The ABC's Of Death 2

And Prison Food, Via The National Menu

Man, I love horror movies. Horror is the one genre that’s pretty easy to map out. The smaller stuff is always best, usually from overseas. And it almost always needs to be Rated-R, the nastier the better. So you can imagine how excited I was to explore the world of horror when I got out. And very high on my list were horror anthologies.

There are a number of wonderful horror anthologies, but my pick are the two “The ABC’s Of Death” movies. Other anthologies are more entertaining, but “ABC’s” offers you the variety of one different short for every letter of the alphabet. Why did it take humanity so long to try this? The second film is not particularly different from the first, with some intriguing horror filmmakers delivering shorts that go on for either one or several minutes, the entire affair lasting two satisfying hours long.

Some of these filmmakers have a name, and some are rather anonymous, and it’s a testament to the formula that you don’t see a credited director until the end of each short. Like the first film, there was a contest to add one filmmaker to the bunch, and the winner, Robert Boocheck, actually provides one of the better entries with the down-to-earth “M Is For Masticate”. And yes, in case you were wondering, the titles can be quite misleading, which provides the humor. So the final short, “Z Is For Zygote” (from “In A Violent Nature” director Chris Nash), is actually about a pregnancy delayed an additional thirteen years. Obviously, steel your stomach for these.

My personal favorite is “S Is For Split”, a split-screen drama done with a minimal budget by director Juan Martinez Moreno (who doesn’t even have a Wikipedia page!) that provides several twists within it’s very short time that are not only horrific, but funny and affecting in depicting a romantic relationship that is not what it seems. I was also tickled by “A Is For Amateur” from E.L. Katz (“Cheap Thrills”), the sickening stop-motion “D Is For Deloused” by Robert Morgan, “J Is For Jesus” by Dennison Ramalho and Larry Fessenden’s (“Wendigo”)  wacky “N Is For Nexus”. A couple of these are terrible, but mostly the bad ones are so forgettable that they provide a buffer between the better ones.

And moreso than the first film, this effort truly stretches internationally, with entries from all over the world. On one level, I was intrigued to see my first horror short from Nigeria, Lancelot Oduwa Imasuen’s “L Is For Legacy”. On another level, I enjoyed the morbid “X Is For Xylophone” from horror royalty Julien Maury and Alexandre Bustillo (“Martyrs”) because they brought on French film royalty Beatrice Dalle to play an evil grandmother. Even a hardcore horror fan couldn’t guess who directed what, but shorts like the delightful “W Is For Wish” very obviously play into the kitschy Saturday morning cartoon interests of director Steven Kostanski (“Psycho Goreman”).

Since these shorts are disgusting, this is a good time to bring up the National Menu! Federal prisons typically operate by one National Menu – it’s available here! It changes roughly three or four times a year, I’m not certain, but it sticks to a similar cycle every time. For me, I got used to it. Others with more commissary money don’t even go to meals sometimes. I remember meeting a guy who had lived in my relatively small building for several years, and had not ventured out for any meals in that time, secure in his small two-man room ordering commissary in bulk. So I guess it’s possible to live like that.

Breakfast had been shrinking exponentially since I had been down, and certainly the pandemic didn’t help. For a while there were bagels, and sometimes bacon. But in my last spot, from 2018 onwards, breakfast was milk, oatmeal, a dry piece of bread and jelly or butter. You got two milks at breakfast and no more – they were notably stingy with the milk, which you cannot get at any other meal. I frequently did not go to breakfast, which was 6 AM on weekdays, 7 AM on weekends.

As it is supposed to be for health reasons, lunch is the biggest of the three meals. Wednesday always involved burgers, though they were frequently the size of sliders. Thursdays were exciting for people, that was chicken day, though the chicken often varied in size from one Thursday to the next. Tuna salad was a frequent dinner – the dinners were fairly skimpy in contrast to lunch. And this was retirement-home dinner, scheduled from 4:30 to 5:15. So if you get hungry at 8, hope you saved some commissary snacks.

On holidays, they have special meals for lunch that are substantially bigger, evened out by the tiny (bag lunch) dinners we receive on those days, usually a lousy bologna sandwich. The holiday meals vary in size, and sometimes the kitchen staff just plain forgets it’s a holiday. There is still a Martin Luther King Jr. holiday meal. When I left, it was still fried chicken, mac and cheese and collard greens. Make of that what you will. 

(NSFW)