THE ABCs OF DEATH (2012) is made up of 26 short films. Less than half are worth your time.
So allow me to guide you through the best, the worst, and the WTF-worthy!
- “Five grand? How do they expect us to make any kind of movie for five thousand dollars?”
- “Alright, so what are we going to do to make our segment stand out?”
26 horror shorts, for 26 letters of the alphabet, by 26 directors.
(Technically 27, because two people directed the “O” segment. Possibly 28, if Wikipedia's assertion is true that the “Q” segment was co-directed by Adam Wingard and Simon Barrett, despite that not being how the latter is credited in the film itself.)
Is this anthology worth 2 hours of your time?
Absolutely not!
Do any of the shorts look or feel anything remotely like the poster?
Not on your life!
Are any of the shorts any good?
A few!
Here's what you're in for from this ambitious, but overall deflating hodgepodge of an anthology:
“A is for Apocalypse”
(dir. Nacho Vigalondo)
Spain
★★½
From the director of Timecrimes, and Colossal.
A peculiar tale of a woman attacking a bed-bound man (who might be her husband, but details are scant), using a knife, then boiling oil, then the frying pan the oil was in. Somehow, the man doesn't immediately die from all this punishment, and there's a sort of wry dark comedy to how matter-of-factly he reacts to it by the time the metal of the pan is viciously thwacked about his skull multiple times. Then the wife confesses that she's been poisoning him for years, but today she felt she had to accelerate the process, because the world's about to end.
And then it does.
And my first thought upon the short's completion was:
“Is that it?”
“B is for Bigfoot”
(dir. Adrian Garcia Bogliano)
Spain
★
This doesn't even have a bigfoot.
And the “Snowman of Mexico” killer - coined off of a fake comic book about the abominable snowman that's seen within the short - is just... some guy.
Very meh.
“C is for Cycle”
(dir. Ernesto Diaz Espinoza)
Chile
★★
How ironic that the director of Timecrimes already had his turn, because C is for Cycle is basically just cut-price Timecrimes, or Triangle, or any other timeloop-with-doppelgänger stories off the top of your head.
“D is for Dogfight”
(dir. Marcel Sarmiento)
United States
★★★½
From the director of Deadgirl, and a segment of V/H/S: Viral.
The title is quite literal: it's a fight with a dog, versus a man. It's shot almost entirely in slow motion, with nearly no dialogue, and it has the visceral texture and sound of a true nightmare, not the least bit of which stems from the upsetting depiction of animal abuse. It may be simulated, and the end credits assure viewers no harm actually came to the dog, but it's a hard watch nonetheless, though it does reward you with a happy ending twist that turns the tables in a satisfying way.
“E is for Exterminate”
(dir. Angela Bettis)
United States
★
From the woman who played May in Lucky McKee's May.
This short would really fuck with one's arachnophobia, were it not for the CGI spider(s) being so cheap and unconvincing, and the liberal usage of iMovie stock music and sound effects being so obnoxious.1 You'd be better off with Ellory Elkayem's 1998 short film, Larger Than Life, which must better exploits the skin-crawling fear that phobias of spiders produces, and that also lead to Elkayem's feature-length Eight Legged Freaks.
“F is for Fart”
(dir. Noboru Iguchi)
Japan
½
This must surely be the dictionary definition of “the writer's barely disguised fetish”.
In this case: lesbian Japanese schoolgirl obsessed with farts, who wants her female teacher/love interest to fart her to death with her gas, before an unexplained supernatural cataclysm kills everyone with its cosmic toxic gas.
“Maybe the black gas was a fart from God?” is an actual line of dialogue.
Simply embarrassing for everyone involved. Those who made it. The poor actresses subjected to performing it. The VFX artists tasked with generating so much greenish-brownish-yellowish gaseous grossness for it. And most of all, me for watching it.
“G is for Gravity”
(dir. Andrew Traucki)
Australia
½
From the director of The Reef.
I literally had no idea what even happened in this story. A first-person POV of a guy who goes surfing, drowns, and… that's it. Wikipedia’s plot summary says he had a bag of bricks with him, so this was therefore the unseen character drowning himself intentionally, but I don't remember seeing a bag of bricks being clearly established. This just felt like an early GoPro test video masquerading as a short film.
