Anthology films are by nature hit or miss, and with more than two dozen crammed into just over two hours, The ABCs of Death can’t help but feel like a jukebox of the nasty, brutish and short. Genre-fest impresarios Ant Timpson and Tim League challenged 26 filmmakers from around the world to each make a horror quickie inspired by a letter of the alphabet, and while the obvious prompts were studiously avoided (Z, thankfully, does not stand for Zombie, nor V for Vampire), most of the directors ultimately seem less interested in crafting a miniature thriller than in out-weirding their colleagues. (Spoiler alert: The Japanese win.) The film starts strong, with Nacho Vigalondo showcasing the same vicious wit that characterized his feature Timecrimes in “A Is for Apo-calypse,” and directors like Xavier Gens, Simon Rumley and Jorge Michel Grau limn their pieces with social commentary, but the majority of the films are little more than rudimentary setups for bloody punchlines. Some are tiresomely inexplicable, like Thomas Cappelen Malling’s WWII furry fantasy or Yoshihiro Nishimura’s closing head-trip, which recreates the 9/11 attacks via a pair of jiggling, tattooed breasts, while others offer empty-headed shock, like Jason Eisener’s “Y Is for Youngbuck” or Noboru Iguchi’s say-no-more “F Is for Fart.” A refreshing number of entries forgo dialogue entirely, notably the hallucinatory “O Is for Orgasm,” but too many could be filed under “M Is for Meh.”

(@ShaunDBrady)