ABCs of Death 2.5 (2016)

directed by many people (go here for a full list! there's too many to type out)
USA
85 minutes
2.5 stars out of 5
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When the call for short film submissions went out as ABCs of Death 2 was being made, apparently the letter "M" got a massive amount of entries- 500, allegedly- so this was put together as a companion piece since choosing just one out of those 500 entries was too difficult.

The majority of the shorts are bad. When I say "bad" in this context I mean that all of them have some element that would make them bad as compared to a professionally-made film, maybe they're poorly-acted or poorly-shot or maybe they have something else wrong with them entirely, the possibilities are endless. But as a showcase of current and upcoming talent in horror filmmaking, it works better than you'd think. All of the shorts have a runtime of three minutes, and that has the effect of making it very clear who can and can't use their time effectively, and the directors who did manage to use their three minutes in the best possible way are ones who I'd say have a shot at directing a successful full-length film someday if they haven't already.

Every director was given full creative control, the only rules were that their short film had to be about death and the death had to involve the letter M somehow (obviously). The surrender of control to the filmmakers as opposed to having them adhere to a strict theme does something interesting: It gives people freedom to focus on pure concept, to just really go for it with no restrictions whatsoever. Where the shorts will go is a constant surprise, sometimes you get interesting things and sometimes you get raunchy, immature, misogynistic nonsense, but every one of these films isn't pretending to be anything it's not just to fit with a theme.

I had the same problems with this as I did with the first two ABCs films, but they all amount to one thing: It's impressive and frightening to me that you can get 26 different directors (29 in this case as some segments were a joint effort) together and the majority of them will not deviate from the norm, I.E., sexual violence and general bigotry. Surprisingly, this actually does better than the first two ABCs films in that respect; there's still a ton of pretty disturbing misogyny but there's a few moments here and there that are better, morally. Nothing is super innovative or game-changing, though, and the shorts that aren't awful to women kind of get swallowed up by the ones that are.

There's too many segments to individually review them all, but the one that stuck out to me as being superior to the others was M for Martyr. That was a case where the concept was so interesting and the execution was so intelligent and original that I could see the director making a good full-length film, easily. On the other hand the bad ones are really bad, but it's easy to tell when they're just bad due to lack of resources (like the first one, M is for Magnetic Tape) or actually bad-bad, as in no talent, as in M is for Mailbox and M is for Moonstruck. The quality varies a lot but for some reason these ABCs films are just so much fun.