Let’s
get it out of the way right now; as a film, The ABCs Of Death is virtually impossible to
review. Principally because it
isn’t a film – it’s a mini-film festival with all the strengths, weaknesses,
quality, tone and taste issues inherent in such an event.
So,
The ABCs Of Death gives us 26 short films by 28 of the most interesting,
inventive and talented directors (almost exclusively male – the likes of the Twisted
Twins, Jennifer Lynch and Elisabeth Fies are notable by their absence)
currently working in the horror genre from 15 countries around the world. Each film costs around five grand and
lasts around five minutes with no space to breathe between segments and there’s
no thematic framing story or link other than that of the alphabet and the
child’s building blocks floating in blood that act as titles for each episode -
oh, and each film must involve at least one death, often the more splatterific
the better. There’s slasher
movies, monster movies, revenge movies, torture-porn, sci-fi, CGI, Japanese
pink films, puppet films and claymation starring killer robots, Nazi stripper
foxes, murderous toilets, flatulent schoolgirls, vampire hunting mobs, Man’s
Best Friend, Russ Meyer-esque Amazons, doomed samurai, innocent ducks and Death
himself.
Wildly
uneven, often childishly crude - there’s almost as much farting, excrement, and
gouting semen as there is blood, guts and gore – the films themselves are
something of a mixed bag; some gritty, some surreal, some stunning, some
stunningly bad. Some, most notably
Kaare Andrews dystopian sci-fi V is for Vagitus are begging for a big-budget,
feature-length remake. Others,
like Adam Wingard and Simon Barrett’s hilarious comedy of errors Q is for Quack (which involves two men, two
guns and one duck) or Timecrimes director Nacho Vigalondo’s poignant A is for
Apocalypse are
simply good-natured fun while Ti West’s M is for Miscarriage is a supremely bad taste
joke. Though modern horror
feminist icon Angela Bettis disappoints with her spider’s eye view E is for
Exterminate,
Britain’s own Jake West surprises with S is for Speed, an ambitious, adrenaline-fuelled Faster
Pussycat! Kill! Kill! pastiche that owes as much to Ambrose
Bierce and Ingmar
Bergman as it
does Russ Meyer.
Yoshihiro
Nishimura’s Z is for Zetsumetsu may contain ABCs’ most deliberately, shockingly,
transgressively calculated image (rest assured - naked jiggling breasts are
involved) but for sheer balls out, jaw-dropping nastiness that makes you want
to wash your brain out with bleach, the masturbation contest at the heart of
Indonesian director Timo
Tjahjanto’s L is for Libido may be the most unsettling, upsetting exploration of the dark
side of human desire since Srdjan Spasojevic’s (who contributes the bloody R is
for Removed) A
Serbian Film. Perhaps the angriest, most overtly
political (and the only truly feminist) film however is the brilliant, stunning
X is for XXL
by French director Xavier Gens, a graphic critique of body image, self-loathing and
society’s obsession with thinness and traditional concepts of beauty.
The
most satisfying segment though is Deadgirl director Marcel Sarmiento’s D is for Dogfight, a breathtaking, brutal,
visceral and beautiful tale of love and loyalty that’s as heartwarming as it is
disturbing; more A Boy And His Dog than Man Bites Dog (though it does feature a man
biting a dog!).
Like
a Sesame Street segment for serial killers (think a coked up Cookie Monster with a chainsaw carving his
ABCs into Elmo), how much you enjoy The ABCs Of Death may depend on just how sick
your sense of humour may be but the beauty of the concept is its
diversity. It doesn’t matter if
you hate one film, chances are you’ll like the next. Or the one after.
Or the one after that.
Hugely ambitious and gleefully boundary-pushing, The ABCs Of Death is destined to be a
late-night cult classic.
David Watson
Directed by:
Kaare Andrews,
Angela Bettis,
Hélène Cattet,
Ernesto Díaz Espinoza, Jason Eisener,
Bruno Forzani,
Adrián García Bogliano, Xavier Gens,
Lee Hardcastle,
Noboru Iguchi,
Thomas Cappelen Malling, Jorge Michel Grau, Anders Morgenthaler, Yoshihiro Nishimura, Banjong Pisanthanakun, Simon Rumley,
Marcel Sarmiento, Jon Schnepp,
Srdjan Spasojevic, Timo Tjahjanto,
Andrew Traucki,
Nacho Vigalondo, Jake West, Ti West, Ben Wheatley,
Adam Wingard
and Yudai Yamaguchi
Written by:
Kaare Andrews,
Simon Barrett,
Hélène Cattet,
Bruno Forzani,
Adrián García Bogliano, Lee Hardcastle,
Noboru Iguchi,
Yoshihiro Nishimura, Simon Rumley,
Jon Schnepp,
Srdjan Spasojevic, Nacho Vigalondo, Dimitrije Vojnov, Ti West and Yudai Yamaguchi
Produced by:
Starring:
Genre:
Horror
Language:
English
Runtime:
2 hours 4 minutes
Certificate:
18
UK Release Date:
Friday 26th
April
Rating:
4/5
Originally published at http://www.filmjuice.com/the-abcs-of-death/
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