The ABCs of Death (2012)

Series of short twist-ending horrorshows. Quality was higher than I predicted. I watched in small batches over the course of the month – this 2+ hour collection is probably more wearying to watch all at once.

Apocalypse
Woman violently kills her husband, apologizes for not doing it more peacefully but she’d run out of time due to impending apocalypse. Nacho Vigalondo also directed the fun Timecrimes.

Bigfoot
Babysitters make up story of Mexico City heart-eaters. Story is true! Babysitters’ hearts are eaten, little girl lives. I must’ve missed where Bigfoot came in. Adrián García Bogliano made last year’s Here Comes the Devil.

Cycle
Doppelganger strangles his other, ad nauseum. Reliant on shock music. Ernesto Díaz Espinoza is known for action stuff like Kiltro and Mirageman.

Dogfight
Slow-mo, dialogue-free man-vs-dog underground fighting ring. Marcel Sarmiento made a good-sounding abandoned-asylum movie called Deadgirl.

Exterminate
Lazy dude keeps getting bitten by the same spider. We see the dude from spider POV sometimes. Then baby spiders hatch from his ear. Not as good as the Creepshow episode. Angela Bettis is a Lucky McKee collaborator, directing Roman and playing the lead in May.

Fart
The one about Japanese girls farting. Nothing to see here. Keep moving. Noboru Iguchi also made Zombie Ass and Bad Butt – I am sensing a trend.

Gravity
Surfer with first-person camera dies. Not as good as the Cuaron version. Andrew Traucki made a shark movie called The Reef.

Hydro-Electric Diffusion
Live-action cartoon WWII soldier dog fights nazi stripper fox. Even better than it sounds! Thomas Cappelen Malling’s only other credit is Norwegian Ninja.

Ingrown
Kidnapped, tied-up girl is injected with Cabin Fever virus, dies. Awful high-pitched whine on the soundtrack. This is the worst. Jorge Michel Grau did the well-reviewed We Are What We Are.

Jidai-Geki
Executioner cannot focus on his head-chopping job because the dude committing harakiri keeps making funny faces. Yudai Yamaguchi worked on Tokyo Gore Police, directed two comedy-horror baseball movies and something called Meatball Machine.

Klutz
Animation is nice but it’s about a sentient, murderous piece of poop. Anders Morgenthaler made the enjoyable Princess.

Libido
New definition of torture-porn? Jackoff competition, loser is killed with a stake up the ass. One guy makes it to round 14 then finds himself on the wrong end of the contest as a girl has sex with him while chainsawing him to death. Odd. Timo Tjahjanto made the suicide/devil-cult segment of V/H/S/2.

Miscarriage
The shortest segment, and nearly the second in a row to be toilet-based. Ti West has been all the rage since House of the Devil.

Nuptials
Huge relief because it stars a colorful parrot who does not get killed or hurt. Talking parrot gives away dude’s affair during his proposal, he gets knifed. Banjong Pisanthanakun made horrors Shutter and Alone.

Orgasm
The great Cattet & Forzani explore new realms of color and slow-motion with a woman receiving oral sex and blowing soap bubbles. I hope they make another movie soon.

Pressure
Prostitute in financial trouble accepts job to be videotaped stomping kittens to death. Kinda the saddest one. Simon Rumley is known for Red White & Blue and The Living and the Dead.

Quack
Director Adam Wingard and writer Simon Barrett decide their segment will stand out for featuring a real death, and plan to kill a caged duck on camera, but they don’t know how guns work and end up shooting each other. By far this is my favorite Wingard movie.

Removed
Hospital prisoner/patient has valuable movie film under his skin, but also has subcutaneous bullets for self-defense. Arrival of a Train at La Ciotat features prominently, and it rains blood at the end. Hunh? Srdjan Spasojevic’s only other credit is snuff-movie thriller A Serbian Film.

Speed
Notably bad acting and editing. Mad Max dystopia turns out to be fantasies of dying druggies. Jake West does DVD-extra docs for horror movies including the feature Phantasmagoria on the Phantasm series.

Toilet
Fantastic claymation. I was nervous since this is the third toilet-based short in the series but it’s completely wonderful. Lee Hardcastle has 20 credits from the last 3 years, and they’re all clay remakes of horror movies.

Unearthed
Death of a vampire, from the vampire’s first-person perspective, in just a few takes. I’ve seen most of Ben Wheatley’s movies, most recently A Field in England.

Vagitus
Sci-fi population-control short looks ike a video game cutscene, super slick, no idea what happened because I turned the volume down but someone was executed in the name of the government and someone else exploded. Kaare Andrews is the second director here after Ti West to have made a Cabin Fever sequel.

WTF!
Brief Metalocalypse-looking animation becomes making-of segment, freewheeling live-action ideas that start with W (includes an Insane Clown Posse magnets reference), then the whole thing turns brutally insane and hilarious. Jon Schnepp directs/designs/edits Metalocalypse.

XXL
French people super-taunt an overweight girl until she goes home and cuts herself thin with knives. Xavier Gens made Frontier(s).

Youngbuck
School janitor is a pedophile, a young victim takes revenge. No spoken dialogue, set to upbeat 1980’s montage music. Jason Eisener made Hobo with a Shotgun and Slumber Party Alien Abduction.

Zetsumetsu
Dr. Strangelove-referencing nazi race-war sex-melee dystopia, ending the anthology in an orgy of bad taste. Yoshihiro Nishimura directed Tokyo Gore Police, obviously.