-By Maitland McDonagh
For movie details, please click here.
Producers Ant Timpson and Tim League recruited 28 filmmakers (not
26, the film's advertising materials notwithstanding; there are two
teams in the mix) to write and direct short, sharp shockers about
death in all its infinite variety, one for each letter of the
alphabet. The good news is that
The ABCs of Death doesn't
place the U.S. at the center of the contemporary horror universe:
While six segments were helmed by American directors, including Ti
West (
House of the Devil) and Angela Bettis (better known as
an actress whose credits include the 2002 remake of
Carrie),
the rest are an international mix representing countries that
include Japan, France, Spain, Denmark, Thailand, Serbia and
Norway—all in their original languages.
The bad news almost goes without saying.
The ABCs of Death
is wildly uneven, the inherent weakness of anthology movies—even
the revered
Dead of Night (1945) includes an excruciating
comic-relief segment involving golfing ghosts. That said, no
portion of
The ABCs of Death equals
Dead of Night's
high point, which launched a thousand nightmares about malevolent
ventriloquist's dummies, though Marcel (
Deadgirl)
Sarmiento's "D is for Dogfight," a wordless parable about the
unbreakable bond between a man and his dog comes close; the
challenge of setting up a shocking eleventh-hour twist that plays
fair with the viewer is multiplied exponentially when you have less
than five minutes in which to do it, and Sarmiento pulls it
off.
"X is for XXL," directed by Xavier Gens (
Frontieres), takes
body-image obsession to its grotesquely logical conclusion; Timo
Tjahjanto's "L is for Libido" is admirably repellent, if
reminiscent of Tom Shankland and Clive Bradley's 2007 feature
The Killing Gene, and "I is for Ingrown," directed by Jorge
Michel Grau (
We Are What We Are) is a surprisingly haunting
distillation of the violence- against-women imagery that permeates
the genre.
Low points include Noboru (
The Machine Girl) Iguchi's "F is
for Fart," an apocalyptic ode to passing gas; West's "M is for
Miscarriage," a lazy one-joke snippet without a joke; Jon (TV's
“Metalocalypse”) Schnepp's "W is for WTF!," a pointless collection
of juvenile, fanboy gross-out imagery; and Nishimura (
Tokyo Gore
Police) Yoshihiro's equally incoherent "Z is for Zetsumetsu,
which does feature the bizarrely striking image of a girl jiggling
together her tattooed breasts, one inked with the World Trade
Center and the other with a plane.
In the end,
The ABCs of Death is the sum of its disparate
parts, and the bad drags down the good—it's especially unfortunate
that the viewer's last impression is "Z is for Zetsumetsu," because
as any experienced filmmaker will tell you, it's much better for a
movie to start badly and end well than the other way around: Last
impressions color everything that precedes them.
Film Review: The ABCs of Death
Viewers of a certain age and whimsically morbid temperament may be reminded of writer/illustrator Edward Gorey's 1963 The Gashlycrumb Tinies, a spare and mordantly funny book about the dreadful demises of 26 children, from Amy who fell down the stairs to Zillah who drank too much gin. Would that the impressively ambitious ABCs of Death, an anthology movie whose reach exceeds its grasp by a considerable margin, were so memorable.
March 8, 2013
-By Maitland McDonagh
For movie details, please click here.
Producers Ant Timpson and Tim League recruited 28 filmmakers (not 26, the film's advertising materials notwithstanding; there are two teams in the mix) to write and direct short, sharp shockers about death in all its infinite variety, one for each letter of the alphabet. The good news is that
The ABCs of Death doesn't place the U.S. at the center of the contemporary horror universe: While six segments were helmed by American directors, including Ti West (
House of the Devil) and Angela Bettis (better known as an actress whose credits include the 2002 remake of
Carrie), the rest are an international mix representing countries that include Japan, France, Spain, Denmark, Thailand, Serbia and Norway—all in their original languages.
The bad news almost goes without saying.
The ABCs of Death is wildly uneven, the inherent weakness of anthology movies—even the revered
Dead of Night (1945) includes an excruciating comic-relief segment involving golfing ghosts. That said, no portion of
The ABCs of Death equals
Dead of Night's high point, which launched a thousand nightmares about malevolent ventriloquist's dummies, though Marcel (
Deadgirl) Sarmiento's "D is for Dogfight," a wordless parable about the unbreakable bond between a man and his dog comes close; the challenge of setting up a shocking eleventh-hour twist that plays fair with the viewer is multiplied exponentially when you have less than five minutes in which to do it, and Sarmiento pulls it off.
"X is for XXL," directed by Xavier Gens (
Frontieres), takes body-image obsession to its grotesquely logical conclusion; Timo Tjahjanto's "L is for Libido" is admirably repellent, if reminiscent of Tom Shankland and Clive Bradley's 2007 feature
The Killing Gene, and "I is for Ingrown," directed by Jorge Michel Grau (
We Are What We Are) is a surprisingly haunting distillation of the violence- against-women imagery that permeates the genre.
Low points include Noboru (
The Machine Girl) Iguchi's "F is for Fart," an apocalyptic ode to passing gas; West's "M is for Miscarriage," a lazy one-joke snippet without a joke; Jon (TV's “Metalocalypse”) Schnepp's "W is for WTF!," a pointless collection of juvenile, fanboy gross-out imagery; and Nishimura (
Tokyo Gore Police) Yoshihiro's equally incoherent "Z is for Zetsumetsu, which does feature the bizarrely striking image of a girl jiggling together her tattooed breasts, one inked with the World Trade Center and the other with a plane.
In the end,
The ABCs of Death is the sum of its disparate parts, and the bad drags down the good—it's especially unfortunate that the viewer's last impression is "Z is for Zetsumetsu," because as any experienced filmmaker will tell you, it's much better for a movie to start badly and end well than the other way around: Last impressions color everything that precedes them.
