The ABCs of Death (C-)

I watched The ABCs of Death last night, mostly because I found the concept to be interesting. The film consists of 26 short films, and the director(s) of each short was assigned a letter of the alphabet. Using that letter, the directors were to choose a word and create a segment involving death. I'd passed the film over many times on Netflix, but being bored and wanting a change, I decided to finally give it a go.

As you might expect from such a broad cross-section of directors, the quality of each film varies drastically. Some are good, many are not, but I think it's mostly a matter of opinion as to which is which. They weren't particularly scary, and a good many were campy, crude, and scatological. I wasn't really interested in potty humor, so I didn't get much out of those segments.

The segments I enjoyed the most were D, involving a well-filmed and fairly nontraditional Dogfight (with a human boxer and a Labrador), and E (for Exterminate) which features a strange spider. I also enjoyed V (for Vagitis, which is defined as "The cry of a newborn baby") which was set in a dystopian future where everyone is sterilized unless they can earn the privilege to have children. I liked it for mostly non-horror reasons, and for what the director was able to accomplish with his budget.

There were also some disturbing entries, such as I (for Ingrown, involving a woman slowly dying after being injected with drain cleaner), P (for Pressure, wherein a woman prostitutes herself to support her children), and Y (for Young Buck, involving a deer and a pedophile). Of these, P was probably the best. The rest of the films either fall flat entirely, or are just too damn silly. I did find a few of them to be genuinely funny, particularly A (for Apocalypse), J (for Jidai-Geki, which is Japanese for "Samurai Movie"), N (for Nuptuals), Q (for Quack), and U (for Unearthed). The rest didn't really grab me.

The dog is one of the best actors in the entire anthology.

Ultimately, I was hoping the quality of D and E would continue throughout the rest of the film, but the needle rises and falls so much as things drag on and on. My review grade is mostly an aggregate, so take it with a grain of salt. There are things you may enjoy featured in this film, but they are too few and far between.

Watch this one at your own risk, but you definitely need to make sure you watch D/Dogfight. Dogfight is currently posted on YouTube, so maybe you should go check it out there and save yourself from the rest of the movie unless you're particularly curious.