The ABCs of Death (2012)

"A 26-chapter anthology that showcases death in all its vicious wonder and brutal beauty."

"The ABCs of Death" is responsible for another 2 hours of my life which I'll never get back, but on the bright side, at least I didn't have to wait to see this megaturd at one of the 30 or so selected cinemas which will be showing it next week. "The ABCs of Death" has been available as a VOD for some time now although I don't recommend that you pay for it if you can help it. It's even more of an insult to any normal human being's intelligence than "V/H/S". I wouldn't even let animals watch this crap.

Because I couldn't care less if I spoil this for you, here's the list of the 26 short "movies" (hahaha, what a joke to even call them that!) or segments and what I thought about them. My ratings are in parentheses.

"A is for Apocalypse" - very short but to the point with decent gore. (4/10)

"B is for Bigfoot" - predictable, but the pretty Mexican actress has lovely boobs. (3/10)

"C is for Cycle" - I didn't get it. Like most of the movies in this anthology, it makes no sense. (0/10)

"D is for Dogfight" - nice choreography but stupid, and I didn't understand the ending. (2/10)

"E is for Exterminate" - Angela Bettis' entry is too quick and predictable. (2/10)

"F is for Fart" - the Japanese girls are kinda hot, but the story is too bizarre. (2/10)

"G is for Gravity" - What? Did a shark get him or something? Who cares? (0/10)

"H is for Hydro-Electric Diffusion" - just weird. I didn't like it or understand what was going on. (0/10)

"I is for Ingrown" - What was ingrown? I expected toenails and got nothing. (0/10)

"J is for Jidai-geki" - a couple of stupid masks, and that's it. (0/10)

"K is for Klutz" - a badly drawn cartoon. Entertaining in a childish way but pointless. (1/10)

"L is for Libido" - one of the better ones. Reminiscent of "A Serbian Film" but with more punches pulled. (4/10)

"M is for Miscarriage" - Ti West gave less than a minute to this. Who cares though? All his movies suck anyway. (0/10)

"N is for Nuptials" - the bird is funny. Reusing an old Jethro joke isn't. (2/10)

"O is for Orgasm" - I have no idea what this is about other than a mess of camera tricks and a woman with bad skin. Feel free to enlighten me by writing your answer on the back of a stamp. (0/10)

"P is for Pressure" - very nasty ending and based on something which really happened online. I don't even want to talk about it, but it's another reason to boycott anything else from Simon Rumney. (0/10)

"Q is for Quack" - nice boobs at start, cute duck at end, but "meta" all the way. (0/10)

"R is for Removed" - utter crap. So surreal that I have no idea what it's supposed to be about. (0/10)

"S is for Speed" - also didn't make any sense to me. Heroin isn't the same thing as speed, is it? (0/10)

"T is for Toilet" - crappy claymation with a twist ending. Not acceptable. (0/10)

"U is for Unearthed" - a handycam vampire exhumation. Some originality, much borrowing. (1/10)

"V is for Vagitus" - lots of sci-fi action and gore, but no point. (1/10)

"W is for WTF?" - exactly, just a mess and even more "meta" than "Q". (0/10)

"X is for XXL" - beautifully gory and very good storytelling. If you find this segment online on its own, save yourself some time by only watching this one. (8/10)

"Y is for Youngbuck" - another story which makes no sense. (0/10)

"Z is for Zetsumetsu" - which is apparently some kind of weird Japanese porn with lots of fake sexual organs and sushi. (0/10)

It comes to something when a dog is the best actor in the film.

I've seen many terrible movies in my time, but "The ABCs of Death" really deserves some kind of award for being such a self-indulgent waste of the 26 lots of $5000 which each filmmaker was supposed to spend on his or her segment. Apparently, it costs $5000 for Ti West to throw some uncooked meat wrapped up in toilet paper down the bog and film a girl in glasses with a plunger in her hand looking at it. Well done, Ti, for proving yourself a total douchebag.

As for the animal cruelty (either shown or implied) which has been dumped in this just to be controversial, I'm against most forms of censorship, but if I had the power to do anything about it, I would pull "The ABCs of Death" in a second, have all copies of it destroyed, and have the filmmakers prosecuted individually. Kids who are looking for cheap thrills will always find them because of rumours, but sicker kids will seek out a "movie" like this and use it as inspiration.

