Axe Reviews

• The Virgin Slaughter

  
  By A1H7PH075VTHO8 on 2001-10-29
  The best part of the DVD of "Axe", is the trailer for the film under the alternate title of "The Virgin Slaughter". I will explain, "Axe" is the story of a trio of criminals who flee into the country to avoid the police. They come upon a lonely farmhouse inhabited by a pre-pubescent girl and her paralyzed father. In what amounts to a no-budget "Straw Dogs", the girl brings her own brand of justice to the criminals. The DVD provide three different trailers for the film with very unique appoaches, the best being the one for "The Virgin Slaughter", which depicts the film as some sort of demonic possesion blood lust film centering on the girl as a type of unholy avenger. It is the most misleading trailer I have ever seen and is well worth the price of the DVD. Something Weird Video has added numerous extras to this presentation. There is an additional film from the same director called "The Electric Chair" which is longer than the main feature. There is also two short subjects, one is very funny as a scantily clad woman, circa 1956 swallows swords which cause various layers of clothing to pop off. There is also director commentary and even radio spots. While this film will not appeal to everyone (anyone?), those who are into this sort of low-budget stuff will find the time spent worthwhile.
  
  

• DRIVE-IN HORRORS!

  
  By A3U5WICBZ0CUQ8 on 2002-07-18
  Another fine showing from SWV! The main feature, while typical of Friedel's style and, hence, not to all tastes is nevertheless a surprisingly well-made film. Despite Friedel's pacey style of storytelling, I must confess a deep fondness for some of his films. He has a real gift for weaving trashy archetypes together into unique little stories. Though far inferior in every way possible, "The Electric Chair" feature is a real hoot. Bad acting (see if you can spot future "LA Law" star Larry Drake in the courtroom gallery), bad direction, bad script and bad special effects make this a true Kamp Klassic. As is so often the case with SWV, however, the extras are the real reason to add this disc to your collection. The Encyclopedia Brittanica short about "Keeping Mentally Fit" is a howler and a half. It's narrated by a senile old sawbones who illustrates the habits of good mental hygiene with stories of past patients including a lazy school girl, a cry-baby and a self-loathing loser who does nothing but pout. Okay, so maybe I am missing the point, but who really cares. These priceless pieces of Americana are the main reason I invest my hard-earned money in these silly discs. This one does not disappoint!
  
  

• "The lady's sure got some nice melons, Lomax."

  
  By A25ZVI6RH1KA5L on 2006-01-20
  If you were a regular at the drive-in in the mid 1960s and throughout the 1970s, you probably weren't a stranger to the films released by Harry Novak through his Box Office International film group, enjoying such wonderfully sleazy exploitation fare as Country Cuzzins (1970), The Pigkeeper's Daughter (1972), and Wham Bam Thank You Spaceman (1975), to name just a few. Another Box Office International release was this independent film, titled simply Axe (1977) aka Lisa, Lisa, produced by J.G. Patterson Jr. (The Gruesome Twosome), and written and directed by Frederick R. Friedel (Date with a Kidnapper), who also starred in the film, along with Leslie Lee, in her first and only onscreen role, Jack Canon (Maximum Overdrive, Weekend at Bernie's), Ray Green (The Natural History of Parking Lots), and Douglas Powers.
  
  As the movie begins we see a trio of unfriendly looking men enter an apartment building and break into one of the units, apparently waiting for the occupant of said unit to arrive home. There's Billy (Friedel), the youngest of the three, sporting one of the more hideous perms I've seen in a long time, followed by Lomax (Green), a greasy, middle-aged, paunchy, ceegar chomping sociopath type, and finally Steele (Canon), a wiry man with a receding hairline, cruel eyes, who has a really annoying habit of continually picking at his nails, and who also seems to be in charge. Eventually two seriously effeminate fun boys show up, dressed in typically atrocious 1970s leisure wear, setting off a festival of pain as Steele an Lomax literally beat the hell out of one of the them. Why? Who knows? But I suspect it had something to do with the guy's ridiculously ugly print shirt...as for the other guy, cowering in the corner, well, let's just say he saved himself a beating by taking the express route out of the building. Anyway, the men take their psychotic show on the road, heading for the country, stopping along the way to terrorize a lone female clerk at a small grocery store apparently because of a lack of quality control regarding her fruit (it wasn't fresh enough for Steele). Given the hideous nature of the woman's floral print blouse, I'm beginning to suspect these guys are some sort of fashion terrorists, intent on sadistically humiliating and brutalizing those who would violate decorum and good taste with lousy wardrobes (hey, sounds like what that pasty skag Joan Rivers and her skagette daughter Melissa do whenever there's an award event). The terrible trio eventually ends up at a large, isolated house in the country, inhabited by a quiet, unassuming young woman named Lisa (Lee), and her paralyzed grandfather (Powers), who can't move or speak, and relies on his granddaughter, who feeds him a steady diet of raw eggs, to survive. After evaluating out the situation, Steele decides this is a good place to hole up, and the three men move in...later that night Lomax gets an itch and sneaks into Lisa's room for some mad, sweaty lovin' of the brute force kind, but instead gets a straight edge razor to the neck...ouch...Lisa then drags his corpse into the bathroom, dumps it into the bathtub, and proceeds hack the body up into bits in a sequence I like to call `I Dismember Lomax'...well, I wonder what she has in store for the other two...
  
