The ABC's of Death

This week in the corner, I am writing about one of the strangest movies I have ever seen, The ABC's of Death.  If you have been following this blog or at least read my first entry on V/H/S, you may remember me referencing this flick.  Like V/H/S, this movie is an anthology horror film which is just a compilation of shorts to comprise a whole movie.  Since I already discussed the anthology genre in greater detail in that earlier blog post I wont retread familiar ground here.  But I will write about how the anthology works for this movie.  Essentially ABC's is comprised on 26 shorts that are each no longer than 3 or 4 minutes and each one represents a letter of the alphabet.  One of the cooler aspects is how 26 different horror directors came together to write and create these small bits that make up the whole of this movie.  Another neat point is that the directors hail from such places as Japan, Korea, Mexico, Spain, and the US.  It gives the movie a diverse and multicultural feel and really adds some charm.  With having 26 different shorts, it is inevitable that there will be some strong entries and some weaker ones.  That is most definitely the case here.  Some are so utterly bizarre you wont know whether to laugh, shutter, or just be awestruck at what you are watching on your television.  There are some that are animated, super violent, super sexual, and super over the top.  But because each short is a maximum of about 4 minutes you don't have slog through too much before you are into the next one.  The best part for me was figuring out how each short, no matter how crazy, was going to play out.  Each short has one (or more) person die and then the end reveal is the letter that the short represents.  They play out in alphabetical order, so will know when you are watching the D short for example, but you wont know what D stands for until the end when you see "D is for ...."  It makes for a great guessing game, especially for some of the more bizarre, so I don't want to give away any of the letters here.  Each letter also doesn't fall into conventional deaths.  For example, A won't be for Ax or something like that, but believe me that the shorts for the letters F and L will make you hope no one knows you are watching what you are watching.  They are that shocking and insane.  This movie had a very limited release, but with some good word of mouth and I guess some good DVD and Bluray sales they have already lined up 26 new directors for a second installment of ABC's due for 2014.  I will be honest, this movie received horrible reviews, but I was enthralled by each short and couldn't wait to find out what each letter represented.  This movie currently can be streamed on Netflix and you can buy it on DVD and Bluray.  If you are in the mood for craziness and don't mind 4 or 5 shorts that are really out there, you should definitely give this a shot.  I also feel it is important to note that this movie is a hard R, so it really should be adults only.

If you give this a shot please leave comments below and let me know what your favorite letters were!

I am going to take a side step now and let you know that if you are going to be in Atlanta over labor day weekend you might have heard of the largest fantasy convention in the world known as DragonCon.  This year marks the first year that there will be a unique and separate Horror Track.  There will be a series of panels and programming featuring actors from the HBO series True Blood, the film Nightbreed, and fan discussions.  On Friday night August 30th at 10pm, I will be a speaker on the Slasher Films 101 panel.  The schedule right now is of course tentative but if you would like to know more about the Horror Track, check out the website here:  www.horror.dragoncon.org.


In honor of this I am going to do something a little different next time and put up a post of my top 10 favorite slasher films.  I hope to have this up by the end of next week, so keep on the look out and let me know what some of your favorite slasher films are!