The ABCs of DEATH

I'm a parent of two in house and another two "offsite", so my time is rather limited these days. A 2.5 year old and 8 week old will tend to crush your time management skills with ease. However I managed to carve out a little time for The ABCs of DEATH and I'm glad I did!

I was waiting for this little nugget to come out for a long while. The concept excited me and I really wanted to see how it all turned out. 26 different directors each taking a letter of the alphabet and coming up with a death cause that starts with it. I was in. It's wild and strange and epic in scope. While some may find it hard to watch, I thought it was a fun little ride.







Now, I know for a fact that many people will find things to hate about the film as a whole or the sum of it's parts, but I have to defend it 100%. There are so many things that go into making something of this nature. You get a letter - let's say it's C - and you have to come up with a cause of death that fits it. You can go with the obvious, like CHAINSAW and have a madman kill someone with it, but where's the fun in that? :)  The directors and writers really managed to come up with some interesting items here.




And the reveals are fun as well. The title card and director for each little story comes AFTER the story plays. This way, you're not sure WHAT you are going to see before you see it. You know what letter you're on, but don't know what was chosen. I loved that. Some of them were real wild choices and I dug them.

 

Slight spoiler warning here - I'm going to talk through some of the stories.






There were some stand outs in my mind. Some that really were wild, gross, or well shot. D is for Dogfight really got me. Slow motion and fantastic lighting with no dialogue. Really dug it even though I'm not sure I totally got it. It really didn't matter - it was interesting. I think that happened a lot in this film. There were times where I really didn't understand what I just saw, but I was still happy that I saw it. :)



F is for Fart fell into that range. It was SUPER light and SUPER silly, but as a fan of the super-gore films MUTANT GIRL SQUAD, MACHINE GIRL and TOKYO GORE POLICE, this was something I could still watch and grin at even though it fell towards the weaker end of the ABCs spectrum.




The stories ran the spectrum for sure. Serious, disgusting body horror at one moment switching to strange, furry anthropomorphic animals in another moment, then right into a gore filled nightmare or artistic surreal vision in another.

While this film is NOT for everyone, it's well worth a viewing for those with a penchant for the strange, new and different. Be warned, however - you're not going to be seeing a narrative, straight horror film. This is an anthology of 26 - yes, TWENTY-SIX - short films strung together by one thing only - Death.

Do you dare watch? 
Can you take it? 
Are you artsy enough to get it?  :) 

I viewed this through Amazon Streaming and it worked like a dream. Check it!

If you get a chance to watch it, do let me know what you think!