Across the Universe: Alphabet soup

Each director -- some fairly well-known in the horror genre, others either up-and-coming or obscure -- was given a $5,000 budget to create his or her little nightmare, and while the lengths of the shorts vary, all 26 manage to get packed into a two-hour running time. The crucial element is that the directors were given complete creative freedom to do whatever they wanted, allowing this heavily international contingent to explore the darkest corners of their imaginations.

The results, as one can imagine, are a mixed bag. With 26 short films to wade through, not every one is going to be a success, and a number are failures. First, though, an overall warning: "The ABCs of Death" is not for anyone -- and we mean anyone -- with an aversion to blood, gore, depravity or extreme behavior of all types; this is a film for fans of hard-core horror and cinematic subversion, with the bounds of taste not only exceeded repeatedly but often jubilantly. There is a great deal of humor in "The ABCs of Death," which certainly helps alleviate the relentless nature of most of the film, but even the laughs are often due to wildly outrageous imagery.

Having said that, and if you've got the stomach for it, the movie is truly a trip through a landscape of the bizarre that offers up a range of imaginative horrors in brief, concise bursts of time. If one's enthusiasm starts to wane (we found ours slipping around the letter O), there will be at least another segment or two that one finds gripping, amusing or startling.

It's difficult to pick top favorites or worst disappointments, but certainly "D I for Dogfight" (from "Deadgirl" director Marcel Sarmiento) is the earliest in the film to really grab us, with its stylized cinematography and satisfying arc of vengeance at the end. Other segments that tell a complete story -- like "P Is for Pressure" (Simon Rumley) and "S Is for Speed" (Jake West) tend to be the most successful dramatically. Some of the more experimental shorts -- like Bruno Forzani's "O Is for Orgasm" and Serbian director Srdjan Spasojevic's "R Is for Removed" -- are compelling to watch for their strange and even poetic imagery, if not their narrative cohesion.

Then there are the segments that seem to go purely for the jugular in terms of how much gore, ravaged human flesh and moral sickness they can stuff onto the screen until it's overflowing. The truly disgusting "L Is for Libido" leads the pack in this category, but at least it offers something original (which we can't even begin to describe here), while "X Is for XXL" from French director Xavier Gens ("The Divide") makes its point early and with wearisome obviousness.

Some of the most unique shorts are the animated ones ("T Is for Toilet" and "K Is for Klutz" are both darkly humorous takes on bathroom issues), while the award for the most utterly insane contributions, almost without fail, goes to the movie's Japanese directors. "F Is for Fart" and especially "Z Is for Zetsumetsu (Extinction)" have to be seen to be believed, and are the natural outgrowth of a long line of Japanese filmmakers who operate on a plane of pure lunacy.

Some of the names that horror fans might recognize include Ti West ("The Innkeepers"), Nacho Vigalondo ("Timecrimes"), Ben Wheatley ("Kill List"), Angela Bettis (star of "May") and Adam Wingard ("V/H/S"). Having genre recognition, however, doesn't guarantee success: West's "M Is for Miscarriage" is particularly disappointing and pointless, although Wingard's "Q Is for Quack" pokes fun at the entire exercise while also indulging in a bit of welcome self-mockery. As we said earlier, "The ABCs of Death" is most definitely not for everyone -- it's not for most people, in fact. But if you are ready and willing to take a white-knuckle ride through some stomach-churning and sensibility-shatteri​ng corners of the horror genre, you may find it rewarding.

The anthology format has almost exclusively found its niche in this field, where short, sharp shocks can often be more effective than stories drawn out to feature length (that's why short stories also still make up a healthy chunk of horror literature). But anyone looking for the old-fashioned spookery of a "Tales From the Crypt" or the high-end satire of a "Creepshow" won't find those here. "The ABCs of Death" is a lesson in filmmaking and thematic extremes for which each participant must be at least complimented for letting his or her instincts run free -- even if they give new meanings to certain words that we may never want to think about again.

'The ABCs of Death' is available on VOD beginning January 31.