ABCs of Death 2
This film starts with a note, which sets up the premise: it’s basically the same premise as the first “ABCs of Death” 26 filmmakers were given a word beginning with a certain letter and told, basically, to go make a horror short based on that word. “They were given complete artistic freedom,” the note continues.
I hear a kind of pride in this statement. This movie was made by hardcore genre fans turned moviemakers one of the producers, Mark Walkow, is an old friend of mine from back in the laser disc days, when we used to excitedly compare notes on disgracefully expurgated versions of latter-day horror classics floating about and it’s commendable to stand behind the most dangerous visions of the filmmakers one commissions. But. And you don’t have to be Einstein or Irving Thalberg or Joseph E. Levine to guess what the but has to do with: quality control.
So this “ABCs of Death,” either due to an excess of artistic freedom or just my own narrower than the producers’ stricture of taste, is as much hit-and-miss as its predecessor (which came out in 2012). This does not mean that for this particular viewer who is his own self a long time horror fan the spottiness stemmed from some mode of repetition enforced by omnibus structure alone; for here individual episode titles are revealed after rather than before their respective episodes, which tends to give said titles more punchliney weight; now while it’s pretty obvious from jump street that episode “R” will be called “Roulette,” in other cases punchline option is deployed with great brio, or used as droll formal comment (as in case of episode “S,” directed by Juan Martinez Moreno and my favorite among all).
What doesn’t necessarily un-surprise me but is good nonetheless is that gimmick doesn’t get as old as you’d think given its iteration. So that’s good. And while it does occur to one early on that the requirement of brevity in order to fit 26 short films into a two-hour slot is likely to impose a samey abstraction on the proceedings, this also doesn’t turn out to be true; each filmmaker takes his or her ball and runs with it.
The outcome is a survey of what’s magnificent or at least interesting about the trends in modern horror, and what’s problematic also. Frequently at once. Like, in that Juan Martinez Moreno episode, which is a home-invasion tale distinguished by truly virtuosic multi-screen manipulations of cinematic space and genuinely excruciating tension, there’s this awful pause to take in the full extent of a GAPING HEAD WOUND which does not to sound like your grandfather who remembers back when movies could be scary without all the gore feel kind of gratuitous.
Another part of The Larger Problem With Contemporary Horror actually gets brought up in the next movie, specifically the “T” episode, which is a bracingly snide and also icky feminist observation from Tyros Jen and Sylvia Soska. These little thematic fillips help make the stretch from “S” to “W” maybe the strongest part of the whole feature, and then there’s a blindingly obvious “X” surprisingly by “Inside” maestro Julien Maury, who’s done in by getting too cute after which the streak is broken with an episode so pointlessly good for nothing as an episode that it can only be called blindingly obvious “X,” this directed by Julien Maury who has made lots of good episodes before but now he makes one where everything goes dark because it’s night time already.
If even half of those people out there who get into high dudgeon over any female character being subjected to violence onscreen gave half as much thought to how readily they accept this activity as male-gendered normative behavior off it (ie toward real women), then culture might actually start moving somewhere instead regressing every few years back past square one again like always; either way though there will never cease being those among us whose brains cannot be hurt no matter what happens around them or inside them least of all by a movie.
I’m not sure if we’re on the same page here, but there’s something missing from this puzzle and it’s not “Y,” which doesn’t have anything to do with any other letter in the alphabet except “X.” Although that movie does come after those ones that are better than OK it is not itself one of those times when you find yourself saying ‘Oh well, at least they didn’t make another good movie’ because what’s wrong with making good movies? But anyway back to my point: even though less than half these were really enjoyable for me as a genre fan, I can’t wait for next year!
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