Movie Review: The ABC's of Death

When I first saw the trailer for The ABC's of Death I was like I need to see this movie.  It is a movie with a crazy premise.  They assigned 26 horror directors a letter of the alphabet and had each one make a short movie using the letter as inspiration for a death scene. What you end up with is one bizarre horror anthology.

Unlike some anthologies there is no real storyline that ties them all together it is just 26 different shorts.  They start at A and go to Z  and each short is completely different.  No matter what kind of horror movies you like there is something in here for you there is comedy, gore, animation, claymation, apocalyptic and everything in between.  While there is something for everyone it is fair to say that everyone will find some they don’t like as is the nature with most anthology films.    

What I liked about the movie is that you never knew what to expect.   Since they go in order you know what letter the short is but you don’t know what the ultimate death will be, so half the fun is trying to guess what it will be.   I will say the short that summed it up for me was W is for WTF.  That is pretty much what you are going to be saying throughout  the movie.  I don’t want to go too much into individual movies because the less you know the more enjoyable it is but I am going to try to highlight some of my favorite shorts without giving too much away. 

My favorite was D directed by Marcel Sarmiento (Deadgirl).  If you have seen the trailer then you can probably guess that D is for Dog.  What I loved about this short was it felt like it told a full story.  As someone who has seen plenty of shorts and tried to write one I know it can be hard to tell a compelling story in a short amount of time.  The short had some great visuals, it was intense and tells the whole story without dialogue. It also has one of the best endings in the series.  This will probably end up as one of my favorite shorts of the year. 

Another one of my favorites was the S movie.  It had some fantastical parts but then brought it back to reality at the end and left you really thinking.

Other ones that stand out for me are

Ti West’s M movie.  As with most of the shorts I wasn’t sure where this was going but he took it to a dark place and is possibly one of the more disturbing shorts.

Adam Wingard got the letter Q which is a tough one but he managed to make a pretty funny short. 

F  is by far my least favorite.            
and I watched T with my young son and I hope he isn’t scarred for life and one day I will get him potty trained. 

Overall: 4/5 Mixed bag for sure but the fun is the journey.  You will be scared, enraged, grossed out, disturbed, and you will laugh.  But most importantly you will be entertained.  I look forward to getting the Blu-Ray so I can see some of them again and skip the ones I didn’t like.