I've mentioned before, in my V/H/S and V/H/S/2 reviews, that I've never really been a fan of anthology horror movies. Horror TV series are fine, with the Masters of Horror series being a prime example, but until the aforementioned films came along I never really thought much of anthology horror in movies at all. 2012, however, was apparently a new beginning for the anthology horror movie, as The ABCs of Death was also released that year.
The premise is a pretty straightforward one, as I'm sure you can guess; 26 short films, each by a different director who was given a letter of the alphabet and told to make a short horror film out of it. That's an awful lot of short films to remember details about, even straight after watching, and detailing all 26 of them would take a very long time. So instead I'm going to comment briefly on my favourite and least favourite shorts of the whole thing. Basically the ones that were the most memorable.
A is for Apocalypse - A woman suddenly starts trying to violently kill her bedbound husband. I liked this one because it just dropped us straight into the action and left us guessing as to what was going on till the very end. And it all made sense, in a twisted sort of way.
D is for Dogfight - Probably one of the best shorts in the entire movie. A man enters an underground dog fighting ring - a literal dog fighting ring, that is - and has to bare-knuckle fight a viciously-trained dog.
F is for Fart - A Japanese schoolgirl is in love with her teacher because of her farts and wishes to be absorbed into them. Maybe I'm not the right audience for this, maybe I just missed the satire, but I didn't enjoy this one at all. It was just... purile.
L is for Libido - The other contender for being the best short of the whole movie. A man wakes up to discover that he is tied to a chair and forced to participate in a contest where he and another man must masturbate to various scenes of porn, and whoever finishes second is killed. The director of this one, Timo Tjahjanto, was also the one behind the incredible "Safe Haven" segment of V/H/S/2.
M is for Miscarriage - Yeah, I did not like this one at all, and if this had been my first exposure to director Ti West's work I wouldn't have been likely to look at any of his other work afterwards. It's purile again, and maybe a little misogynistic (if you squint at it).
P is for Pressure - A woman who may or may not be a prostitute (I don't think the film ever made that clear, despite what some summaries say) takes a role in a crush film to pay for toys for her children. It should be pretty clear why I really disliked this one.
T is for Toilet - When they were making The ABCs of Death, the producers held a competition for the final slot, for any and all new filmmakers to enter. The winner was Lee Hardcastle, known on YouTube for his claymation version of The Thing, and this was his short for the movie. It's claymation, funny and bleak at the same time, and I liked it.
U is for Unearthed - The story of a vampire as he is dug up and revived, goes on a bit of a rampage and then is staked by an angry mob. Pretty straightforward, except that the whole short it shot entirely from the vampire's perspective, which is what caught my eye and got it into my favourites list.
So out of 26, there were 5 short films that I really liked and 3 that I really disliked. The other 18 were, for one reason or another, just not memorable enough for whatever reason or just not offensive enough for me to end up hating them. Of course, with so many short films to choose from opinions are always going to vary and just about everyone is going to have their favourites. But ideally I think there should have been more of them that I could actually remember without having to resort to Wikipedia to look them up...
Comments