Rating: 12/20
Plot: A second anthology of 26 shorts that find the horror and comedy in death.
My brother will be interested to know that Laurence R. Harvey, that guy in The Human Centipede sequel, is in a post-credits scene. Masturbating.
I feel a little dirty and juvenile for even watching these, but I really like the idea. These are up-and-coming directors except for a few familiar names, and the results are exactly what any reasonable person would expect. There are a couple really good ones, a bunch of mediocrity, and a few that you wish you didn't have to watch. There are nine decapitations, quite a bit for 26 short films, a high number of jugular spurts, and some references to urine. There's not as much nudity as the first one, as I recall, but there is one disturbing sequence where a man is sans penis.
Here, I'll go through them all for you, hopefully without ruining anything.
A is maybe one of the best ones, almost clever and fairly well executed. It has some hyperkinetic edit grossness which, if something like this is any indication, is the thing now. Somebody named E.L. Katz did this one.
B is silly and underdeveloped, kind of a found footage thing with a badger. C is for Completely Pointless apparently, a look at capital punishment.
D is one of the too-few animated ones, and I'd like to see more by director Robert Morgan. It's animated grossness with some interesting ideas and visuals, kind of like a cheapo Quay Brothers without the subtlety or anything genuine about it. Interesting to look at anyway.
E starts with a fart and has some interesting transitions in its lone beach setting, but it has the feel of an extended commercial or something and isn't nearly as funny as anybody thinks it is. F has an unclear message and is silly when it probably could be saying something interesting. There's also yet another close-up of excruciating pain if that's your thing. It seems like a lot of these directors' thing.
G will make you open your eyes a little wider. I thought it was pretty funny although it was trying very very hard to be pretty funny. "Look! Can you see anything I can wank with? Can you?" This one had jugular spurting but was shocking for far more creative reasons. A guy named Jim Hosking directed it. Unfortunately, I don't want to see anything else directed by a guy who looks like this:
Although now that I look at it again, it sort of looks like somebody I really like.
H, I thought, was a cheap Plympton knock-off, but then it turned out to be Bill Plympton. It was probably something he did in his sleep though. I was some Japanese weirdness with some dumb-looking special effects and a story that wasn't fleshed out enough to really make any sense. J was a little hard to watch with an oppressive message about homosexuality and a wild exorcism scene.
K was one of my favorites, even though it kind of dissolved into weirdo Japanese-style horror imagery. But the inky snow globe surreal imagery followed by a Rear Window-esque series of violence was fun. Not sure why it was called "Knell" though. This one was directed by a Lithuanian woman named Kristina Buozyte.
L is, I hope, the worst thing I watch all year. Laughable effects (straight out of Birdemic) and with a monster that looked as silly as any monster I've ever seen. The setting is Africa, and a Nigerian named Lancelot Oduwa Imasuen directed it. This cat somehow has 73 director credits on his filmography.
M has Rupert (a Hoosier, I'm proud to say) from Survivor in yellow-stained tighty whities attacking people in the streets. It turns out to be a lame joke with a punchline that I probably should have predicted. I do like the word "masticate" though. N is clumsily edited and has terrible acting by all involved. It was almost interesting but turned out to be strangely unpleasant for reasons I can't even identify. O was another Japanese one, but who needs to see more zombies?
And then there's P, the one that seems to be overwhelmingly the least favorite if you only research the imdb message board. This one seemed to have the production values of a Christian church play and was so weirdly stupid that it actually became likable. Distorted face match blowing, a creepy toothed baby. It didn't make sense at all, just incomprehensible slapstick, but it almost made me laugh. I kind of liked it. Turns out that Todd Rohal directed it, and I know him from the interesting and wonderfully-titled Catechism Cataclysm which I also thought was funny.
Q has a gorilla costume. R had a story with a piece I must have missed, some Russian roulette game that goes for mysterious but ends up obscure. S had a cool use of split screen but ended up just being really nasty. Like a lot of these, its twist didn't totally work because there wasn't enough room for any development. T was degrading and stupid, the kind of thing you probably could expect from something called "Torture Porn." U was for Utopia. I don't know what the commentary was exactly, but this had fire effects that were at least as bad as the ones in the "I" short. V is a found footage thing with the kind of acting that makes this sort of stuff just not work at all. I think 14 year olds must have been responsible for writing this one, and it's woefully unpleasant.
W was one of the more interesting ones, something that appealed to the 80's kid in me. It's a fun action figure kind of thing, and although the special effects weren't very good (probably intentionally so), it felt like a perverse juvenile delinquent cousin of the Power Rangers and has a "Fantasy Man" with something very David Carradine about him.
X? Well, they went with one of the three words in the English language that starts with an X and decided to see how they could push the boundaries with it. It's not pleasant either. Y is more insanity from Japan.
It finishes strong enough with Z and a 13-year pregnancy, a deadbeat dad, and some impressively gross effects. I'm not sure what the short was saying or if it was even saying anything, but I liked it even if it made me a little uneasy.
There will likely be another of these in 2016, and I'll probably watch it, too, just because it's the type of thing I like to waste my life with.
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