Review of The ABCs of Death (2013) by Kevin R — 05 Jul 2013

A horror anthology movie with a segment for each letter of the alphabet, The ABCs of Death does have a couple creepy and effective segments but the rest of them tend to be either dull or astoundingly pointless.

The connecting theme that connects each brief vignette (each one lasts between three and five minutes) is death, but aside from that each director was given carte blanche to make their segment as scary, funny, or unique as they wanted.

Many of the directors have experience in low-budget horror and low-budget movies in general, including Jason Eisener (Hobo With A Shotgun), Ti West (House of The Devil, The Innkeepers), Srdjan Spasojevic (A Serbian Film), and Adam Wingard (V/H/S).

There are over 24 different directors from 15 different countries, so this is more ambitious than your typical horror anthology. The best segments are D is for Dogfight, E is for Exterminate, H is for Hydro-Electric Diffusion, and J is for Jidai-Geki, but there are a few other good ones as well.

J is for Jidai-Geki (a phrase which more or less means a period drama with samurai) was my personal favorite. It involves one samurai who is about to execute a captured enemy samurai, but the captured samurai's face seems to keep distorting in bizarre, inhuman ways.

This includes his eyeballs popping out of his nose and then swinging like pendulums. It's clever and very funny, which is more than can be said for many other segments in the movie. The movie hits absolute rock-bottom very quickly with the segment F is for Fart, which isn't any more sophisticated than you would expect.

It's a five-minute long fart joke, and a bad one at that. T is for Toilet isn't much better, featuring a story about a killer toilet and some very mediocre claymation. Most segments aren't quite as bad as these two, but they tend to be pretty uninspired and, for lack of a better word, meh.

The ABCs of Death is an interested experiment that is ultimately derailed by a number of uninspired and often tasteless segments, and unfortunately the bad outweighs the good. If you're looking for a horror anthology movie, you could do much better than this.