  Overall I thought this film a very stark and effective feature, and a great example of what can be done on an obviously minimal budget. The characters and the plot were kept simple, and the story wasted little of its meager 68 minute running time on unnecessary elements. One really interesting aspect of the film was how there was absolutely no back story towards any of the characters, especially in terms of the three men. We never truly learn who they are, or why they heaped the beating they did on the man at the beginning, whether it was under instructions from a superior, or just a vendetta against someone who did them wrong...and by the end, it didn't really matter. Instead, the story is essentially a snap shot of events that occur over a three day period, and we, the audience, happen to arrive on the scene just as things begin to get good. I though all the characters interesting and distinctive, given what little he had to go on, with Lisa being particularly so, a young female, alone, except for her mute, invalid grandfather whom she cared for, living a life of quiet desperation and despair, that is until the three men show up. At first she seemed willing to give it up, as if to say after all I've suffered these many years, this is my reward? To be used and abused by three men who just happened to pick my house as a place to hide out? What's the point? But then something snaps, and, in cool, almost calculating fashion, she starts to dispatch those deserving, given the right catalyst, that being a big, sweaty bohunk jumping her in the middle of the night. Most of the movie takes place in and about the lonesome farmhouse, and the director makes the most of the locations with some very decent shots, especially given his seemingly limited experience behind the camera. As far as the blood and gore, there is some of the first, but little of the latter, as any scenes with involving the axe are not actually shown, but shot in such a way as to leave it towards the viewer's imagination. I suspect this as done more out of budgetary constraints rather than artistic reason, but regardless, I didn't mind. There was one really unsettling scene for me, and that was near the end as Lisa is feeding her grandfather tomato soup. Given the events prior to the scene, one can't help but wonder if that's really tomato soup, or perhaps something else, something less appetizing...another element that worked really well for me was the simple musical score, with a tinge of the creepy.
  
  Something Weird Video provides a nice looking fullscreen (1.33:1) transfer here, as the picture is clean, suffering minor flaws. The audio, presented in Dolby Digital audio, on the other hand, comes across a little soft and muddled at times, making it difficult to hear some of the dialog. I don't think this was an issue in the transfer, but something due more to how the material was originally recorded. In terms of extras, Something Weird really goes the distance providing a slew of goodies, including a 2nd, full length feature called The Electric Chair (1977), a bizarre little nugget written and directed by J.G. Patterson Jr., who produced this film. Also included are three, theatrical trailers for Axe under its various titles, along with ones for Behind Locked Doors (1968), Booby Trap (1970), The Child (1977), Frankenstein's Castle of Freaks (1974), Kidnapped Coed (1976), The Mad Butcher (1971), The Toy Box (1971), and Toys are not for and Children (1972). On top of that we have two archival short features, the first titled Mental Health: Keeping Mentally Fit (12:14), the type of propaganda film shown in schools back in the day, and the second titled We Still Don't Believe It (3:40), featuring a female swallowing swords, to which each time she would stick a sword down her throat, an article of clothing would pop off (she stops once she gets to her undergarments), and finally a gallery of horror exploitation art with Horrorama radio spot rarities.
  
  Cookieman108
  
  
  

• Packed With Fun!

  
  By A1OS2HX2CWQIC7 on 2008-08-26
  This is the DVD that made me fall in love with Something Weird Video. It's great to discover a company that offers hundreds of obscure titles for consumption and expresses the deepest affection for this catalog, even though it clearly doesn't take any of them seriously! For example, this DVD's main selection screen features the title in the background; periodically, a disembodied hand hops across the screen wielding an axe, which it chops a few times to leave a bloody mess over the title. SWV makes it very clear that their movies are enormously stupid and fun!
  