“H is for Hydro-Electric Diffusion”
(dir. Thomas Malling)
Norway
★
Alright, WHO LET THE FURRIES IN HERE?!
(Yet another short you can categorise under “the writer's barely disguised fetish”, and unfortunately, it won't be the last.)
It's furries in World War II, where the bulldog man looks horrifying, and the fox woman has human tits, and she's also a Nazi, and there's torture machines, and the disembodied voice of Winston Churchill, and honestly, it all would've worked better as a Cuphead-type cartoon, and even then, only barely. As a live-action approximation of a cartoon, however, it's an egregious assault on my eyeballs.
“I is for Ingrown”
(dir. Jorge Michel Grau)
Mexico
★
From the director of the original version of We Are What We Are.
Story-wise, it's just a man holding a woman captive in his bathtub, injecting her with what Wikipedia says is motor oil (I thought it was bleach), then leaving while she dies an agonising death, scratching at her skin until she bleeds. If you hate the graphic sounds of gagging and retching and vomiting, because those sounds make you feel like you vicariously need to as well, steer well clear of this short.
There's nothing actually “ingrown” in this short, unless Grau meant it in a somehow figurative sense. The end credits make the short out to be a message about the widespread killing of women in Mexico (“2015 women murdered in the last 10 years in Mexico. 200 women a month. The horror is not on the screen”), so maybe “ingrown” is meant to be in reference to the ingrown horror of misogynistic violence rooted deep within society? If that's the intent, it doesn't come across in the short itself.
On a slightly different note:
Someone thanked in this short's end credits is a woman by the name of Emilia Pérez. (God, I wonder how her life has been over the last year or so?) In an astounding bit of coincidence, the actress playing the tortured woman in the bathtub is none other than Adriana Paz, who herself actually starred in Emilia Pérez as the title character's love interest, Epifanía.
(It's at this point I realise that I need to see Paz have a decent role in a good movie for once, since surely neither of these entries in her filmography are worthy of her talents...)
“J is for Jidaigeki (Samurai Movie)”
(dir. Yûdai Yamaguchi)
Japan
★★★★
An executioner prepares to dispatch a samurai who's committing seppuku, but every time the executioner looks, the samurai's stifling giggles and pulling faces in increasingly outlandish ways.
It's a live-action cartoon that actually works, and also, genuinely made me laugh. Outrageous, darkly comedic, delightfully bizarre, and one of the best shorts in the bunch.
“K is for Klutz”
(dir. Anders Morgenthaler)
Denmark
★★
An absurd little animation about a woman in the bathroom at a party, who finds herself having birthed/shat a sentient squeaky turd child creature that simply will not flush, and the antics that ensue in her bids to do away with the pernicious little shit.
Kinda funny in concept, but it didn't do much for me. Good animation, though.
“L is for Libido”
(dir. Timo Tjahjanto)
Indonesia
N/A
From the director of The Night Comes For Us, and the upcoming Nobody 2.
What in the Serbian Film was that?!
Two men awaken tied to chairs, forced by their voyeuristic captors to jerk off to a naked woman standing in front of them, and the one who doesn't splooge first gets a spike up the arse and through his mouth; repeat the experiment with different stimuli. So far, so fucked up.
This starts off looking like “the writer's barely disguised fetish” yet again... until it very much doesn't, and things escalate to degrees of depravity that Western filmmakers rarely ever have the stomach or gall to depict. It's batshit insane, over-the-top boundary-pushing, and I have no idea what to rate it. Is it making a Salò-esque point, or is it just shock value for its own sake? This is one of the better shorts in this anthology, don't get me wrong... and yet, I can only give it an undecided zero star rating, because I don't know how I could rate something like this.
“M is for Miscarriage”
(dir. Ti West)
United States
½
From the director of The House of the Devil, The Innkeepers, and the X trilogy.
Did you even try, Ti?
Woman searches for plunger for about a minute of screentime, comes back to clogged toilet, and surprise, it's a dead foetus! END.
Is that it?!
