Saturday, August 29, 2015

ABC's of Death 2 (2014)

In case you're not familiar with the concept, the ABC's of Death is an anthology made up of 26 short films.  Each director is assigned a different letter of the alphabet and must come up with a horror concept and title using the assigned letter.

While anthologies are always spotty, the one saving grace of this one is that the shorts clock in at around five minutes each.  So if you don't like one of them, the next one will be up soon.  So in that sense, I'd like to see the series continue because it's a good format and gives the viewer exposure to many different directors and ideas.

Overall, I liked this anthology better than the first, but still was not thrilled with a lot of the shorts.  My favorites were: Badger (you know what's coming but it's still enjoyable); Masticate (gross but like the punchline at the end); Questionnaire; and the overall favorite was Wish, where kids are playing with a He-man type castle and toys, and wish they were part of the action.

My least favorites were Head Games, Legacy, P-P-P-P-Scary, and Zygote.  P-P-P-P-Scary is a cop out since it's the short representing the letter P.  It's obviously based on 1930s style slapstick shorts, like The Three Stooges or Abbott and Costello.  That type of humor has it's place, but this was like watching a bad 1930s vaudeville team.  The p-p-p-p represents the characters stuttering, which gets extremely annoying very quickly.

No comments: