Sunday, May 17, 2015

The ABC's of Death 1 & 2 - 2012, 2014

I remember when The ABC's of Death was playing at theaters near where I live in 2012.  I didn't read the description, just saw the poster and the name and decided, "that's a skipable movie".  I dismiss modern horror films without even so much as a second thought quite often, I find that horror movies just lack the interest factor for me that they used to, it seems that they just turned stupid circa 2000.  There are some that I'll get excited about, and watch, and then I'm usually met with lasting disappointment which will make me feel uninspired to watch another.  (Thanks a lot, The Purge.  I fucking wasted two hours on your pointless shit)

When ABC's of Death appeared as a watch instantly on Netflix, I passively added it to my queue and thought, whatever, maybe I'll watch it.  Then I turned it on and watched the entire 2 something hour long movie feeling greatly entertained.  You see, ABC's of Death is a 26 segment film, featuring 26 short films by 26 different directors.  Each director got a letter, and were given no constraints on what to film with that letter, it just had to involve someone dying in a way that somewhat related to a word that starts with the letter.

Okay, exhale. In the case of ABC's of Death 1, A was for Apocalypse.  So the short, in this case directed by Nacho Vigalondo, dealt with characters dying by the apocalypse.  That is how the whole movie was.  Each short was about 2-10 minutes long, and ranged anywhere from dumb to smart to scary to funny to weird to creepy, etc.  When you're working with only 10 minutes you don't spend too long on the unnecessary parts of a movie- the scenes where you might want to fast forward, or zone out cause you've been staring at the same guys for 45 minutes.  It is perfect for the short attention span, and keeps you watching.

I found it was a lot of fun to try and guess what the letter would stand for at the end.  Some of them are kind of obvious, and some are not.  I appreciated that sometimes the letters could have stood for very obvious deaths, like G being for Gun or something, but most of the time they went for something not as obvious.

Anyways, I watched ABC's of Death part two last night, and again, I loved it.  The deaths were again creepy, weird, interesting, bizarre, and scary.  Some of them are not great, of course, in 26 shorts some of them are bound to be forgettable, but others were just brilliant.  Seeing a movie like this makes me search out directors, writers, and others involved because of how clever some of these shorts are.  I honestly can say that I was very impressed with 90% of the deaths in ABC's of Death 1 and 2.

The thing about these as well is that they are all amazingly high budget looking, well shot, and inspired.  I think since these are made out of the Hollywood system, people take this opportunity to truly do something to the best of their ability, make something that people will remember, and impress people.  I don't know how they handle the money aspect of a film like this, because it must not be that high budget, but everything looks really good.

I would recommend these movies to anyone.  Some of the shorts are bound to offend, scare, or whatever, but people can deal with it.  It's clever, fresh, interesting, and unique.  Also, some of the shorts are animated, some are claymation, some are American, some foreign, there's different languages, etc- and that's hugely entertaining to see. Some of the directors are known, most are unknown though, so it gives a chance to see new exciting stuff by what I hope are directors that have a future making more movies.

I gave each film 5 stars, and I stand by that.

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