  The main feature is pretty entertaining. After brutalizing a fruity gay couple and a grocery clerk, a trio of dapper thugs (Canon, Green and director/writer/editor Friedel) hole up in a rural farmhouse, where a pretty, sullen young woman (Lee) cares for her paralyzed grandfather (Powers). While it isn't a great film by any standard, "Axe" is ably shot and edited, featuring some interesting (if unexceptional) performances and a subdued, ominous atmosphere unimaginable in a contemporary American horror picture. Despite its languid pace, plenty of bloody mayhem is bundled into this feature's brief (68 minutes) runtime. Although the musical score by George Newman Shaw and John Willhelm is unique and effective, Shaw's sound design is probably the worst element of this crude production: the soundtrack is as muddled and poorly mixed as that of so many other B-movies. Most of the film's stock is pristine, but a few scenes are quite grainy. SWV claims to use the best existing prints for their transfers and I'm sure that's true; overall, this copy looks pretty good.
  
  The second feature, directed, written, produced and co-starring "Axe" producer/co-editor J.G. Patterson is entitled "The Electric Chair." Quite simply, this may be the single worst motion picture that I've ever seen. Its production values, story, performances, etc. are somehow inferior to that of Z-grade drivel like "Manos: The Hands of Fate" or "Monster A Go-Go." The poorly-constructed plot concerns the murder of two adulterers and the consequences that ensue thereafter. As both a crime thriller and a courtroom drama, this movie is a complete failure in every conceivable way. Even a pair of interesting (albeit depressingly morbid) execution sequences can't save this trash. I don't even know if this was conceived as a denunciation against or promotion for capital punishment, and I couldn't care less. The screeching, synthesized musical score sounds like outtakes from early Throbbing Gristle recordings. Seriously: don't watch this. Just move along to the special features. You'll have wasted 86 minutes of your life on some of the worst audiovisual garbage ever created if you sit through this tripe.
  
  This disc's special features are plentiful. Two vintage short films are available: "Mental Health (Keeping Mentally Fit)" and "We Still Don't Believe It." The former is an educational short produced by Encyclopedia Britannica that makes most of Centron's old movies look brilliant in comparison. However, the second short is modestly enjoyable. In it, a cute Latina sword-swallower examines and then gulps down numerous swords in a fake exhibit. Every time she does so, another article of her clothing is torn as though cut and falls away, leaving her clad in underwear at the movie's end.
  
  11 theatrical trailers are provided on this disc for your viewing enjoyment. The first three of these are promotional reels for "Axe," under both its present title and two others: "Lisa, Lisa" and "The Virgin Slaughter." The trailers of the alternate titles feature, shrill, campy, hyperbolic narration; the "Virgin Slaughter" promo hilariously portrays the movie's victimized antagonist as a bloodthirsty seductress! The other trailers were hastily thrown together to promote eight more raunchy B-movies typical of those that Harry Novak's Boxoffice International Pictures produced and distributed by the score from the early '60s to the late '70s. If none of these can at least make you smile, I don't know what possibly could.
  
  The last of the special features consists of a slideshow of exploitation film posters and advertisements, scored by numerous outrageous radio spots! Some of the movies that these materials promote are lost films; others are available from SWV. Many of them aren't listed on the IMDb!
  
  If you're as keen on sleazy, low-budget '70s movies as I am, this DVD and quite a lot else of SWV's selections will entertain you to no end. I can't wait to check out more of their offerings!
  
  

• When your horror film is directed by a porn director, you're in for a treat!

  
  By AT7W1EXT0PF2Y on 2007-07-30
  As horror exploitation movies go, this is one of the better ones. On a better budget, this movie could be pretty good. The revenge murder plot is a great concept. Overall this movie is pretty miserable. It starts out like a movie of the week drama with a picture of a quaint old house. Then we are introduced to some criminals that will be the villains of the picture. The movie then shows it pulls no punches when it comes to showing it's miserableness. We have a young woman who leads a miserable life taking care of her invalid grandfather who is capable of nothing but watching an old TV with a broken vertical hold. This gal's life really can't get any worse. Or can it? The criminals show up as they need a place to hide out and take them hostage in their own home. When one of her captors tries to rape her she executes her own brand of justice and cuts his neck. This kills him almost instantly. Time to clean up and move on to the others. Well, that is after chopping up the first corpse to hide the evidence. Now the axe she used is really a hatchet. It is so small it's pathetic. Couldn't they have found a real axe? Long story short, she kills the others to and goes right back to her everyday miserable life. One of the better grindhouse horror flicks. Could have been better if it had proper funding. Of course, maybe funding would have killed it as they would try to make it more commercial.
  
  

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