All copies of "The ABCs of Death" ought to be destroyed anyway in case today's braindead generation start thinking that burning a load of glorified YouTube videos onto a DVD is the equivalent of making a real movie. With this lack of talent for them to emulate, no wonder horror is dead. In another 20 years, there probably won't be any movies except for 5 minute long ones on video hosting sites.

Furthermore, I have no idea why Amazon lists this as starring Ingrid Bolsø Berdal. She's not in it anywhere.

According to the IMDb, "The ABCs of Death" will be in movie theatres from February 28th. I advise you to watch something else.

Felidae (1994)

"After his owner relocates, the cat Francis in involved in a series of cat murders in the new neighbourhood. Francis tries to solve the murder cases with others - including Claudandus, a very knowledgeable and old cat."

Although the subject matter belongs on my horror cats blog, it's an adult German cartoon so I've decided to say something about it here instead.

Containing a lot of film noir elements and some very weird looking cats, "Felidae" was an amusing way for me to waste 82 minutes of my life especially as the most horrific thing about it was that, in spite of a lot of hype on certain forums, it wasn't actually very good.

The dubbing was okay but the dialogue was awful in places and the story wasn't much better. It was all a bit too ridiculous. When the cats were actually behaving like cats, it was almost great. Overall, though, it was a little bit too far-fetched and poorly animated to be enjoyable.

The best part was the theme song by Boy George:



At least it didn't cost me anything since I watched the whole thing on YouTube but "Felidae" isn't something which I would recommend to anyone except the very curious. We all know what curiosity did to the cat.

The Cat with Hands (2001)

"The dark, surreal story of a cat who wants to be human."

Director: Robert Morgan
Writer: Robert Morgan
Stars: Livy Armstrong, Victoria Hayes and Daniel Hogwood-Kane

I think this will do as October's "Horror Cat of the Month".

For more horror cats, please check out http://horrorcats.blogspot.com. Now with over 1000 followers on Twitter!

The Aristocats (1970)

Want to know what really scares me? DISNEY! I've only ever seen a few Disney films back when I was a really little kid and didn't know any better plus a couple of episodes of "The Wonderful World of Disney" from the '70s neither of which I can remember apart from one of them starring Jaclyn Smith from "Charlie's Angels". I only remember that one because I was so surprised to see the most beautiful woman on the planet at that time in something so childish.

So with great trepidation I recently bought "The Aristocats" on VHS from a yard sale for $1 and tried to watch it. IT WAS CRAP! Even for little kids, stuff like this is insipid, tedious and boring with no entertainment value whatsoever.

I'm not a parent except of two cats (only one of which sings) and I found the whole thing to be totally unrealistic. For the love of all that's furry, do not let your children watch rubbish like this! No wonder the world is as messed up as it is if there have been generations of parents forcing their children to watch this tripe. They'd have been better off letting them watch Dario Argento movies and that's saying something.

For a start, cats do not speak English even to each other nor do any of them wear clothes on a regular basis. I've certainly never seen any of them play a musical instrument either except by accidentally walking across a piano keyboard. What lies are Disney telling your children with this? They should be ashamed.

The animation is pretty bad even for the time period. I once watched parts of Disney's "Robin Hood" and even that was better. The soundtrack was terrible too. You can't even call anything by Maurice Chevalier music and the rest of the "songs" were instantly forgettable and just horrible.

Of course, if you really want a good animated cat movie you have to get "Gay Purr-ee" from 1962. Even though it has Judy Garland in it, the story is far more satisfying and, as you can see from the trailer below, it is much more realistic.



If you really wanted to torture somebody, you don't need to use waterboarding or pulling fingernails out, just make your victim watch "The Aristocats" over and over again. This is without doubt the worst movie ever made.

Beowulf (2007)

Now it's not often that I watch an animated feature, and I never expect very much of them if I do, but this was really good.

CGI has certainly got more advanced in recent years and this was state-of-the-art stuff all the way. Even though it still looked pretty much like an elongated cutscene from a computer game, I really enjoyed it.

Maybe it's because I was already familiar with the Beowulf story or maybe it was seeing Angelina Jolie naked, but, either way, I got thoroughly engrossed in it all and it didn't seem to matter after a while that Ray Winstone's character looked more like Sean Bean than Ray Winstone or that Anthony Hopkins was a strangely Welsh sounding Danish king.

