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.

V/H/S (2012) - 2.5

Video Home System. With the VHS, you had all the entertainment of the multiplex and the ability to make your own life into a home video. Compared to youtube, VHS was rubbish. But we of the ‘80s generations love to fetishize archaic technology. A bunch of ‘80s-gen filmmakers decided to make a horror movie out of their fetish. V/H/S.

V/H/S is structured as an anthology film. A group of douchebags who make their money exposing unsuspecting women's tits on camera get offered a big break. If they find a tape in an abandoned house, they’ll be paid big. That’s the MacGuffin. Instead of one tape, they find an ambiguously dead body and a bunch of tapes. So they watch them all, giving us a series of horror shorts that are supposedly genuine recordings using the amazing system of home video production, VHS. Nevermind that a few of the shorts are more likely to have been recorded on MiniDV or directly to a computer’s hard disk.

Judging by the talent involved—Adam Wingard, Ti West, e.g.—I imagine they saw the opportunity to make something avant-garde here. To push the boundaries of horror by playing with the medium, introducing new levels of creativity to the increasingly stagnant but promising found-footage genre. Playing with ideas like recording-over existing footage and having the old footage show through, as often happened with that wily magnetic tape. Or entities that are either uncapturable by magnetic tape or, perhaps, entirely an artifact of magnetic tape.

I agree: they had the opportunity to make something avant-garde, a bold step into new areas of horror filmmaking. If they think they achieved that, then I disagree. They had many good ideas and they chose to show those ideas before developing them.

This is particularly true of the frame, the third, and the fifth segments. The third, directed by Glen McQuaid, creates an interesting technique in which a murderer becomes a series of magnetic tape artefacts, as if phasing in an out of reality—but a video, rather than physical, reality. The technique looks great and compelling. I wonder, ‘What the hell is this thing? Is it in the camera? In the world? How does it work?’ The implementation of the technique is sadly wasted on a glib slasher story that offers no explanation. The story is merely a showcase of the technique.

The fifth segment, directed by the group Radio Silence, introduces some brilliant, cocteauian flourishes of ghostly hands reaching through solid matter. The digital effects are seamlessly integrated into the camcorder footage. The idea is good. I just wish there was more of it, either in depth of detail or variety of effects. I also would have preferred a less trite conclusion to an otherwise interesting story.

The frame tale, by Adam Wingard, is the most devoted to struggling with the medium of a VHS tape. In a film titled ‘V/H/S,’ that’s a good thing. But old footage showing through is a well-known technique called ‘palimpsest’ in literature. It’s been exploited at least as early as Hoffman’s The Life and Opinions of Tomcat Murr. The technique is nothing new and so demands a vivid and original application. With Wingard, the technique merely hangs there, a suggestion to future filmmakers, ‘Wouldn’t this be a good idea?’

The experimental techniques attempted by V/H/S are interesting and do suggest some new directions for horror filmmaking. The problem is that they’re only suggesting rather than pioneering. If a filmmaker is going to just suggest, he’s placing himself alongside experimental filmmakers who are doing the same thing, but much better. Peter Tscherkassky’s “Outer Space” and “Dream Work,” for instance. Martin Arnold’s “Deanimated: The Invisible Ghost,” in which the Bela Lugosi film The Invisible Ghost is gradually stripped of all actors. The Maya Deren films that inspired David Lynch. The Stan Brakhage films that inspired Fincher’s cinematic textures. What V/H/S needed is more time in development to give these bones some real flesh.

Besides the conceit of being genuine VHS recordings, each story is linked by another motif. Starting with the frame narrative, all the stories focus on the exploitative nature of relationships between men and women. This motif is given a variety of interpretations, but it remains constant. In the frame tale, for instance, the men grab a woman in a car park and expose her while yelling, “Show her tits!” This is taped over one of the men trying to secretly videotape sex with a girl and getting caught.

The first story, written and directed by David Bruckner, is the most rigorous on the motif. A strange pickup from a nightclub is pressed into a gangbang by a group of men with a secret spy cam. The evening ends in a frightening, gory mess. Bruckner’s simple, controlled, highly effective short, albeit mostly predictable, is the best V/H/S gets.

