Bloody
  Axe 
    Wound

Slasher Trash with Panache?

Review: JA Kerswell

Cute rather than laugh-out-loud funny, fans of classic 80s slashers should still get a kick out of BLOODY AXE WOUND. A teenage girl is keen to take over the family business of stalking and killing the town’s High Schoolers after her masked maniac father’s health begins to deteriorate, but her homicidal resolve falters when she falls for one of her intended victims. Part homage to the Dead Teenager movie and part teen romance, it perhaps lacks the bite of some other slasher satires but is still largely a good time.
 
Abbie (Sari Arambulo) co-runs the failing town video shack with her father Roger Bladecut (Billy Burke) and their creepy employee, Mackenzie (Matt Hopkins). Abbie is a willing accomplice to her horribly disfigured father’s killing sprees that have plagued the town of Clover Falls for decades. In a case of suspending disbelief perhaps a tad much, Bladecut’s exploits are turned into low-budget slasher movies with Jeffrey Dean Stanton portraying him—which are then rented from the store to the townsfolk. However, whilst Bladecut has previously bounced back from mortal wounds in classic slasher movie villain style, his latest resurrection reveals that his powers are fading. He decides he needs a successor and, much to Abbie’s annoyance, chooses Mackenzie to pick up the axe and carry on the killing business because he’s not a “girl”.
 
After Mackenzie proves to be no match for the local teens and dies in a freak accident, Abbie is promoted to Head Psycho in a wolf mask. When Bladecut chooses the local High School to be her hunting ground, she goes undercover there as a student to plan her murder spree. However, after tough lesbian student Sam (Molly Brown) fights back and survives an attack, Abbie finds herself beginning to have feelings for her. She also develops feelings of empathy for her would-be victims and finds herself in a struggle both not to let her father down and to try and keep her newfound friends safe from Roger Bladecut’s murderous intent … 

Seemingly set in the late 1980s or ‘90s—certainly around the time Mom & Pop video stores were starting their decline—BLOODY AXE WOUND has little basis in any real tangible reality. Of course, that’s not necessarily a bad thing. The town of Clover Falls seems resigned—as do the High School kids themselves—that teenagers will die with alarming regularity, and that is, ironically, part of life. It also appears to provide the town its home entertainment, watching the recreations of Roger Bladecut’s bloody killing sprees on videotape. Like the film’s title, much of the humour is pretty on the nose and is reminiscent of those 80s teen comedies that peppered video stores in the 1980s. An example is the Mrs Bates-style desiccated corpse that sometimes sits behind the checkout desk at the store. Larger-than-life willing accomplice Glenn (Eddie Leavy) is a comedy highlight, with faker moustaches than the one worn by the cop at the end of SLEEPAWAY CAMP (1983). The film goes big and cartoonish (especially with its ample, splashy gore effects—including a wound that just won't stop gushing blood), and it often works. Still, without any real foot in reality, it is perhaps a little more difficult to get invested in the more grounded, human relationship drama between Abbie and Sam.
 
As I mentioned, the movie has a cute twist of the slasher satire without striking any particularly new ground. Bladecut and Abbie share an otherwise suburban life, with chats at the kitchen table and well-worn generational rifts familiar to most parents—just with bodily dismemberment thrown in. One of the film's central jokes is that Abbie's teen rebellion is that she wants to stop killing people. It is interesting that she is initially not repulsed by the murders she witnesses—that’s until she makes her first two kills and ends up spewing chucks. Yet, she is so keen on not failing as an apprentice that she initially pushes on with her father’s murderous plans. However, given the film’s jokey approach, the dual nature of her morality and split personality isn’t particularly deeply explored.
 
Director Matthew John Lawrence ploughed similar ground with his earlier UNCLE PECKERHEAD (2020). The comedy in BLOODY AXE WOUND may be an acquired taste, but if you’re in tune with it, there’s fun to be had here.   

BODY COUNT 11: 
Female 5 / Male 6

1. Male has his face burnt on a hotplate
2. Female chopped on the neck with a meat cleaver
3. Male is seen chopped in half
4. Female is hacked in the neck
5. Male is pierced through the eye with a trophy
6. Female is hit in the head with an axe
7. Male is hit with an axe
8. Male is found decapitated
9. Female is shot with a harpoon
10. Male gets an axe to the head
11. Female is stabbed through her back

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