2012’s anthology film The ABCs of Death set out with a noble mission: to assemble an international crack team of the finest under-the-radar directors in the scare-‘em game, assign each one a letter of the alphabet, and tie a blood-soaked ribbon around 26 self-contained frights. Though it brought viewers some breathtaking kernels of nightmare fuel — Marcel Sarmiento’s “D Is For Dogfight” was brutal and balletic in equal measure, while “O is for Orgasm” turned unwitting horror nerds on to the neo-giallo stylings of Bruno Forzani and Hélène Cattet — many shorts came up, well, short. The plain-and-simple verdict on the newly released sequel arrives as surely and anticlimactically as its predecessor: Some of the shorts are good and some are bad, rendering it nearly impossible to make general statements about The ABCs of Death 2 as a whole. A film so determinedly discrete in the way it doles out frights practically demands to be broken up and reviewed piecemeal. So, without further ado:
A: E.L. Katz stays true to the rascally sense of violence-as-playtime that made his Cheap Thrills so much fun. An auspicious start!
B: Wrings a couple of laughs from an unorthodox visual format, accomplishing a lot using very little.
C: As heavy-handed and dull as the axe upon which the plot hinges.
D: This short features surreal, richly textured stop-motion. It’s Jan Svankmajer after taking one of the brown tabs of acid.
E: A lot of sloppy buildup to a reactionary, stupid punch-line. Chicks, amirite?!
F: This is contrived and conceptually thin. When a 5-minute film drags, that’s a serious problem. But hey, at least it’s not about farting.
G: “I’ve done wee-wees tastier than this.” You will be a happier person and your life will be better if you skip this one.
H: Here’s the most rapturously imaginative short of the bunch. Bill Plympton’s beautiful pen-and-ink drawings result in a comic fantasy something like MAD Magazine for art freaks.
I: Agreeably campy, but nothing more than that. It’s forgotten before it can get to the title card.
J: This uses every second of its paltry runtime with ferocious economy. And who can say no to vengeance-seeking gay zombies?
K: Inoffensive and weak, despite a promising start. However, it contributes the film’s single most resonant isolated image.
L: The Nigerian perspective is a nice change of pace and the effects are endearingly practical, but this still lacks a meaningful driving idea.
M: This short makes the silly sublime with a little help from some jangly ‘60s pop, but ends with the single best punchline of the entire film.
N: It executes an already-sweaty premise with a damning lack of grace. Cross-cutting does not kinetic cinema make.
O: The East Asian shorts share a uniformly endearing craziness when not abjectly repulsive.
P: Idiotic and unusual, but not in ways that are fun. Amateurish prosthetics have our hero looking like the star of a high school Cyrano de Bergerac production. Its best joke is its title.
Q: One of many shorts in service of a gag that fails to justify the footage preceding it. An absurdist twist can’t bail this one out. Where have you gone, Adam Wingard?
R: It’s marvelously ambient, orchestrated with a classical verve. The monochrome photography fits the aristocratic setting perfectly.
S: Split-screen images do not help the short’s rudimentary premise run smoother; they just strand characters on deserted islands with nothing to do. Bad acting has nowhere to hide and the poorly developed themes feel toxically hateful.
T: In an interview, co-director Jen Soska claimed to have been “blown away” by the original anthology’s “L Is For Libido.” As signs go, that’s a pretty bad one.
U: The glossy sheen of a cologne commercial has been molded to fit embarrassingly entry-level social commentary.
V: While it uses buffering lags and glitches to supremely unsettling effect, that’s not enough to redeem a needlessly putrid premise.
W: This combines a healthy sense of childlike wonder with an unhealthy sense of demented analog nightmare imagery. The creators of “Wonder Showzen” approve!
X: It plays but a single note, though a perfectly on-key one.
Y: In the original ABCs, W stood for WTF. This time, Y does. Abandon all hope, ye who enter here.
Z: This is definitely the most tastefully executed, which is saying a lot, considering that the short is absolutely fucking disgusting.
Howard Hawks has been famously quoted as saying, “A good movie has three good scenes and no bad ones.” So what does that make a movie with 10 good scenes and 16 bad ones? Long. If the duds could be flayed from this collection, leaving only the diamond-hard core, it could be a heroic exercise in horror eclecticism. Alas, viewers are called upon far too frequently to bear with The ABCs of Death 2 until it gets back on the right track.
