The ABCs of Death

You really don’t want to know what F stands for.

(2012) Horror Anthology (Magnet) Ingrid Bolsø Berdal (voice), Erik Aude, Kyra Zagorsky, Ivan Gonzalez, Dallas Malloy, Sarah Bonrepaux, Lee Hardcastle, Fraser Corbett, Peter Pedrero, Darenzia, Arisa Nakamura, Hiroko Yashiki, Lucy Clements, Match, Yuri Murata, Je$$ica, Harold Torres, Mattias Oviedo, Alejandra Urdlain, Takashi Nishina, Chems Dahmani, Vanja Lazin. Directed by a bunch of people.  

Horror movies are undergoing a quiet renaissance with an underground that is active and imaginative. While many of these movies aren’t getting theatrical releases, with the advent of YouTube, VOD and other means of putting movies out there, we’re seeing some really good stuff not just here in America but from all over the world.

Tim League, founder of Fantastic Fest, America’s premier genre film festival, wants these talents to see the light of day. Along with co-producer Ant Timpson (a Kiwi whose Incredibly Strange Film Festival is one of the world’s most prestigious) he came up with a concept – assign 26 of the world’s most exciting up-and-coming horror film directors a letter of the alphabet and have them make a short film relating a word starting with that letter to death and then with all 26 shown as a single film.

Like all anthologies, the quality varies and with this many shorts (most of which last less than 5 minutes) there is a wide variety of styles and content. Some are more comic than horrific, some taking on a combination of the two. Many are attempts to push the boundaries, not only of gore but of good taste. Some are intriguing, some are innovative, some are repulsive and some are mediocre. Most people will find at least one of the shorts to be outstanding.

There were some that were just plain horrific in an old-fashioned sense –  A is for Apocalypse is, for example, from Nacho Vigolando (of Timecrimes and Extraterrestrial) in which a savage murder is turned into an act of mercy. One of my favorites was T is for Toilet in which an overly skittish young man who has an irrational fear of toilets (a fear which turned out to be justified) done in Claymation – the director, Lee Hardcastle, actually won the 26th spot on the roster in a contest.

Xavier Gens, the French director who helmed The Divide has one of the more straightforward shorts in the bunch.  In X is for XXL, a tormented overweight French woman decides to take matters into her own hands and reinvent herself to be more in line with the aesthetic of beauty that French models ascribe to. Take from that what you will.

There is also much humor. J is for Jidai-Geki (Samurai Film) from Japanese director Yudai Yamaguchi has a samurai about to deliver the coup de grace for a samurai committing hara-kiri unable to keep a straight face because of the faces his charge is making. Q is for Quack has Adam Wingard (A Horrible Way to Die) and Simon Barrett commiserating over the disrespect afforded them by being assigned the letter Q and at their billing  in the credits. They concoct a brilliant way to make their segment stand out – then screw it up about as badly as it can be.

There are some surreal segments such as O is for Orgasm and W is for WTF. There is the animated K is for Klutz and the Russ Meyers tribute S is for Speed. I could go on and on but I don’t think it necessary to go over all 26 entries. You get the drift.

There’s enough good stuff to outweigh the bad by a pretty decent margin, so I can recommend this for most horror fans and even those mainstream moviegoers who don’t mind having their boundaries pushed a bit. This isn’t for the faint of heart, the squeamish or the easily offended. Who it is for are those who are looking for something a bit out of the norm and have an open mind about movies. I recommend bringing along someone with a big booming belly laugh. There was a guy like that at my screening of the film and it helps immensely.

REASONS TO GO: Some big laughs and some big scares. Pushes some boundaries and offers examples of what’s going on in the horror underground around the world.

REASONS TO STAY: Uneven – some of the segments are less successful than others. Too much toilet humor.

FAMILY VALUES:  Crude humor, graphic nudity and gore, foul language, violence, disturbing images and themes, drug use and a partridge in a pear tree.

TRIVIAL PURSUIT: Ant Timpson and Tim Teague, producers of the film, are best known for running the Incredibly Strange Film Festival and Fantastic Fest respectively; Teague is also CEO of the Alamo Drafthouse chain of theaters.

CRITICAL MASS: As of 4/21/13: Rotten Tomatoes: 39% positive reviews. Metacritic: 44/100; critics really didn’t get on board for this one.

COMPARISON SHOPPING: V/H/S

FINAL RATING: 7/10

NEXT: I Declare War

Life As We Know It

Josh Duhamel is only glad there's no poop on HIS face.

(Warner Brothers) Katherine Heigl, Josh Duhamel, Josh Lucas, Hayes McArthur, Christina Hendricks, The Clagett Triplets, Sarah Burns, Jessica St. Clair, Britt Flatmo, Kumail Nanjiani, Will Sasso, Majandra Delfino, DeRay Davis, Melissa McCarthy, Rob Huebel, Andrew Daly. Directed by Greg Berlanti

Is there a secret to life? Most people agree that if there is, it is elusive at best, but there is one secret that’s fairly graspable; change is inevitable.

