Movie Review: Bloody Axe Wound

Few subgenres of horror can generate interest as consistently as slashers, which of course means that there are countless entries produced every year. This can make it especially challenging to stand out, requiring a filmmaker to either nail the usual formula or come up with a new twist on it. In Bloody Axe Wound, writer / director Matthew John Lawrence tries the latter approach and while he does have some good ideas, in the end he comes up a little short.

Abbie (Sari Arambulo) has had a highly unusual upbringing. In her hometown of Clover Falls, not only are slasher villains real, but the movies themselves are as well, with each of the murders being packaged together into some sort of narrative and sold as entertainment. It’s a semi-intriguing idea but it ultimately opens up too many major, completely unaddressed questions to ignore like “Why would anyone continue to live there?” or “Who is filming all of this?”

Anyway, if that didn’t make Abbie’s life strange enough, her adopted father also happens to be one of the killers, Roger Bladecut (Billy Burke) (Also unexplored, why does he even have an adopted daughter? Did he take pity on the child of a victim? This seems worth at least briefly diving into). Abbie is eager to work with her father, whose old-fashioned beliefs prevent him from saying yes. But he is starting to show signs of his age, despite seemingly being immortal, and thinks he should probably consider passing the torch. So, he of course picks the arrogantly inept Makenzie (Matt Hopkins), an employee at the family video store. Abbie is livid but ultimately agrees to help Makenzie on his first kill. When that goes terribly wrong, it’s up to her to finish the job, which inspires Roger to let her try to make a “movie” of her own.

She enrolls at the local high school and gets to know a group of students that she can kill, led by popular rebel Sam (Molly Brown). As this is her first time making friends though, she finds herself growing attached to her “marks”, especially Sam, and asks her dad if she can pick a different group. He refuses her request, which sets up a rift between the two and sets them on a potential collision course.

The material is played for laughs, which does somewhat excuse some of the logical fallacies, though it would have probably served the movie better if they were at least jokingly acknowledged instead of outright ignored. Otherwise, Lawrence does a decent job of balancing campy humor with grisly violence and even manages to generate a little suspense by the end.

The cast all do good work, mostly playing their parts straight and imbuing them with the right level of melodrama and angst to sell them. The comedy does occasionally veer too far into silliness, but more than a few decent chuckles can be found here. I think that with a little more script development this could have become something truly special, but as it is right now it’s just a passable way to spend some time on the couch. ★★½