The ABCs of Death (2012) - 2.5/4

The ABCs of Death has perhaps drawn more attention due to its sheer breadth of directorial talent than due to the formalist conceit. With 26 geek-gen directors involved, it was hard not to run into the title while browsing IMDb. The conceit itself is a fairly familiar 'brainstorming' technique: choose a letter of the alphabet, a word that starts with that letter, then base a work of fiction off that word. Each of the 26 directors was given this freedom, with the condition only that the short they produce contain a death. Needless to say, there's little consistency and one has to be ready to be surprised, pleasantly or not.

The overall experience of ABCs of Death is the major triumph of the film. Critiquing the individual shorts, an activity I will briefly partake in below, is itself a part of the ABCs of Death experience and one of its most enjoyable aspects. ABCs brings the short film festival into your home and allows you to be the judge and jury--not so much the executioner, alas. You see 26 shorts, some of them brilliantly creative, some of them a waste of time, some of them just confusing, and you get to hurl the full rotten-fruit-basket that is your tastes at them. The more people you watch it with, the more fun this probably is.

In my case, I watched with my wife and we both agreed Malling's "H is for Hydro-Electric Diffusion," a Nazisploitation liveaction Furry sketch, was the most enjoyable and creative of the segments. That gets the Palme d'Or from our Living Room Cannes. We absolutely loathed "G is for Gravity" a lazy POV segment of a guy falling and drowning. From there, our tastes diverged. I loved "Y is for Youngbuck," an oversaturated dreamscape of blaring '80s keyboards and abused trust, but she thought it was foolish. She liked Xavier Gens' "X is for XXL," which I thought trite. I thought "W is for WTF" was extremely enjoyable and certainly lived up to its chosen 'word,' but for her cinematic headfuck she preferred "R is Removed," which I found a little too pompous.

The sheer variety of styles and content ensures you will find a few shorts you enjoy, a few you don't mind, and a few you hate. There are some avant-garde shorts, like the French-produced smugness of "O is for Orgasm," some animation like Morganthaler's tedious "K is for Klutz," comedy like Yamaguchi's amusing "J is for Jidai-geki," highly ambitious epics like "V is for Vagitus," and throw-away vignettes like Angela Bettis's "E is for Exterminate."

If there is anything consistent about ABCs of Death other than death, it is a peculiar obsession with toilets and what goes on in them. Whether its Ti West's rubbish short about a miscarriage in a toilet, Hardcastle's toilet monster, or Iguchi's tale of a lady absorbed into fart-heaven, most of these directors equated creative freedom with dick- and fart-jokes. The few that did not have earned my respect.

A week after seeing the film, I still find myself treasuring the experience. There is no other film like ABCs. Not yet, anyway. There are plenty of anthology films, but none that gives so much content. There'll be some significant rewatch value in revisiting some favorites and some forgottens. Ultimately, however, we can all make our own ABCs of Death by compiling a disk of shorts and may have just as much fun with it, if not more.