Studio:   RLJE Films/Shudder
Director: Matthew John Lawrence
Writer:   Matthew John Lawrence
Producer: Hilarie Burton Morgan, Jeffrey Dean Morgan, Liz Decesare, Jordan Manekin, Eric Knapp
Stars:    Sari Arambulo, Molly Brown, Eddie Leavy, Margot Anderson-Song, Angel Theory, Matt Hopkins, Taylor Seupel, Jeffrey Dean Morgan, Billy Burke

Review Score:

Summary:

Anxious to follow in her slasher father’s footsteps, a teen girl targets high-schoolers for slaughter, but reconsiders becoming a masked murderer when an unanticipated romance develops.

Synopsis:

Roger Bladecut, a serial killer with a deformed face who is a legend on the snuff scene for recording his murders like horror movies and releasing them through underground video stores, admonishes his adopted teen daughter Abbie for appearing in his rival Butch Slater’s latest tape. Abbie, who anxiously wishes to follow in her father’s footsteps, is additionally upset to learn Roger passed her over to put Makenzie, her hated co-worker at Roger’s Real to Reel video store, in his newest movie.

Roger has Abbie take his bloody clothing to nearby tailor Glenn for mending. Although he also has a desire to apprentice with Roger as a supporting performer, Glenn refuses due to the previous job’s disgustingness. Abbie convinces Glenn to take the clothes by promising him a bit part in Roger’s next film.

To make Abbie feel better, Roger has her tag along on his next murders. Roger teaches Abbie some rules for hacking up teens while killing high-schoolers Mitch Dewsky and Laverne Shern.

After slaying Mitch and Laverne, Roger collapses and dies. Abbie buries her father expecting him to resurrect like he’s done in the past, but Roger comes back with diminished strength and wounds that refuse to heal.

Accepting that he has aged past his prime, Roger sends Makenzie to make the next movie without him, but sends Abbie along for support. While trying to murder Daisy Bezzleman and her jock boyfriend Bryant Nutley, Makenzie accidentally impales his head on a trophy and dies. Donning her distinctive werewolf mask to hide her identity, Abbie kills the couple herself.

Abbie continues on to the home of Roger’s next teenage target, Sam Crane. Aware of Abbie’s intrusion, Sam stabs her in her stomach, but Abbie escapes through the window. Rapidly losing blood, Abbie stumbles to Glenn’s, where she falls unconscious. When she recovers, Abbie sees her father gifted her with her own ax as he finally seems to have officially passed the torch.

Posing as a transfer student, Abbie starts attending Clover Falls High School to stalk Sam prior to trying to kill her again. However, Abbie unexpectedly forms a bond with Sam that gradually turns into a romance. Abbie also gets to know Sam’s misfit friends Izzy Moxie, band nerd Patty Spillenski, and musician Billy Burnwell.

Abbie proposes to her father that perhaps Sam and her friends shouldn’t be victims. Roger tells Abbie her emotions are clouding her judgment, and demands she kill them no matter what.

To please her father, Abbie pushes Izzy out of her bedroom window to her presumed death. However, Roger later takes Abbie to the hospital to show her Izzy survived her fall.

Abbie returns to Izzy’s house to kill her, but she is unable to go through with the murder. Instead, Abbie goes to Sam’s for an intimate encounter that is interrupted by news of Izzy’s death.

Suspecting her father killed Izzy because she would not, and believing Roger may continue killing, Abbie has Glenn phone Sam with a warning for her and her friends to get out of town. Abbie personally drives Sam, Patty, and Billy, but their vehicle breaks down. Abbie confirms her father is behind the new spree when she notices his knife sabotaged their van.

Sam suggests waiting out the auto repairs at an abandoned campground nearby. Worried about Roger coming after them, Abbie calls Glenn to help again.

Posing as a “Crazy Ralph” doomsayer, Glenn encounters the four friends in the woods, but puts on an unconvincing performance. Before Glenn can give himself away, Abbie knocks him unconscious. The teens restrain Glenn and bring him with them to the campground.

A newspaper found in a cabin mentions Roger Bladecut as a suspect in a string of gruesome slayings. Abbie recounts Roger’s origin story for Sam, Patty, Billy, and Glenn.

Inside a barn, Sam finds a bottle of what she believes are uppers in an old car. The teens pop the pills to party, but they turn out to be sedatives that put everyone to sleep.

Abbie and Patty wake the next morning to find Sam and Billy missing. Outside the cabin, they discover Billy’s beheaded body charred by the campfire.

Upon catching Abbie in the act of untying Glenn, Patty accuses the two of them of conspiring to murder teenagers in town together. As Abbie attempts to explain, Patty raises an ax and prepares to swing, but Sam unexpectedly shoots Patty in her stomach with a crossbow. Patty’s guts spill onto the floor.

As Sam stares in astonishment over what she did, Roger suddenly lunges through a window. Abbie, Sam, and Glenn escape outside where a struggle ensues between Roger and Sam. Sam hears Abbie call Roger “dad” before Abbie splits his head with her ax to save Sam.

