BLOODY AXE WOUND - Mark Reviews Movies

Bloody Axe Wound, RLJE Films

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Review by Mark Dujsik | December 26, 2024

Bloody Axe Wound offers the kernel of an idea in search of a movie. It's also a movie in desperate need of a more coherent premise.

The basic conceit, which is all writer/director Matthew John Lawrence provides, is that horror movies are real. Then again, maybe this is the world inside a horror movie, in which all of the melodrama and killings happening in real life become snuff films for a wide—although non-existent in this story—audience. There are already too many questions to ask and be left unanswered, and we're just at trying to explain the foundations of the narrative.

What we know for sure is that Roger Bladecut (Billy Burke) is the star of a several movies, series, and franchises revolving around an undead, unstoppable murderer. He is also that unnatural, invincible killer for real, whose killing sprees of many a teen are recorded, edited together into movies, and packaged as VHS tapes for sale and rental.

Oh, Roger also owns a video rental store that provides his murders-as-entertainment to customers, and by the way, the shop operates in the same little town where all the killings take place. It's a good thing nobody walks into that store looking to rent anything, because that would only raise even more questions about how this guy remains untouched by the law and his murderous alter-ego remains an urban legend to everyone in town.

Actually, he doesn't seem to have an alias, so how has no one made the connection between the owner of this shop, providing video recordings of decades of actual and well-known murders, and the killer who has brought terror to this place for so long? The plot hasn't even begun, and already, Lawrence has made the foundational logic of his setup completely incoherent.

If we can get past all of this, the rest of the movie is, at least, completely pedestrian as a self-referential horror comedy, with an emphasis on none of those elements. No, the focus here is the drama of an aspiring masked killer who comes to realize that the senseless murders of several teenagers might not be a good thing.

She's Roger's adopted daughter Abbie (Sari Arambulo), who desperately wants to be like her father, but dear undead dad doesn't want her going near the business that made him infamous and—also, somehow—completely anonymous. When Roger develops some health issues, he decides to let Abbie tag along with dad's trainee (played by Matt Hopkins). The newcomer fails miserably and fatally while trying to butcher a couple of horny teenagers, so Abbie takes over, finishes the work, and sets out to kill the rest of the teens, circled in a local yearbook by some unknown entity.

Where are the cameras making these movies, by the way? If they do exist off-screen, how has no one in the history of these movie-star murderers ever noticed them? Their absence suggests some supernatural force, determining which teens are to be killed and capturing these stories by some omnipotent eye that can transfer its vision to magnetic tape.

It's difficult to tell if this is just becoming a pointless act of overthinking or if Lawrence's script really does lack even a basic understanding of how its own premise would function. The latter seems unlikely at such a ground level of storytelling competence, but every sign here points to it being the case.

Anyway, Abbie tries to kill high-school rebel Sam (Molly Brown), who fights back and stops our wannabe serial killer. Abbie admires her would-be victim, starts going to the local high school to get closer to Sam and the other targets, develops a crush on the girl who stopped her, and starts to like the other outcasts and misfits Roger wants her to slaughter. In his mind, the teens deserve to be killed for being the types of teenagers who are killed in a horror movie.

With all of the many other questions that arise from the incomplete world building of the story, there's another that seems pertinent at this point. What is, ultimately, the point of any of this? It's definitely not, as hopefully has been established by now, to create a clever world in which horror movies are real. It's not to satirize the genre, because a bunch of the teens end up being killed just as Roger wants.

The generic and generally unrelated title of Bloody Axe Wound probably sums it up more than anything. The movie is just a broad subversion of the genre put together with little thought as to how it functions, what it's doing, and what purpose it's actually serving.

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