“N is for Nuptials”
(dir. Banjong Pisanthanakun)
Thailand
★★½
From the director of the original Shutter, and The Medium.
A parrot rats out a man's affair in front of his girlfriend, making her go knife-happy on him. Kind of funny. Made me think of Waldo the bird from Twin Peaks. Not much else to say.
“O is for Orgasm”
(dir. Hélène Cattet and Bruno Forzani)
Belgium
★★★★
From the directors of The Strange Colour of Your Body's Tears, and Let The Corpses Tan.
The most experimental, visually striking short of the bunch.
Bubbles, moans, cigarettes, multicoloured kaleidoscopic freakouts, and black leather gloves - the most abstract giallo you've ever seen.
“P is for Pressure”
(dir. Simon Rumley)
United Kingdom
★★★
Perhaps the most grounded, relatively straightforward tale in the anthology, this has the feel of a vérité documentary as it follows a struggling mother and sex worker, trying to look after her children any way she can. Before it takes a (ahem) heel turn into off-screen animal cruelty that just about tips it into horror territory befitting the anthology's theme, this drama has more in common with something like Ryan Coogler's 2011 short film, Fig, which dealt with similar subject matter.
“Q is for Quack”
(dir. Adam Wingard)
United States
★★★★
From the director of You're Next, and The Guest.
Adam Wingard and Simon Barrett go the cheekily meta route, playing themselves in a tale where they're pissed off to have gotten the letter “Q” for their allotted segment of The ABCs of Death, and have to scramble their brains to think of something novel to make their short stand out from the crowd. They settle on capturing a real death on camera, and choose to kill an animal. Specifically, a duck. But then, they go and duck things up, and the results will quack you up!
“R is for Removed”
(dir. Srđan Spasojević)
Serbia
★★★
From the director of A Serbian Film.
Quite decent, icky, gloopy practical effects work here, in the story of a man whose mottled skin is constantly sliced and peeled from his flesh, because his skin produces strips of 35mm film. He's adored by scores of fans, as he's wheeled out by his captors and presented to the world in a cage that the audience sees and touches him through the bars of, yet they won't free him from his captivity by the forces who repeatedly cut into the man for the resource he produces. Early on, a bodyguard watches on a TV the famous silent film, The Arrival of a Train, from the earliest years of cinema. The man with the celluloid skin suddenly stops producing the film strips, and the doctors appear to conspire to euthanise him, since he's no longer fulfilling his purpose. But the man with the celluloid skin escapes, kills his captors (including one he kills with a bullet he apparently made out of his magic skin), enters the outside world, finds a nearby train yard, and tries to push an empty train carriage down the track, but dies from his wounds before the train can properly move again, and The Arrival of a Train can be echoed in the present. It ends with the sky raining blood.
So, if I had to guess, perhaps this was Spasojević making a metaphorical statement about the death of shooting on film (this short being cheaply shot on digital cameras adding to the commentary), or it could be about the death of cinema itself. I lean more towards the former theory, but I don't know the intent for sure. The symbolism seems pretty straightforward in some ways, yet vastly open to interpretation. It's kind of interesting, but maybe too pretentious for its own good? I dunno, it sort of grows on me the more I think about it.
“S is for Speed”
(dir. Jake West)
United Kingdom
★½
Starts off as a no-budget, poorly acted Mad Max riff, with a woman escaping a hooded man with a disfigured face, before both of them engage in a high-octane chase driving through an arid desert landscape.
Ends with it all turning out to be an elaborate hallucination in the mind of a dying woman in a drug den, overdosing on some unspecified narcotic, and the blunt symbolism reveals itself to be that she was trying to outrun Death himself.
Blah.
“T is for Toilet”
(dir. Lee Hardcastle)
United Kingdom
★★★½
There was already an awful lot of toilet stuff in The ABCs of Death prior to this short, so it figures there'd be an entire segment entitled specifically on the subject. It helps that it comes from the twisted claymation mind of Lee “Claycat” Hardcastle, which thus entails an acerbic sense of pitch-black humour, and an exceptionally generous helping of grotesquely graphic stop-motion gore. Out of all the toilet-related shorts in the anthology, Hardcastle's entry is leaps and bounds above the others.
