Starring Yui Murata, Eva Llorach, and Michael Rogers. Rated R.

The premise here is that 26 young genre directors were each given a letter of the alphabet and then told to do whatever they wanted with it. Need it be said that the results are a little variable? On the positive side, the good outweighs the bad, and nothing is long enough to completely overstay its welcome—although you might wonder where the budget went on the too slight “N is for Nuptials” or Ti West’s virtually non-existent “M is for Miscarriage.”

Inbetween are noble failures like “A is for Apocalypse”; an arresting (and graphic) opener with a ho-hum twist. “C is for Cycle” might be the cleverest of the bunch, with its curlicue logic reading like Charlie Kaufman with meta-suicide on his mind, but how to compete with something as laugh out loud insane as Noboru Iguchi’s tiny epic of flatus-driven Hausu-style lesbo-erotica, “F is for Fart”?

Other winners include John (Metalocalypse) Schnepp’s demented “W is for WTF?” and Adam Wingard and writer Simon Barrett attempting to kill a duck for the sake of art in “Q is for Quack”. But you’ll naturally find your own favourites inside a film that swings from the artsploitative “O is for Orgasm”, to the cartoon poop humour of “K is for Klutz”, to the irredeemably sick “L is for Libido”—a jaw-dropper that takes a scant four-and-a-half minutes to plunk you somewhere in the region of A Serbian Film by way of Salo.

Honourable mentions also go to the epically fucked up “Z is for Zetsumetsu”, and not only because it quotes Dr. Strangelove. Meanwhile, “V is for Vagitus—besides giving us an impressively realized, nightmare vision of Vancouver—proves that local phenom Kaare Andrews has easily grasped the ABCs of tearing your face off with the smallest of resources. B is for bravo!

The ABCs of Death plays at the Rio Theatre on April 14, 15, 16, & 18