Foreverisacastironmess123 Review of ABCs of Death 2

ABCs of Death 2 (2014)

Good! Definitely quantity over quality but you sure get enough bang for your buck!

[7/10 · 2 September 2017]

Surprised that this has so few reviews.. I thought this was a very decent collection of macabre short films that mostly focus on monsters and death, and there's a terrific variety to the overlong cavalcade of terror, with some of them being comedic, dead serious, or incomprehensibly bizarre. A lot are enjoyable, not too many are exactly great, but to me not many are downright awful either..very mixed bag indeed! I love the multicultural aspect and how you get to experience different kinds of experimental and artistic approaches to the horror. It's a silly nitpick really but like with the original, one of the real downsides is that it gradually becomes quite the slog to watch if you're planning on sitting through the whole thing with one little tale endlessly going into another, and by the end you're fairly itching for it to wrap the hell up already! I'm only talking about the shorts that I was most impressed by, I'll leave the negativity to the other reviews. "D is For Deloused." Oh what a hideously beautiful work of art, it was so mesmeringly grotesque with all those bug things consuming the fleshy man-like thing and dissolving and spawning new larval crawling filth...oh I just loved it, it's so good! Robert Morgan is so skilled and his highly distinctive brand of animation is so absorbing that, if you're like me, you won't even care that you have no idea what's going on. Yeah that was right up my alley, I dug it! "G is For Grandad." To my way of thinking this grungy coarse tale of an equally revolting granddad and grandson who hate each other's guts is more complex than it first seems, because everything about it from the decor to how the horrible people look and sound feels purposefully designed to be as off-putting and hilarious awkward and vile as possible, and in its own way it's quite the artfully done little piece and it certainly got under my skin! "H is For Head games." I could see how some might not take to this one as it's not even really horror, it's a kaleidoscopic visual metaphor of a 'stormy' relationship, or a very passionate kiss! I sometimes enjoy different kinds of animation, and I thought that one was very fun and eye catching from start to finish. "J is For Jesus" I loved and found quite powerful and moving for how brutal it was. "N is for Nexus." While it could have done with just a little more punch to its conclusion, I thought this cleverly constructed little Halloween treat about people ending up at the wrong place at the wrong time at a specific moment was quite sharply directed and nicely suspenseful, and at the end Frankenstein is dead, and she becomes a macabre screaming Bride of death for real - which I found very cool! "O is for Ochlocracy." I found this loony satire of an undead kangaroo court with people being charged harshly by the 'cured' zombies for the zombies that they had to kill to defend themselves really funny and entertaining, and even a little poignant as the woman is sentenced to death by her own reformed zombie daughter who doesn't forgive her... "V is for Vacation." I was impressed by how brutal this found footage type offering of two guys in a foreign country who meet their doom at the hands of a mad prostitute was, I found it to be one of the more realistically disturbing and unnerving stories. "W is for Wish." Rather loved this madly epic and colourful romp of a child's fantasy turned into something twisted and weird in which two kids get sucked into the 80's Castle Grayskull type playset of their favourite action figures and find that it's not quite as rosy fun and black and white as they look from their side, it was a neat imaginative idea that could make for a cool movie, and it was creepy too, with one of the poor young boys being unceremoniously vaporised and He-Man being a pervert! "U is for Utopia" was I thought a very scary idea of a future society of genetically perfect people in which the ugly are immediately burned from existence on sight! What would such a 'paradise' ever be truly worth if it was built on such a nightmare? "Y is for Youth" I loved a lot, I found it to be a jaw-dropping explosion of insanely bizarre and creative metaphorical imagery, it had a giant burger monster, gross maggot hand, an electric guitar erupting from a guy's head, a French fry vacuum cleaner, it was so super freaky but it sure had a lot of energy and was one of the few shorts that ended on am absurdly uplifting note - hell yeah!!! "Z is for Zygote." This was the real gem of the movie and ended it on a very strong and satisfying note that kind of enriches the whole collective tone of the film by itself. It raised the gag factor by a mile and was easily capable of causing anyone's gorge to rise! The world of Zygote was so sharply realised and darkly rich that it felt like there could have been an entire picture made of it. It's repulsive on multiple levels as a teenage fetus forcibly takes over her mother's skin from within after ejecting out all the bones and organs in an astonishing display of gruesome body horror effects... It's an amazingly twisted tale that's so brilliantly visceral and thematically perverse and strange, you'd have to be made of stone not to have some kind of reaction to it! In the girl's defence she never knew what murder or a father was as up to that point she'd lived her existence inside a hideously distended womb! So no classic but a fun and exhaustive horror compilation horror, on repeated viewings you may benefit more from simply watching the chapters that you do like! See ya x