Axe -- its spare bleak terrain and characters heighten suspense, terror

 

Axe, a very low-budget North Carolina regional film, was shot in 1974 by a 20-something filmmaker, Frederick R. Friedel. The budget was only slightly more than $20,000.  Harry Novak, who ran Boxoffice International Pictures, Inc., a now-cultish mostly grindhouse distributor, picked it up from Friedel, along with another micro-budget Friedel film, Kidnapped Coed.

I haven't seen the latter film but I always wanted to see Axe, mainly thanks to a creepy trailer Novak put together. (You can see the trailer at the IMDB link to Axe above) I saw ads for the video/DVD when Something Weird was pitching it, but never bit. A key reason was despite several exceptions, Novak-released films generally seemed to be wanna-be porn that skirted the gray area between X and XXX.

Axe popped up on YouTube recently and I decided to finally check it out. I had recently learned that it was one of the "video nasties" that England banned for a while long ago. 

Axe kind of blew me away. It's only slightly longer than an hour, and it's no Novak-type sex film. It's an intense revenge film where the spare, bleak settings, buildings and emotionally spare characters create both a suspenseful and ultimately terrifying film. Novak, who was trying hard to stay in business in the mid to late '70s, was wise to pick up Axe. I hope it made a few bucks.

The film involves three criminals. Two are sadistic psychopaths. One is a weak man who goes along with the murdering and robbing. After killing one man and causing his terrified male lover to leap to his death, they take off for the country in search of plunder. In a small convenience store on the road, the two sadists casually terrorize and sexually humiliate the lone female employee. It's uncomfortable and gradually more frightening to watch. People shouldn't be allowed to terrorize innocents like this. They do in life, though. It's a harsh reality.

The trio eventually stop at a large house off the road, very southern style, wih a long front porch. Inside is a grandfather, who is paralyzed and cannot speak. He is tended to by granddaughter Lisa (Leslie Lee), a pretty girl/woman with an age difficult to ascertain. She is quiet, emotionless and solemn, speaking rarely and without emotion. She could have medical issues except in her bedroom there is art of girls laughing and smiling. They even look like Lisa. It's clear something traumatic has changed  Lisa.

She is a stoic and does not emote when two of the criminals very soon become threatening to her and her granddad. The third, weaker criminal, develops a crush on Lisa. Director Friedel has set up an odd kidnapping situation where the "hostages" barely acknowledge their captors. When a police vehicle stops by looking for the criminals, Lisa blandly acquises with the kidnappers' ponderous threats not to tell. 

The contrast to the terror victims experiences in the two previous scenes, a double murder, and a robbery, to what's occurring in this remote southern house, is striking. Stoicism without fear is being exhibited by Lisa. The criminals are too crudely dumb to be concerned.

That night, one of the psychopaths enters Lisa's girlish bedroom with an intent to rape her. But Lisa has a straight razor in bed with her. The criminal dies a graphic, painful, bloody death. Lisa, exerting tremendous strength, cleans up and tries to hide the body. 

This is an intense film. We know there are flaws. We don't have a backstory as to how Lisa became an emotionless, almost robotic character. We don't know what spurs the fire inside her to fight back. But what Roger Ebert said in his review of Last House on the Left applies also to Axe, which at heart is a less explicit version of Last House ... Ebert said he was describing what occurs in this intense film, not trying to deconstruct it. It may be unpleasant. It may be horrific. But the story is lean and mean and told effectively. The music works in Axe, as well. It's haunting, with a kind of hopeless melody.

The scenery, the house, bedrooms, living room, kitchen, the shabby store where the clerk is terrified, all are "characters" that contribute to this grim tale of revenge. The scenes of Lisa feeding her disabled grandfather, without emotion, while evil hovers around her, are at first disconcerting but later forbidding. It becomes so clear that these criminals are way in over their heads with this 100-pound protagonist.

Axe eventually has garnered a very small cult. Severin Films has released a Blu Ray of it and Kidnapped Coed, which is a film I'll also see once I buy the Blu-Ray. The Blue-Ray includes a blending of both films that Friedel released 30 years later, called Bloody Brothers.