Really the only place I can fault this is with the sound. Some of it was too shouty and unintelligible. I know the Danish language bits were supposed to be but I got a bit confused at times when I couldn't even understand what was being said in English!

This film also loses points with me for Angelina's fake Russian accent. I don't understand why a Danish demon should have a Russian accent. Oh well, if the king can be Welsh and Beowulf a cockney then I suppose it all makes sense.

I would still recommend this to anyone though as the action scenes are really impressive and it wasn't too kiddified.

My rating: 7 out of 10.

Howl's Moving Castle (2005)

This is the follow-up to "Spirited Away" by Hayao Miyazaki.

I just watched the whole thing twice! First I watched the Japanese version with subtitles and then followed it by suffering the Disney version (with Christian Bale and Jean Simmons dubbing!).

I have to say I was disappointed more by the latter than the original language version but... I was still disappointed.

This was just not as involving or as much fun as "Spirited Away". The story was a lot weaker even though it did hold my attention for about three-quarters of the film before I started to get a bit bored.

The problem is that this is too kiddie-fied. I tend to avoid "family" movies anyway because they are just so inspidid but this one really was a girlie sickener. All love story and hardly any action... this isn't the kind of cartoon we want at all!

The story, for those who don't know, is hardly a complicated one. There's a wizard called Howl (or at least a name that sounds like that in Japanese!) and he lives in a mechanical castle on legs. It reminded me a lot of the Russian Baba-Yaga story. The castle even has the same chicken legs if you look closely.

Then there's a girl called Sophie who works in a hat shop, meets Howl in the street while he is being chased by shadowy creatures, and gets cursed for no particular reason by "The Witch of the Waste". She is turned into an old woman and ends up going to Howl presumably to seek a cure. It is more luck than judgement how she ends up in his castle though.

Anyway, once inside the castle, Sophie becomes Howl's cleaning lady, gets up to all sorts of stuff, befriends a little boy and a talking fire (who used to be an evil spirit and powers the castle now!), and from time to time changes backwards and forwards between an old woman and her original self.

Sophie, of course, falls in love with Howl and has to rescue him finally after a huge battle (which was a bit disappointing really). They get free of their respective curses, set a few other cursed people free of their curses along the way, and finally end up together living happily ever after in the castle.

Not much to it at all really. The animation is a lot more refined, and is often far more "cutesy", than in "Spirited Away" but you just don't feel involved enough in the story to care.

You might like it, but, as I still prefer "Spirited Away", I can't really recommend it to you. You can watch the entire thing for free on YouTube anyway, so it's only time that you will waste.

Spirited Away (2001)

I watched this cartoon a few weeks ago and thoroughly enjoyed it even though I usually don't like this sort of thing.

I find Japanese animation can often be really "out there" and this is no exception. Their monsters are usually anatomically impossible and there seems to be some unspoken mythology underpinning it all that makes you think that you are missing out on a big chunk of knowledge. The truth is that they just make it up as they go along so kudos to them for the imagination.

The plot is as follows: On the way to moving to a new home, Chihiro and her parents take a wrong turn down a mysterious wooded path which leads to a tunnel. On the other side of the tunnel they find a mysteriously deserted town filled with restaurants that have all kinds of tempting food on display. Chihiro's parents sit down and start gorging themselves and announcing that they will pay the restaurant owner when he returns.

Chihiro, who seems disgusted with them and their gluttony, wanders off until she comes across a large building. A young boy, named Haku, appears. He warns her to leave before nightfall then disappears again. Oooh, spooky! What could be about to happen?

At sunset, the town fills up with lots of gods from Japanese mythology (as far as I can tell!). Chihiro returns to the restaurant to find that her parents have turned into pigs... aha, so there was no such thing as a free lunch!

The young boy, Haku, who works in the large building (which turns out to be a bathhouse for 8 million gods) helps Chihiro find work in this new world, find a way to save her parents from ending up on someone else's dinner plates, and find her way home.

Weird, eh? Well wait till you see all the creatures and "gods" in it. It has some great characterisation and doesn't make you feel like you are watching a kid's film at all.

In many ways this is reminiscent of the works of Homer, especially the Odyssey. It's a nostos (homecoming) tale. The myth of Kore who ate the pomegranate seeds in Hades also springs to mind. It is a good mix of all sorts of mythology and even reminds me of a few episodes of the 1970s Monkey series in places.

Watch it, you'll like it!