With its subtle-free title, Bloody Axe Wound would like you to believe that it's leaning deliriously heavy into the midnight movie mentality that allows it to get away with that type of "so bad its good" personality that so many horror efforts have ridden to relative success.

 

Don't get me wrong, it's evident that Bloody Axe Wound has been made with the best of intentions, and it has one hell of a promising premise festering within its (thankfully) easy 83 minutes, but whether it's a lack of experience or talent on hand (excluding Jeffrey Dean Morgan, who's here in the most minute of cameo appearances), there isn't enough sauce here to flavour Matthew John Lawrence's slasher comedy.

 

In the small town of Clover Falls - which sounds like a town ready to be slaughtered right off the bat - teenager Abbie (Sari Arambulo) is hoping to get into her very off-kilter family business.  Her father, you see, Roger Bladecut (an unrecognisable Billy Burke), is a certified horror villain, hacking up the townsfolk on the regular and packaging their demise on camera to sell as a VHS horror title.  It's all so inexplicable, and never once do we actually see a camera on hand to film said murders, not to mention there's full on promotional poster art when they arrive at the video store they're rented out from, but we wouldn't have an escapist slasher of any sort if proceedings made sense, so it's just easier if we go along with it all.

 

The murders have also never been solved, and Bladecut has never been tried in any form - despite, you know, literal videographic proof - but the movie moves along in its own reality, a reality where yearbooks turn up for Roger to decipher who his next victim will be. Bloody Axe Wound asks far more questions than it answers, and it's clear that Lawrence is hoping that enough practical gore will make us forget that what's transpiring either doesn't make a lick of sense or, more unforgiveable, is, quite frankly, boring.

 

With a new movie on their schedule and Bladecut unable to bounce back as sprightly as he used to - slashing is a physically demanding gig, did you not know? - he reluctantly lets Abbie assist in his latest kill and, unsurprisingly, she's quite the accomplice.  It's here that Bloody Axe Wound starts to suggest something of an interesting, emotional layer to its story - Abbie taking up the family business, but in being told not to get too close to her victims, she does just that - but, again, it never commits to itself.  The idea that Abbie either follows in her father's footsteps or bravely bring it to a close off the back of falling in love with an intended victim (stoner Sam, played by Molly Brown, adding an inclusive note to the action) is ripe with possibility. Sadly, Bloody Axe Wound never exercises the smarts or stability to follow through on such.

 

It's a real shame that Bloody Axe Wound never rises to the occasion, as it hones such a bonkers premise and evident love for splatter slashers that it's all the harder to fault it for its misgivings.