Stream It Or Skip It: ‘Bloody Axe Wound’ on Shudder, a Sloppy Slasher Satire That’s Overstuffed and Undercooked

By John Serba

Hell of a title, Bloody Axe Wound (now streaming on Shudder) – be a shame if you didn’t live up to it. Although it does, kind of, almost, in the ol’ gore-’n’-guts dept., but that doesn’t necessarily mean it’s a GOOD living-up to it. Writer/director Matthew John Lawrence’s very indie horror-comedy mixes a little earnest emotion into this satire of and homage to the slasher genre, casting Sari Arambulo as the heir to a serial-axe-murderer legacy who finds herself in a pinch when her next designated kill is her girlfriend. Ulp. That dilemma is squeezed into a high-concept premise that could stand to be much lower, and sure seems to be actively working toward tanking the entire movie. But maybe it has its moments?

BLOODY AXE WOUND: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

The Gist: I think – these are key words, here, “I think” – the world of this movie is one where two rival serial slasher guys compete to make slasher movies that are actually snuff films, and nobody’s the wiser. I think. The movie does not make any of this quite clear, including how, exactly, they manage to film their nasty nasty kills; we watch one of them stalk and machete the life out of some poor teenagers, but never see a single boom mic, cinematographer, lighting person, craft-services table full of shitty cold cuts or any such ilk. It’s just movie magic, I guess. They kill and the gruesome slashery appears on VHS tapes ready for rental down at the corner brick-and-mortar. We’re not sure what year it is, but it’s a time of Yorx cassette-deck boomboxes, cars with keys that don’t have fobs and phones attached to walls via cords. So I’m going to guess… 1989. Close enough.

Roger Bladecut (Billy Burke) is one of the killers. He owns a video store where he rents his Bladecut movies, and business is dwindling. That’s his day job. By night, he circles faces in the local high school yearbook and then puts an X through the circles after he kills the owners of the faces. He has a face even a mother might think twice about loving – think Temu Freddy Krueger – and a modest middle-class suburban home and a daughter who knows everything. That’s Abbie (Arambulo), and her dream is to fill her old man’s shoes and Jason Voorhees-like mask someday. She’s like his familiar. The movie’s only functionally amusing gag apes the old slasher-movie routine of the killer who never dies: Abbie’s job is to bury Roger after he’s killed, so he can resurrect himself in the classic fashion, by sticking his hand out of the mound of dirt with dramatic flair, and haul himself from the grave.

At first, Roger blanches at Abbie’s desire to hack up teens when he retires. Why? Because she’s a girl. That’s it. Just plain and simple quiet-part-out-loud sexism. But he eventually relents, and gives Abbie her first assignment: Sam Crane (Molly Brown of Dexter: Original Sin). Why her? She smokes pot, is promiscuous and is crass, Roger sez. Crass! Look in the mirror, bro! So Abbie dons a werewolf mask and fails miserably. Sam stabs her with a busted drumstick, because she’s a drummer in an actual band that plays for audiences that number in the single digits. Abbie’s new at school (she was previously homeschooled, per the sloppy-ass screenplay) and on her first day guess who sidles up to her? Right. Sam. And Sam likes girls. And I think Abbie does too. This is a problem. A dilly of a pickle, you might say. Methinks Abbie has some finaglin’ to do.

Photo: Everett Collection

What Movies Will It Remind You Of?: Bloody Axe Wound is like Friday the 13th crossed with a John Hughes movie directed by Sam Raimi’s budget-challenged fourth AD, if nobody involved gave a single damn about continuity, editing or any draft of the script after the first.

Performance Worth Watching: Brown’s laconic-cool Kristen Stewartisms are the only thing in the same ballpark as charisma here.

Memorable Dialogue: What passes for comedy in this movie: “Valedictorian – more like vale-no-more-ian.” – Sam

Sex and Skin: None. In a slasher movie homage. Some homage!

Our Take: From its opening bit of voiceover narration that fails to lay out the concept of the movie with any succinctness or clarity, Bloody Axe Wound struggles mightily to hang together. The film is trying to do way too much: A love story within a satire within a gorefest within a post-Scream self-aware convoluted concept within Gen X nostalgia. That’s a lot of stuff – all crammed into an 83-minute film – and every bit of it is half-assed at best. Pare it down to the suburban-dad/doting daughter dynamic, and you’ve got an idea that you can easily render complex with the love story and its built-in crisis of conscience. But as it stands, Bloody Axe Wound is a junk drawer of a screenplay full of pens that are out of ink, stray pennies, dead batteries and flashlights that use different batteries than the ones that are dead. Time to clean that shit out.

So with its best components diminished by all the overambitious bric-a-brac, the movie is a real patience-tester that laboriously works its way through its miscellaneous tones, kitschy visual flourishes and DOA comedy without any satisfying results. The core relationships aren’t developed in any meaningful way, and the shrugged-off context leaves us wondering why nobody in town seems to be doing or saying anything about the mass culling of its younger population.

It’s easy to admire Lawrence’s use of throwbacky practical effects (goremongers might appreciate one or two of these kills), but the retro visual aesthetic lacks the specificity to render it even shamelessly effective nostalgia, and the clumsy editing betrays an overall dearth of comic timing. By the time Abbie and Sam have collected three wacky friends and found themselves at an old abandoned campground in the third act (the movie stops a millimeter shy of posing them under a wooden sign that reads CAMP KILL ’EM ALL HAHAHAHAHA), the movie has worn out its welcome and exhausted our goodwill. Another pass or four through the word processor, and maybe then we’re talking. 

Our Call: Cut Bloody Axe Wound out of your queue. SKIP IT.

John Serba is a freelance writer and film critic based in Grand Rapids, Michigan.