Anthony Timpson – known as Ant Timpson, a New Zealand Film maker who is co-producer of a horror anthology – The ABCs of Death – is currently campaigning to raise money to help a US teacher Sheila Keams fight against her convictions on felony charges she received for showing his unrated film to US school children, some as young as 14, in Spanish language classes. In January 2015 Kearns, 58, was found guilty of disseminating matter harmful to juveniles and has received a jail sentence of 90 days.
The film produced as a DVD comprises 26 short films – each with different directors and each dealing with a different horror death scenario based on a different letter of the alphabet – is unrated in the USA. Media are reporting it is replete with “explicit sex scenes and features gory deaths”.
In New Zealand the 129:43 min long film was submitted on DVD format to The Office of Film and Literature Classification by the Film and Literature Board of Review and was classified as a restricted R18 film for NZ audiences, on 25 March 2013. It is classified ” Objectionable except if the availability of the publication is restricted to persons who have attained the age of 18 years“. The Censor’s descriptive note states, contains “Sadisic violence, drug use, offensive language and sex scences“. The NZ distributor of the film is the New Zealand Film Festival Trust.
In 2012, friends Ant Timpson, founder of the Incredibly Strange Film Festival, and Tim League, founder of Fantastic Fest and the Alamo Drafthouse, joined forces to produce the incredibly ambitious, possibly insane, horror anthology The ABCs of Death.
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