I urge readers to see Axe. I want to know what you think. It grabs me with its spare, devoid of emotion crude justice. It's only about 66 minutes. Edited for the times, of course, it would have been a superb idea for Monogram or PRC 80 years ago. You can watch Axe (for now) here. Also see a South Carolina 1974 release ad under its original title, Lisa, Lisa (below).

-- Doug Gibson

Ogden, Utah, regional classic: Don't Go in the Woods ... Alone

By Steve D. Stones

This film is of particular interest to me because it was filmed in my native state of Utah. The composer who created the music, H. Kingsley Thurber, is a resident of my hometown of Ogden City. Thurber is responsible for composing music tracks for popular video games of the 1990s. With the exception of the four main actors in the film who play the young campers, most of the cast members were from Salt Lake City. Many scenes in this film were shot at Bridal Veil Falls, a beautiful mountainous location up Provo Canyon here in Utah. The film was banned in the U.K. in the 1980s as a "video nasty," and remains banned in that country to this day. Unlike many cult films, I actually loved this film the first time I viewed it. It usually takes me several viewings to appreciate a cult film.

There are many interesting "point of view" shots in the film. One shows the camper Joanie, played by actress Angie Brown, tearing through a sleeping bag after she has been strung up in a tree inside the bag as a prank from her boyfriend. As she tries to tear through the bag to get out, she witnesses the murderer of the film through a hole in the bag as he runs down a mountain trail and stabs her boyfriend in the stomach with a knife tied to a long tree branch. The murderer is similar to the maniac Jupiter in Wes Craven’s 1977 classic "The Hills Have Eyes." On the audio commentary for the film, director James Bryan describes the maniac-murderer as a Siberian-Shaman looking character.

One very creative murder sequence shows a young mother painting on canvas outdoors in the mountains as her infant is bouncing up and down in a baby swing. The canvas she is painting on has only been painted with green strokes of paint. Suddenly she is murdered and gushes of red blood splatter across the canvas, making an interesting use of complementary colors together. I don’t know how intentional this was in the film. For those of us who paint frequently and know about color schemes, it is an interesting sequence. There are also many "fake scares" in the film that set the audience up for thinking they may see the murderer attack a character in the film. Many of these sequences turn out to be a "fake scare" to add to the black humor of the film.

Although the humor sequences outweigh the serious ones, it is often hard to tell whether the film wants to be a full-blown black comedy, or a serious horror film, This may be one of the biggest reasons why I enjoyed the film the first time I viewed it, and continue to enjoy it with each viewing. If you pay careful attention to the film, you will notice that every time a new character is shown on screen in an awful costume, you can guarantee that this person will be the next to be killed. This is part of the black humor director Bryan is trying to get across in the film. Death comes to those with a horrible fashion sense.

A particularly tacky scene shows Cheri and Dick making out in the back of a Volkswagen Van on their honeymoon night. Dick repeats: "Cheri, Cheri, you’re the most beautiful thing that has ever come into my life." This is pretty bad dialogue to say the least. The director once worked in the porno business before he worked on the Grizzly Adams television show of the 1970s, so this may be why he intentionally gave these two characters the tacky names that he did and their poor dialogue. To add to the tackiness, the interior of the van is designed with a poster of Farrah Fawcett plastered to the ceiling with gold trim, red shag carpet, and heart-shaped pillows. Perhaps the interior of the van was once used as a set for a porno film? The awfulness of the van’s décor would lead us to believe so.

It seems like such a cliché to have an overweight, soft-spoken sheriff of a small town in a low-budget horror film, but this may be the most convincing character in the entire film. The sheriff, played by Texan Ken Carter, flies a small plane into the skies in search of a missing person reported lost. This sequence seems like homage to Coleman Francis’ plane scenes in "The Beast of Yucca Flats" with the sheriff fulfilling the role of Tor Johnson. Another scene shows Carter helping a pretty young roller skater from falling to the ground as she runs into him getting out of his police vehicle. The sheriff frequently wipes his brow from sweating profusely, which has also become another cliché in low-budget horror films.

If you are a fan of low-budget horror films and a native of Utah, I highly recommend that you view this film. The 25th Anniversary Edition DVD distributed by Media Blasters is full of extra features, such as a short featurette made by director James Bryan with cast and crew members, two audio commentaries and a poster and production still gallery of the film. You are guaranteed to get your money’s worth if you purchase this DVD. It is one of the most cherished DVDs in my collection.