Uptight upscale bakery owner Holly Berenson (Heigl) has just exited from a long-term relationship that went nowhere. Her best friend Allison Novack (Hendricks) has set her up with her husband Peter’s (McArthur) best friend Eric Messer (Duhamel).

It would have been the date from hell had it even gotten that far. The laid-back lothario Messer (who prefers to be addressed by his last name) arrives an hour late, sans dinner reservation and to top it all off takes a booty call that he sets up for the same night. Amused at first, Holly is at last infuriated and storms back into her apartment, having not even pulled away from the curb.

Three years later they are celebrating the first birthday of little Sophie Novack (Clagett). While the date went sour, Messer and Holly still remain best friends to the Novacks and while Messer annoys Holly terribly, they remain civil for the most part for the sake of their friends. All that goes by the wayside when they get the phone call that Peter and Allison were killed in an auto accident. However, that’s almost equal to the shock they receive when they find out that their friends named them as guardians of little Sophie in the event of their demise.

The will specifies that Sophie remain in the suburban Atlanta home…or maybe estate would be more accurate…that the Novacks lived in. With the mortgage pre-paid for a year, the two godparents take up uneasy residence in the house and try to somehow be parents.

It’s a rough go, as they are completely clueless about childcare and they still get along like Yankees fans and Red Sox fans, only less violent. However their love for little Sophie and their feelings of obligation towards their dead friends keep them plugging away, despite Messer’s attempts to seduce half of Atlanta, Holly’s ambitious expansion plans for her bakery and her own romantic interest in Sophie’s handsome pediatrician whom Messer names, not unkindly, “Dr. Love” (Lucas).

While there is clearly tension between Holly and Mess, there is also just as clearly attraction between the two as the social caseworker Janine (Burns) notices. However, what little connection they have is stretched to the breaking point when Messer gets a job offer for his dream job – which will take him out of Atlanta and into Phoenix if he accepts.

This is a movie that careens from romantic comedy to drama, sometimes in a jarring fashion, but I get the sense that overall the filmmakers saw this as the former. Somewhat ironically, I think the dramatic sequences tend to work much better than most of the comedic ones, which rely on baby poop, baby vomit and sleep deprivation for most of the gags. Had the movie steered itself away from the romance, toned down the comedy and concentrated on the bringing up baby aspects a little bit more, I think this would have been a really great movie.

Unfortunately, the romantic comedy formula is followed nearly to the letter; boy and girl meet, dislike each other intensely, come together and then are split apart before coming back together in the final reel. It seems like every studio romantic comedy follows the same bloody formula without exception and I for one am tired of it, but it seems the appetite for such formula romcoms is endless so until Hollywood stops making money hand over fist with them we will continue to see them churned out one after the other into multiplexes all over the world.

That said, the chemistry between Heigl (who is the mistress of uptight professional women roles) and Duhamel, who has become a pretty decent romantic lead in his own right, is undeniable. The two are believable as a couple which is at the heart of any romcom. Lucas, who is one of those actors who just does a good job every time out but never gets the credit he deserves, is solid as the third part of the romantic triangle.

I am not big on babies in the movies, but I will say that Sophie may be the most charming baby I’ve ever seen onscreen. She is portrayed by triplets (and then at the film’s conclusion by twins as she ages in the film) and they all seem to have a fairly expressive facial palate.

While I would have liked to have seen either less formula in the romantic comedy aspect, or more of the serious drama of picking up the pieces after the death of the parents, the filmmakers seem to settle for a little bit of both and wind up with a playing-it-safe mish-mash that ends up curiously unsatisfying, despite all the items on the plus side of the ledger. I don’t know if Berlanti and his writers went the taking-no-chances route of their own volition, or if studio bigwigs hamstrung them but I wish they had been a bit bolder in their choices.

REASONS TO GO: Nice chemistry between Duhamel and Heigl; the baby may be the most charming movie baby ever.

REASONS TO STAY: The script is awfully formulaic and doesn’t really send any surprised the audience’s way.

FAMILY VALUES: There’s a little bit of sexuality, a little bit of bad language, a little bit of drug humor and a good deal of baby poop. Pretty much acceptable for most reasonably mature teens.

TRIVIAL PURSUIT: Those who stay to the very end of the movie will hear a currently unreleased Faith Hill song (“All I Needed”) on the soundtrack.

HOME OR THEATER: Quite frankly this is a movie that will make you want to cuddle with your loved one; definitely worth seeing at home.

FINAL RATING: 6/10

TOMORROW: Amreeka