To countdown to this year’s Halloween, Luke Owen reviews a different horror film every day of October. Next up; fan-favourite The ABCs of Death….
Working on a simple gimmick, The ABCs of Death gets together 26 different horror filmmakers and asks them to create 5-minute shorts based around a letter of the alphabet. With every director given seemingly complete free reign to put together whatever they want, The ABCs of Death is perhaps the most unbalanced and over-hyped horror anthology of all-time. At times it’s lazy, at other times it’s stupid and then, occassionaly, it’s not too bad.
Despite this writer’s utter hatred of V/H/S and ambivalent indifference to its sequel, it had least had some form of structure. For how messy and poorly made both movies were, there was a clear creative control over the project as a whole. Each director had to submit their script to the movie’s creator who then gave them feedback on how to improve it to meet his vision for the project. Whether this is true or not, it seems as though each filmmaker in The ABCs of Death just made a movie, sent it to the creator and he put it in regardless of whether it was crap or not.
It creates a massive sense of imbalance because there is no consistent tone. You’ll go from a harrowing short of men being forced to masturbate over horrific images (including children) to a cartoon of a woman fighting against a killer piece of poo. This is a movie which contains a segment called F is for Fart, a short about a student and her teacher orgasming over each other’s farts, and a segment in which a woman attacks herself with a coathanger called M is for Miscarriage. You can see why this film doesn’t really work.