a few minutes (all 26 letters of the alphabet are completed within a 123 minute span) and without restriction of studio interference, the directors brought their style of horror, humor and hubris to the platform. The shorts include multiple languages and showcase even animation and claymation.

As with any anthology, there are highs and lows. We loved 'A is for Apocalypse', 'D is for Dogfight', 'F is for Fart', 'T is for Toilet' and 'Y is for Youngbuck'. Letters 'V' and 'K' were also slickly produced on their $5,000 budgets and don't even get us started on 'Z' that had gigantic penises with swords and a whole bunch of other visuals that had us exiting the theatre just a tad disturbed.

'X is for XXL' was possibly the entry with the most blood spewing and 'L is for Libido' was just plain weird. The most disappointing entry was easily Ti West's 'M is for Miscarriage'. It was neither interesting nor involving and considering he may be the most commercial name who contributed to the effort, it has to be considered the biggest misfire. Adam Wingard got stuck with the difficult letter 'Q' and pulled off a humorous entry that was a welcomed diversion from the otherwise violent entries that preceded it.

As I have long complained in many of my reviews that films are often over long and stretched beyond their paper think story lines for the purposes of achieving the standard 90-minute running time range, The ABC's of Death was a welcomed treat. We were able to sit back and enjoy the films without a bunch of subplots or unnecessary character development clogging up my time investment. So if you didn't like 'K is for Klutz' then wait through the five minutes and give 'L is for Libido' a chance.

However, the change of pace might not be for all audiences. We found our screening at this year's Toronto International Film Festival to be filled with an audience that began to sway in energy and excitement as we plodded through the later letters of the English alphabet.

But we were not one of the distracted. We were invested through all 26 entries and it was fun to watch a short and try and determine what the letter designation would represent in the title card that comes only after the film.

Outrageous, audacious and even courageous, The ABC's of Death will be considered an experiment that all horror film fans should experience. It is sure to shock, entertain and provide plenty of after screening conversation over which entries you thought were better than others or what worked or failed.

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A collection of 26 short films from 26 directors from all over the world, each using a different letter of the alphabet for their theme, The ABCs of Death is an ambitious experiment in horror that, although far too much of a mixed bag to prove wholly entertaining, still offers enough for fans of outrageous cinema to enjoy. Whatever your taste in horror, there will most likely be something here to cater for it, and with each segment being an average running length of just 4 minutes, if you don't like the current tale it's not long before something different comes along.

A large proportion of the films are either frustratingly weak (guilty parties: Adam Wingard, Andrew Traucki, Simon Rumley), utterly perplexing, regrettably mediocre (Angela Bettis, come on down) or just plain bad (yes, Ti West, I'm looking at you—again!), threatening to make the film more of an 'Eh?-to-Zzzzzz' of horror than an A-to-Z (yeah, OK, I shoe-horned that line in, but it was too good to waste!).

Thankfully, the good stuff—the really wild stuff—makes it all worthwhile and then some: Marcel Sarmiento's 'D is for Dogfight' is beautifully shot in slow motion throughout; Xavier Gens' 'X Is for XXL' is wonderfully gory, just as one might imagine from the man who gave us Frontier(s); Thomas Cappelen Malling's 'H is for Hydro-Electric Diffusion' comes across like a live-action cartoon on crack; 'L is for Libido' is fap-tastically depraved; crude claymation short 'T is for Toilet' may lack the finesse of a Nick Park film, but is tons gorier; and words cannot do justice to the insanity on display in Yoshihiro Nishimura's 'Z is for Zetsumetsu'.

Even if, like me, you only really enjoy (or even understand) a handful of these twisted works of art, The ABCs of Death is a commendable effort and easily worth a couple of hours of any degenerate's time; while I can't see myself watching the whole thing again in a hurry, there are certain chapters that I'm sure I'll revisit many times over in the future.

When you watch "The ABCs of Death", you're really watching 26 f**ked up short stories that either leave you thinking it was good, or a total piece of crap. About half of these stories are good and the other half suck. The good thing about this is that even if while you're watching one and you think it's horrible, it only lasts about 4 minutes, then a whole new tale begins. There's a lot of graphic scenes in this gritty movie that you might not want to watch if you have a lite stomach. However, for all the gore loving horror freaks out there, I would definitely say its worth a see. I'm not sure of I'd ever watch the full thing again, but there are certainly a couple scenes that I would show my friends/family, and re-watch a couple times. Overall I give this movie a 5/10. Better than what I thought I would give it before I turned it on.

This movie is freakin' insane. THE ABCS OF DEATH is the perfect movie to sit around with your buddies and watch over a few six-packs. It's equal parts hilarious and disturbing, but primarily this movie is an endurance test. Twenty-six short films is a lot to sit through, even when they're universally excellent. The shorts in this ambitious horror anthology range from garbage to golden. But before I even address the films in this collection, I think you have to respect the premise of the film regardless of the quality of its individual parts. THE ABCS OF DEATH gave $5000 each to twenty-six aspiring horror directors and assigned each of them a letter of the alphabet. With their assigned letter, each filmmaker was to shoot a segment based on a word starting with that letter and, of course, relevant to death in some form. Some of the shorts are actually incredibly well done, while some of them seem as if the directors shot whatever they could do in an afternoon and pocketed the majority of their $5000 budget. But, as with any sort of anthology collection, the quality of the shorts are going to run the gamut from one end of the spectrum to the other. There's no good way to address each individual short in a comment like this so I'm just going to shower some praise on a few of the best and warn you about some of the worst of the bunch. Just remember: opinions vary and some might disagree. These are my personal thoughts on the best and worst.