Sam asks Abbie who she really is. Before Abbie can respond, Roger uses his last act before dying to kill Sam from behind.

Despite receiving a shipment of the movie made from recent events, Glenn helps Abbie close down her father’s video store. While Abbie wistfully watches a copy of the film at home to relive romantic moments with Sam, a storm cuts the power. Abbie goes outside where she finds her father’s empty grave dug up. However, Abbie turns around to see Sam standing in front of her covered in dirt.

Review:

At the risk of sounding slow on the uptake, I confess I had to watch the first few minutes of horror/comedy “Bloody Axe Wound” more than once to process its choppy setup.

The movie opens on a cleaver-wielding man and a werewolf-masked girl killing a manager and a waitress at a diner. Scanlines fade onto the screen as the camera pulls back to show the scene playing on a tube TV. The girl’s accompanying narration identifies the man as Butch Slater (Jeffrey Dean Morgan in a one-minute cameo), presumably either his character’s name or possibly an imaginary actor’s name. Ah, so this must be a faux horror film we’re watching. But why does the clip suddenly cut to news footage about a decades-long string of unsolved murders?

Narration continues from teenager Abbie Bladecut, who explains that real-life massacres in her hometown of Clover Falls have been put on tape and packaged for years. My brain must have blipped on that “real-life” clue, because when she subsequently says her father is really “legend in the biz” Roger Bladecut, not Butch Slater, the montage of movie posters, onscreen credits, and colorful VHS covers adorning a video store’s shelves (including one for Ti West’s “The Roost”) furthers the notion that we’re dealing with fictional fright flicks here. But wait. I thought Butch Slater was the star of these slashers? Who is this Roger Bladecut now?

Let me jump ahead in my jarring journey by connecting these disjointed dots. Butch Slater and Roger Bladecut aren’t actors. They’re not characters in fake films, either. They’re killers who shoot their sprees to look like horror movies that they distribute through underground video stores like the one where Abbie works, and they’ve both earned big followings from fans who can’t get enough of their snuff. Hopefully you’re seeing this before watching “Bloody Axe Wound” for yourself, so now you can start on firmer narrative footing than I did.

Abbie aches to follow in her father’s murderous footsteps, but he’s not ready to pass the torch yet, at least not to her. According to Roger, his adopted daughter can’t carry the Bladecut legacy because she’s a girl, and he can’t have someone who “weighs about a hundred pounds soaking wet” terrorizing teenagers. “It just doesn’t work.” Adding insult to injury, Roger chooses Abbie’s despised coworker Makenzie to be the male apprentice for his upcoming “Son of Bladecut” sequel instead.

Things don’t go according to plan though, allowing Abbie to step up when Makenzie slips up. And with Roger’s latest resurrection not leaving him as limber as he used to be, he finally sighs that it’s time for Abbie to take his place. Abbie champs at the bit for her first assignment, which involves killing a high school outsider and her three misfit friends. There’s just one problem, but it’s a big one. The more Abbie gets to know her new target, the more she thinks she might be falling in love.

All of the above contributes to a clever springboard for turning the typical slasher routine inside out. As you can see by the bumpy buildup, however, “Bloody Axe Wound” doesn’t get off to the smoothest start. Maybe writer/director Matthew John Lawrence was in a hurry to blow by some bloodshed to get to the emotional heartbeat pumping it onscreen. The fumbling done by the first act thus has a hard time extending an open invitation to confused viewers who aren’t clear on the concept. Yet it ultimately turns out that slasher satire isn’t really what “Bloody Axe Wound” is all about.

The movie gets into its fair share of gags involving sendups of horror tropes. One character, an overeager actor with a flair for flamboyancy, exists almost exclusively to parody exaggerated stereotypes like a pearl-clutching community member and a “Crazy Ralph” doomsayer. Such setups produce low-hanging fruit that similarly styled horror-comedies have already picked clean, although these moments can still provide light chuckles.

But to home in on horror-related ribbing by stamping these jokes as stale would be missing “Bloody Axe Wound’s” point, and ignoring its unexpected charms to boot. Potshots at formulaic frights aren’t the film’s bread and butter. Somewhat swiftly, “Bloody Axe Wound” sheds the skin of a slasher spoof to morph into a more intriguing inversion of a coming-of-age tale. Through traditional high school scenes of drinking beers under bleachers to climbing through bedroom windows, Abbie experiences an unplanned identity crisis while navigating a problematic parent as well as her first crush. The creative twist is that this all comes under the context of thinking she should also become a serial killer in the meantime.

The older I get, the more I realize a lot of things, including how often I preface an observation with “the older I get.” One of those realizations is that not every piece of media has to include me, a grizzled B-movie veteran, in its target demographic. Next generations need gateways into genre entertainment too, and “Bloody Axe Wound” fits the bill for a feisty teen dramedy with a little kick. Bookending the bungled beginning, the plot loses its way again with an iffy ending that underdelivers a proper payoff. But the playful pace brought about by 21 needle drops and lively performances makes for an active YA-leaning movie that moves as nimbly as a masked maniac, even if it doesn’t always have the killer instinct to match.

Review Score: 65