“U is for Unearthed”
(dir. Ben Wheatley)
United Kingdom
★★★★
From the director of Kill List, Sightseers, and A Field in England.
If I remember correctly, Wheatley's inclusion in this project was the impetus for me ever adding The ABCs of Death to my watchlist many years ago in the first place. Thankfully, this short caught him during his prime directing era - i.e. long before he inexplicably helmed The Meg 2 - so Wheatley's still on strong form, freshly coming off of making Kill List to create this first-person POV short, about a vampire getting dug up from its grave by hunters needing to perform the proper ritual to permanently kill the beast, and the bloody mayhem that ensues when the creature flees into the surrounding woods. Wheatley even brings back his Kill List leading men, Michael Smiley and Neil Maskell, for the occasion, which is a delight to see.
Overall, quite fun.
“V is for Vagitus (The Cry of a Newborn Baby)”
(dir. Kaare Andrews)
Canada
★★
Given the shoestring budget allotted to all the shorts, this dystopian sci-fi/horror tale looks surprisingly decent, and it even has a cool robot that wouldn't look out of place in a sci-fi project with 100 times the money to work with.
Unfortunately, it's bogged down by an overabundance of derivative ideas and convoluted exposition, and an arbitrary shifting back and forth between a widescreen letterboxed aspect ratio, and a fullscreen ratio. Why it didn't just stick with the far more cinematic widescreen look it starts off with, I have no earthly idea.
But hey, it's cool to see Michael Rogers - from Beyond the Black Rainbow, and We're All Going to the World's Fair - steal the show with another villainous role, so that's something.
“W is for WTF!”
(dir. Jon Schnepp)
United States
★★★
Starts off as a sordid animation, abruptly switches to live-action to become self-referentially meta about itself like Wingard's earlier short, then devolves into a cacophonous collage of randomness, violence, and comic absurdity ratcheting up in intensity. Feels akin to Don't Hug Me I'm Scared, or an Adult Swim project à la Too Many Cooks, or Unedited Footage of a Bear.
“X is for XXL”
(dir. Xavier Gens)
France
★★½
From the director of Frontier(s), Hitman, and The Divide.
Imagine the blunt and gore-tastic social commentary on dangerously unrealistic and unfair beauty standards of Coralie Fargeat's The Substance, meets the exploitatively facile fat-phobic tastelessness of Darren Aronofsky's The Whale, and you get an idea of X is for XXL by Xavier Gens.2
In this mean-spirited French body-horror shocker, a plus-sized woman goes about her life, wandering through the streets of (presumably) Paris, taunted about her weight by various nasty French people (or, as stereotypes would insist, just the French in general), and haunted by omnipresent advertisements promoting the imagery of skinny female models' bodies as the ideal to strive towards. Seized by a self-destructive spiral of gorging on food to numb the pain, the woman fatefully decides to get rid of all the fat from her body once and for all. A kitchen knife to her torso, a razor blade to her face, an electric knife to everywhere else... until hours later, she emerges from behind the blood-splattered shower curtain, steps out of the bathtub, feet slipping on the blood-drenched bathroom floor, revealing she's carved away all of her skin, and most of her flesh in jagged chunks. She poses like a supermodel would, then collapses onto the floor, inevitably dying from blood loss. (Were this not a pointedly metaphorical little nightmare come to life, she clearly would've died a looooooong time before this, but if this had hewed to strict realism, it wouldn't be able to end on such a striking, queasy, unforgettable image.)
This short makes its point unmistakably, its makeup effects and practical gore are astonishing, and its conclusion will be seared into my brain forever, but I can't help but feel a sense of lurid exploitation undermines its overall effectiveness. In The Substance, you felt an empathy on Fargeat's part; in X is for XXL, the empathy feels in short supply, and any empathy there may be just feels performative and shallow. Your mileage may vary.
(Also: the end credits inform us of the interesting fact that “The Double Without Skin” was played by this short's composer, Yasmine Meddour, who provides the nerve-shredding, ear-screeching strings soundtrack for the final meltdown to set your teeth on edge, sounding akin to Clint Mansell and the Kronos Quartet's work on the music to the frighteningly intense finale of Aronofsky's Requiem for a Dream.)