The second story, from Ti West, concerns a roadtrip with a shy mistress that ends in lesbianic murder. West provides the weakest segment in V/H/S, with a banal story that could have been at the back of an Ellery Queen pulp fifty years ago. The story provides a single, startling moment, like a good punchline, then continues spiralling senselessly toward its uninteresting conclusion. West is the master of the uninteresting, as in his recent films, House of the Devil and The Innkeepers. Perhaps someone should let him know Antonioni’s dead.

In the fourth story, by Joe Swanberg, a man videochats with his long-distance girlfriend and talks her through some unsettling events in her apartment. His frustrating bumbling proves to be part of a sinister conspiracy. Swanberg’s segment, albeit the most detached from the idea of VHS, is one of the best. The imagery is creepy and the conclusion disturbing. Also, the girl has beautiful breasts.

The third and fifth stories service the motif. The slasher plot of the third involves the usual horny guys and slutty girls. One of the girls, however, is merely using the others as bait. The fifth concerns a group of young party-goers discovering a woman bound and in duress. Their ethical decisions get them surprisingly little gratitude.

V/H/S is not a bad film. I think it was conceived with the best of intentions and rushed into production by some ambitious, young filmmakers. With more thought and development, this could have been an excellent film. But given how rarely horror anthologies receive widespread notice, it’s unfortunate that V/H/S was anticipated as a major event in horror filmmaking. It’s not. For all its major names, like West and Wingard, and for all its budget, it is nowhere near as smart, entertaining, or sophisticated as the underseen and underappreciated Slices of Life (2010), by unknown Anthony G. Sumner with his little budget.

Slices of Life (2010) - 3/4

   Slices of Life is a horror anthology film containing three stories, all directed by Anthony G. Sumner. Each story addresses an aspect of life--work, home, and sex--and are bound by a frame story in which an amnesiac girl starts to remember her own life.

   Anthology horror movies are very difficult, especially on a low budget. The short horror film is a difficult craft in itself. Justifying the inclusion and order of the short films in an anthology often appears arbitrary. Sumner's approach shows a degree of thought and seriousness, as well as familiarity with the genre, that is of an unusually high order and these virtues are consistently present in each story.

   The first, and best, of the stories, "W.O.R.M." concerns a sadsack mailroom clerk who uses experimental technology to make people be his friend. He's actually a rather likeable guy, thanks to a fine performance by Jack Guasta. But he has the misfortune of inhabiting a kafkaesque corporate office that rewards jerks and bullies exclusively. Sumner crafts this environment so expertly and believably that the eruption of a Cronenbergian sex-and-violence nightmare into this environment seems an appropriate and fitting end to its denizens.

   The second story, "Amber Alert," is a well-crafted ghost story in which a pregnant woman begins to receive visitations from a kidnapped little girl. The outcome is a bit predictable and the telling too reliant on digital effects, though they are at times beautifully inventive. The depiction of an African American male may strike some viewers as either amusingly or lamentably racist.

   The final story, "Pink Snapper," concerns a brother-and-sister duo who leave their abusive uncle and stumble upon a mansion in the woods where a girl is chained up in the basement and a body has been butchered in the bathtub. "Pink Snapper" is an excellently structured suspense-and-gorefest with a Hennenlotter sort of vibe. It works primarily on a visceral level, and it works very well. The practical effects in this segment are particularly praiseworthy.

    The films are ordered almost like a work of classical music, the first movement exciting, the second slow and somber, and the third fast and playful. I found the momentum of the film highly engaging, making the heavily-allegorical conclusion, venial if a little misplaced. Sumner's work in each short is deft and thoughtful. It's a degree of seriousness too often lacking in independent film. The stories and gore are all consistently entertaining and thought-provoking, and the overall design of Slices of Life is as elegant as the creepy scrapbook props of the frame tale.

   It's a shame that an independent, anthology horror film that's this good is so viciously trashed in its Internet Movie Database rating (3.7 at time of review). Slices of Life is what horror filmmaking is and a horror fan must be pretty jaded not to get some thrills from it.