Unseen Terror 2013: Day 24

Today will mark the last entry featuring what you could constitute as a "modern" horror film (i.e. released within the last ten or fifteen years), and boy howdy am I glad, since I was starting to miss the good times and cheesiness of the decade that I was born in. Director-wise, The ABCs Of Death is one of the largest groups I've seen assembled on this blog, with an ambitious idea of gathering twenty-six different men and women to direct different shorts and segments, each based around a different letter of the alphabet that was assigned to them. Hence, why I don't have a plot synopsis typed above, since there is none to found here. Not a single story connects with one another, though some do share similar themes and styles.

Therein lies the problem with this "movie" though, since it may have been better served as something other than an actual film. For every story that intrigued, amused, or even shocked me, there were about five or six that just didn't, and it feels akin to a two hour-long roller coaster ride in terms of horror anthology enjoyment. Producer Ant Timpson did a great job of rounding up as many people from different parts of the world as he could, including directors from America like Ti West (House of the Devil) and Adam Wingard (V/H/S, You're Next), France's Xavier Gens (Frontier(s)), Japan's Yudai Yamaguchi (Meatball Machine) and Noboru Iguchi (The Machine Girl), and a myriad of mostly unknown Spanish and latino directors. The quality of these actual shorts varies in a way that some feel like they could be stretched out into actual short films, while others feel phoned in to the point where you wonder if the directors felt as if they sent their segments in as a way to get the producers to leave them alone (Ti West's barely minute-long segment feels similar to a page he ripped from a script he never finished).

I know this isn't an entirely original concept either, and as I've brought up before (at least I believe I have), Showtime's Masters of Horror was very similar to The ABCs of Death. If that name doesn't ring a bell, let me refresh your memory. Created by director Mick Garris, 2006's Master of Horror was an anthology series that aired for two seasons on the Showtime network, and featured a wide array of directors in the field, with a large amount of them being pretty darn famous. I know Magnet Releasing most likely can't afford to get someone like John Carpenter or John Landis to come in and work on a short here, but every single short "film" that aired in Horror, even the bad ones, had something to remember, and it gave you room to breathe by making you wait another week for the next installment. Death's segments just occur, flash the title with a "directed by" at the end, and immediately transition into the next one. It gets to be tiring and repetitive entirely too quickly, ultimately making you just want to guess what the letter is going to stand for, and not in a fun way, but in a "would you hurry up?" kind of way.

Inconsistency in quality really hurt my overall enjoyment of The ABCs Of Death, which was a real shame since I still want to applaud this concept. But next time, perhaps making this a series of online-only shorts (no way this makes Youtube due to the nudity) would best serve the creators and cause less frustration among fans. With this decision, you gain the ability to skip past the fluff and at least revisit the memorable moments you did enjoy without having to revisit any meandering or flat out boring segments. Hell, I know that I'd love to rewatch the segments from Noboru Iguchi, Banjong Pisanthanakun, and Angela Bettis again without having to suffer through what precedes them. Supposedly, there's a sequel being worked on at the moment, with at least one pair of directors confirmed, those being the Soska Sisters of American Mary fame. They seem enthused enough about the project, so in the case of the producers, hopefully it will be a case of learning from your mistakes, or at the very least, the shorts themselves don't have the bad-to-good ratio of 6:1 as seen here.

Tomorrow, we're back to the 1980s and stuck in CHOPPING MALL!