The ABCs of Death

This over-long and wildly uneven anthology of short films (costing $5,000 each) about death gives a sense of horror movie making learned by rote – at a boy’s school where girls have been admitted under sufferance. The running order is the make or break with portmanteau movies, so juxtaposing the shocking sexual overkill of Indonesian director Timo Tjahjanto’s ‘Libido’ with Ti West’s tasteless abortion story, ‘Miscarriage’, does neither film any favours. Faced with such diverse global offerings, it’s hard to hold on to the sweaty, stylistic pleasures of Marcel Sarmiento ’s ‘Dogfight’, the gossamer eroticism of Bruno Forzani and Héléne Cattet’s ‘Orgasm’ or the hard-core feminist body-horror of Xavier Gens’s ‘XXL’ when confronted with the silly, smug self-consciousness of Adam Wingard and Simon Barrett’s ‘Quack’. Ben Wheatley’s oblique vampire anecdote ‘Unearthed’ is an object lesson in narrative economy, but Jason Eisener’s paedophile revenge story, ‘Youngbuck’, is merely trite. British animator Lee Hardcastle won a competition to contribute the ‘T is for Toilet’ segment, a funny and imaginative tale about a killer khasi.