11 Jun 2011

Axe - Will's Review

Lisa Lisa took an axe, gave her captor 40 wacks, when she saw what she had done, she gave the other 41...

One of the greatest things about this film (aside from the bastardised 'Lizzy Borden' poem used in the trailer) is the runtime - at an hour plus credits, it's mercifully short.



The opening scene, in which some gangster types sit scowling and sniping at each other, passing the time by burning a transvestite's cloths while they wait for him to come home, is shot like a VERY low rent Hitchcock rippof, but things soon take a turn for the (even worse) as the film was apparently edited by dropping the filmed footage into a food processor; people get unexplained cuts wheel the camera looks the other way, shirts open themselves between shots an so fourth.

Once the gangsters have beaten the tranny to death with a plastic doll (!) we are introduced to our 'heroin' - Lisa, a young lady with an aversion to shoes (she goes out to tend to the chickens, and even into the forest to gather wood, barefoot.  Lisa lives alone with her catatonic, raw egg eating grandfather, who is arguably the more exciting of the two...

After stopping to hassle a shop assistant, our gangsters haul up at Lisa's house, forcing her to feed and tend to them; which she seems only mildly annoyed at.

On the subject of the shop assistant (surly one of the least emotive actresses ever) there is a great gag at one point, where a shot is fired, and she gets tomato sauce on her - in a decent quality film the gag wouldn't have worked, the red stuff that dribbles down her is so obviously vegetable (well, allright, fruit) based that in a higher standard production one would have imideatly spotted the bluff - here it could conceivably be supposed to be blood.

Anyway unfortunately for our home-invading tranny killers, they don't know when they're onto a good safe-house, and they get nasty with Lisa (i.e. One of them rapes her) so she starts picking them off with an axe.

And that's it, the entire story; hence the short running time, and padding at the convince store.

The direction is very odd indeed; I already mentioned the (bad) faux Hitchcockian opening scene, but once they arrive at Lisa's house it gets really odd... I can only assume the director was going for 'arty' as we get lost of odd lingering shots of things like Lisa's feet, a decapitated chicken on a draining board (Lisa killed it for dinner) and, oddest of all, about 10 broken eggs on a shelf in an otherwise empty fridge (we have no idea how the eggs came to be smashed, or why they were left there - in fact, they are never mentioned).

Finaly, regards its placement on the DPP list...

WTF???

This thing was even one of the final 39, and you see NOTHING - I had to double check that mine was really an uncut print, as the camera cuts away from EVERY SINGLE axe / knife / doll blow. Save for the rapes (neither of which is remotely graphic; in-fact both are committed fully clothed) I expect this film would get a 15 rating these days.





Human Body Count: 8
Animal Body Count: 1 
Boobs: 0
Most memorable death: Beaten with a plastic doll.


Please use the comments bellow only to comment on this post - to write your own review, please comment on the "Reader Reviews" post for this movie.

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