“Y is for Youngbuck”
(dir. Jason Eisener)
Canada
★★½
From the director of Hobo With A Shotgun.
What the buck?
One of the most disgusting sights in any of the films across the entire anthology: the moment in Y is for Youngbuck when the decrepit old pedophile school janitor licks the benches where schoolboys' accumulated sweat was left behind after a basketball game.
Thankfully, he gets his eyes gouged out and his head ripped off by one of the boys we see in flashbacks that he'd abused. The boy took the head of the deer the janitor decapitated after teaching the boy to first kill it with a bow and arrow, and the boy uses the antlers on the deer’s head to kill the exceedingly creepy nonce stone cold dead, before slam-dunking the fucker’s errant cranium through the basketball hoop.
It's stylishly shot like an 80's music video, with no dialogue, all montage, all super saturated colours, and all set to a rocking synthwave track - (appropriately called 'Vengeance' by Powerglove) - but in the end, it's far too gross for me to enjoy it much beyond its technical aspects.
“Z is for Zetsumetsu (Extinction)”
(dir. Yoshihiro Nishimura)
Japan
½
From the director of Tokyo Gore Police.
We end the anthology on one of its worst lows, and with yet another example of “the writer's barely disguised fetish” being indulged to ludicrous extremes. Naked lesbian fights, giant dildos, rampant genitalia, multiple ejaculations, mixed with food porn (quite literally mixing sex and food in a most unsanitary manner), Nazis, lots of shouting, and non-sensical satirical barbs and imagery related to America and Japan and nuclear warfare, epitomised by a wheelchair-bound, sunglasses-wearing man who chatters through the whole short, and who doesn't just look like Dr. Strangelove, but is literally credited as being Dr. Strangelove.
It is frankly exhausting sensory overload, climaxing with the Japanese Dr. Strangelove standing up from his wheelchair, re-enacting the end of Kubrick's film, only instead of him rejoicing over being able to use his legs (“Mein Führer! I can walk!”), it's him excitedly rejoicing over getting an erection, before his dick ejaculates rice into the camera, and a red circle in the centre morphs it into the Japanese flag.
This all sounds like a racist fever dream, but I swear, that is exactly what happens, and it's the final note The ABCs of Death ends on, before the 11 minutes of cumulative end credits roll.
Yip-fucking-pee.
In conclusion, here are the only ABCs of Death segments I think are worth watching:
• D is for Dogfight - (dir. Marcel Sarmiento)
• J is for Jidaigeki - (dir. Yûdai Yamaguchi)
• L is for Libido3 - (dir. Timo Tjahjanto)
• O is for Orgasm - (dir. Hélène Cattet and Bruno Forzani)
• Q is for Quack - (dir. Adam Wingard… and Simon Barrett?)
• R is for Removed - (dir. Srđan Spasojević)
• T is for Toilet - (dir. Lee Hardcastle)
• U is for Unearthed - (dir. Ben Wheatley)
I’d also say a hard maybe to:
• A is for Apocalypse - (dir. Nacho Vigalondo)
• P is for Pressure - (dir. Simon Rumley)
• W is for WTF - (dir. Jon Schnepp)
• X is for XXL - (dir. Xavier Gens)
As for the remaining 14 segments?
You really need not bother.
Overall rating: ★½
(Worth mentioning is that, up until this point, I'm pretty sure every single short in The ABCs of Death has used immediately identifiable iMovie assets from the built-in sound libraries. Maybe they're actually from Final Cut Pro, iMovie's exorbitantly expensive sibling, which likely shares the same sounds, given their shared Apple lineage. But the fact that so many of these shorts look and sound on par with, and sometimes worse than, any given amateur short film on YouTube? It kind of cheapens an already very cheap anthology movie.)
(The producers must have thrown their backs out from patting themselves so hard when they chose the director named Xavier to helm the “X” segment. Oh, how clever.)
(Recommended with extreme caution, and/or if you're looking to be a Timo Tjahjanto filmography completist.)