There are some really awesome short films included in this collection. Some of them will blow your mind when you realize it was all done on a meager $5000 budget. The segment "V is for Vagitus" was written and directed by Kaare Andrews and creates a fleshed-out futuristic Vancouver in the course of a few minutes. The production design and effects are fantastic, especially a robot cop named Nezbit. The V segment contains enough ingrained plot that you almost wish it would be expanded into a full-length film. Then there is the hand-full of segments that are just awesome little doses of creative filmmaking. "D is for Dogfight" and "Y is for Youngbuck" (from HOBO WITH A SHOTGUN director Jason Eisener) are some of the best in the series based on creative film-making alone, and "S is for Speed" is a cool little grindhouse short that doesn't seem like much at first but redeems itself in it's final moments when you realize what director Jake West was doing with it. Some directors use their spot in the movie to make a personal statement (such as Jorge Michel Grau or Xavier Glens) while others are just flat-out crazy for the sake of crazy. Admittedly, the craziest ones are my personal favorites and most of them are out of Japan. The letters F, H, J, T, and especially Z are some of the most mind-bogglingly weird portions of the film but they make for the some of the funniest bits (again, especially Z).

On the other end of the spectrum, some of the shorts in the collection just didn't work for me. Thankfully, there are far fewer shorts that fail than succeed. The segment for the letter M (for Miscarriage) seems to be receiving a lot of flack, and it deserves it. It's short, lazy, and aims for a quick shock gag. It's not horrifying, it's just poor taste. I suppose it is a form of death, but the most frightening aspect of the short is the woman's reaction to it. The segment "Q is for Quack" is another lazy film. The majority of the short is director Adam Wingard and producer Simon Barrett complaining about receiving the letter Q for their assignment and it's not quite as funny as I'm sure they were hoping it would be. "C is for Cycle" is an interesting premise but it looks like it was shot on home video and the constant use of fade-outs to change scenes was aggravating, and "O is for Orgasm", while the most artistic of the bunch, feels horribly out of place and grinds the movie to a halt right smack dab in the middle of an already long run-time. On the bright side, all of the weaker shorts in the film occur within the first half and I feel safe in proclaiming that entire last half of the movie is totally worth it.

Some segments might make you cringe ("L is for Libido") and some might make you laugh ("F is for Fart"), but as a whole THE ABCS OF DEATH is an interesting movie. I imagine there's got to be something here that will appeal to most everyone. It can be an incredibly difficult task to sit through the entirety of this movie in one showing, but it's a fun one to throw on with a bunch of friends to laugh and gag at. If nothing else, people with a bizarre sense of humor who preferably grew up on Tex Avery cartoons need to watch "H is for Hydro-electric Diffusion". It's an absolute nightmare (made especially creepy by the makeup effects) but it's so bizarre that you can't not watch.

Concept of the anthology: 26 letters in the alphabet, 26 shorts, and all must have at least one death and open and close with the color red. To say the anthology is a mixed bag is obvious. You have some good films here mixed with a lot of bad ones mixed with a whole lot of forgettable ones. "The ABCs of Death" just proves how incredibly hard it is to make a good short film, and I'm sad to say the bad far outweighs the good.

The first decent short does not come all the way until the letter L, which is almost halfway through the alphabet. It's not until you get to the second half of the letters where you finally begin to see some good shorts, my favorite being Q, directed by Adam Wingard. Other notable filmmakers involved include Ti West (M) and Nacho Vigalondo (A). Unfortunately, West's segment feels incredibly lazy and shot in five minutes while Vigalondo's segment rehashes the same apocalypse premise we've seen many times before. T is a notable segment because it was for a competition, and it's one of the best ones here. X is the most violent (and is also very good), which isn't surprising coming from French filmmaker Xavier Gens ("Frontier(s)").

Shorts F, J, and Z are all Japanese, which you think might be a good thing, but they are huge stinkers in the bunch, especially "F is for Fart." It's pretty much self-explanatory. Another one that I hated is W, appropriately titled "WTF!" O is the most visually breathtaking with uses of slow-mo and sound effects, but it's pretty much style over substance. But hey, compared to most of the shorts you see, it's a welcome change. G seems to be the most pointless one where all you see is a guy surfing. Seriously, I'm not joking. That's all there is.

I guess I was a bit mad watching this because, as an aspiring filmmaker, if someone were to give me $5000 to make a short, I would work very hard in creating something good. Seeing all the wasted effort from most of the filmmakers here just angered me. Overall, "The ABCs of Death," while a neat idea, is mostly just a collection of forgettable to incredibly bad shorts sprinkled with very few good ones.

The Good: L, N, P, Q, T, U, X // The Bad: E, F, G, H, J, M, W, Z // The Best: Q // The Worst: W // The Forgettable: All others not listed.