Movie Review – The ABC’s of Death
Synopsis: This explosive film is comprised of 26 individual chapters on the topic of death, each helmed by a different director assigned to a specific letter of the alphabet. Provocative, funny and socking, this anthology is the definitive vision of modern horror diversity. Get ready to learn your ABC’s.
Rating: Not-Rated
Run Time: 130 Minutes
Director: Kaare Andrews, Angela Bettis, Helene Cattet, Ernesto Diaz Espinoza, Jason Eisener, Bruno Forzani, Adrian Garcia Bogliano, Xavier Gens, Jorge Michel Grau, Lee Hardcastle, Noboru Iguchi, Thomas Cappelen Malling, Anders Morgenthaler, Yoshihiro Nishimura, Banjong Pisanthanakun, Simon Rumley, Marcel Saremiento, Jon Schnepp, Srdjan Spasojevic, timo Tjahjanto, Andrew Traucki, Nacho Vigalondo, Jake West, Ti West, Ben Wheatley, Adam Wingard, Yadai Yamaguchi.
Dvd Extra’s:An offering of behind the scenes, making ofs, deleted scenes, Commentary, Trailer.
Nudity Factor: Lots of nudity that shows male penis, full female nudity, sex props, though not nudity it does have a scene of implied masturbation.
Of Note:Sheila Kearns, a substitute teacher, was convicted on four felony counts in January 2015 for showing this film in class to her students. Kearns apologized to the court in April 2013, saying she did not watch the movie before showing it to her Spanish class at Columbus East High School.
Recommendations:
Rating:
This is a series of short films, all surrounding death, and each one associated with a letter of the alphabet. So in just over 2 hours you get 26 short films. If that is not enough, then each short film has a different director as well. I really can’t tell you much more about the story, as that is really the only story that carries through. Each director was given full creative license to do what he wanted with his letter and the word associated with it. Some of them felt like they had a pretty high production value and others felt like they were filmed in my garage with any bum off the street doing the acting. The needle on this certainly points to bizarre more than anything. Most of the scenes are just bizarre. Kind of like when you come home and want something to eat, and you open your fridge. You don’t have all the ingredients to make one thing, so you just use what you have to make something. In the case of this film it was more like we have a catsuit, let’s do something with that or we have a giant penis so lets do something with that. Also most of the shorts are not in English and many don’t have any lines at all. With that you will be reading a lot of subtitles as well.
Overall if a ballot was handed out for each short in this movie the ballot would need 3 options. Interesting, entertaining, or non of the above. Some are interesting, some are entertaining, and some are non of the above. I can’t recall any of them being a combination of entertaining and interesting. That could lead right into part of the problem, most of them are not even rememberable. This was a great concept but the concept is also one of its biggest weaknesses. There is only so much you can do in such a limited time that you can’t really develop anything with any depth to it.