Al filo del hacha

It is so frustrating when you can see the good DNA of a movie buried under bad filmmaking. Edge Of The Axe could’ve been a fantastic late addition to the slasher genre, had it been made competently, but it’s flaws drag it down. What works in the movie and gives you false hope are the new ideas it brings to the table. The killer is stalking an entire rural town in California. There’s nary a teenager in sight in this movie. Almost every character is at least in their 20’s, and most are 40 and up. The police are actively involved from the beginning. And they throw plenty of red herrings at you to keep the viewer off balance. But thats the end of my positives, because the script hobbles all of that. Let’s start with the red herrings. The movie tried to hang the crimes on a BUNCH of people. But because the movie waits until over an hour in to reveal some connective tissue between the victims (and it can’t even do that consistently until the last five minutes), it’s hard to take any of the red herrings seriously. How is a viewer supposed to be convinced someone is a suspect if we don’t have a motive? And when they start introducing new characters to be suspects, it only gets worse. One character is introduced about an hour in, and given literal seconds of screen time to establish some fake suspicion, and then we don’t see him for another 20 minutes … when he’s killed. WHAT THE HELL. Meanwhile, the cops are woefully incompetent. The movie opens with a woman being hacked to death in the tunnel of an automatic car wash. When the second victim is murdered in the ticket office of a train yard, the chief wants to write it off as she got drunk and fell under a passing train. I don’t know what’s dumber; the idea that she fell under a train but somehow got thrown several yards away INTO A BUILDING, or that you deliberately ignore the axe marks on the body in light of a similar crime happening only a day or two before. A corpse is discovered in an attic, gnawed on by rats; the coroner can’t confirm how she died at the scene because of the body’s condition, so the chief wants to write it up as a suicide so they can just be done with it and give the family peace. THAT IS WRONG IN SO MANY WAYS. The mystery element of the movie is handled so unfairly. An hour or so in and you find out that the victims all once worked at the same place, a mental hospital. Around the same time, they suddenly decide the main female lead needs tragic backstory, where she traumatically injured her cousin on a swing, and he was hospitalized for eight years. The movie has been signposting the male lead as a possible suspect pretty hard at this point, so now you assume he’s the cousin. But they’ve been romantically involved, so … eww, that’s a GROSS commitment to the con if that’s the case. The title of the movie would seem to indicate some world class gore. Nope. Blood is off color and too thin, and the kills are lame. The killer’s manic anger as they swing over and over is cool to see, but the moment you see an axe literally bounce off someone’s torso, or the axe blade turn sideways and hit the victim with the flat side when it should be the blade, it ruins the moment. The hope is clearly “show a lot of swings” and “here’s some blood”, but you never see actual GORE. The one time you see a flesh wound is post-mortem and it looks like it could’ve been done with a Swiss Army knife. It’s like a student play version of a slasher. Characters are introduced and forgotten for no reason. The two main male leads are great friends and have running jokes that longtime friends do … but the main male character is established as having only been in town a couple weeks. A bunch of time is wasted on the second male lead’s bad marriage to an older woman with a lot of money; it’s a side-plot that goes nowhere. So does his attempts at infidelity with a local girl. Dialogue is often weird and seemingly alien (“Do you want a Coke?” “Sure.” “Okay.” “Is it a cold Coke?”). There’s a whole scene where the killer abandons their motivation for killing and scares someone by beheading one of their pigs and putting the head in their bed; this is reported to the police as the pig having their throat slit. Don’t even get me started on how computers are used in this movie (“I’ll hook it up to the central terminal.” WHAT ARE YOU TALKING ABOUT?!?), where two people communicate over computers with a primitive IM system, when there’s a phone RIGHT THERE. The computer literally exists for moving along plot points. And speaking of computers and those plot twists, the ending. Whoa boy, the ending. This movie makes no attempt to reach a climax; it checks its watch, sees it has ten minutes left, and says “okay, let’s wrap it up”. The confusing ending sees the main male lead, Gerald— for whom there’s been a BUNCH of clues hinting he may be the killer, which is just lazy — in the killer’s gloves, boots and trenchcoat stalking the main female lead, Lillian, in her house. The signature axe that’s been used in all the murders is in her house. She grabs it to defend herself. He confronts her and reveals on the computer that her cousin doesn’t exist; LILLIAN was the one with the skull injury and was hospitalized, where she was diagnosed with severe brain injuries and psychotic behavior. All the people killed were either her caretakers or women who tried to seduce her dad. But Gerald has a scar on the back of his head where the cousin would’ve, and he’s in the killer’s attire. And if he wasn’t the killer, then why did he come to town and why does he know all this? But then again, once Gerald is killed by the police, why does the movie end with Lillian smiling like a psychopath? Was he the killer? Was she? MAKE UP YOUR MIND, MOVIE. It’s really unfortunate, because there’s a lot to like. The setting is different, the non-teenage cast is refreshing, the mystery element is a nice throwback, and the killer has a real manic edge to it, whoever it is. But the script is just wretched. It doesn’t play fair with the mystery element in any way, the cops are idiots, side-plots go nowhere, or are used to introduce plot elements that take the long way around, the pacing is weird, the dialogue is hokey and unnatural, characters are introduced and forgotten … it could be so much more, and it hurts that it isn’t.