Written and directed by Matthew John Lawrence, Abbie Bladecut’s family business, a video store, has thrived by disposing of teenagers to mimic horror movies. As the first female slasher, she battles gender bias while realizing the harsh realities behind the mass murders. Starring: Sari Arambulo, Molly Brown, Billy Burke, Eddie Leavy, Sage Spielman, Margot Anderson-Song, Jeffrey Dean Morgan and Matt Hopkins.
Any horror fan is going to be immediately drawn to Bloody Axe Wound, a homage to 1980s horror and slasher flicks, where the serial killers get to be the leads, what’s not to love? There’s no denying that it’s a great concept, a daughter wanting to follow in the footsteps of her bloodthirsty father. However, the execution is a slightly different story.
The balance between horror and coming-of-age story doesn’t really work, at a certain point it becomes almost entirely the latter and the violence gets pushed to one side. While it is a great addition to explore a queer teenage story, as it’s always refreshing to see, it loses the parody-esque tone and becomes quite cliché. There’s also a very strange conundrum with Abbie’s (Sari Arambulo) choices once she starts to get to know the teenagers her father targets. She loses a bit of sympathy, and that adds a distance which doesn’t help the story’s struggles.
It does finally switch back to its horror roots in the final moments, but it feels like it’s overcompensating. That inconsistency is massively holding it back from being a really good time. Yes, Bloody Axe Wound is entirely ripping off Friday the 13th and some of that is good and some is too on the nose, but mostly it does feel appreciative of the genre. Having an empathetic serial killer have to be faced with the consequences of killing is a nice switch-up and there are some great characters at work but they’re let down by a poor ending.
Matthew John Lawrence’s direction is solid, it feels somewhere between Final Girls and Freaky with a tiny bit of Moxie thrown in. The period setting isn’t quite as strong as hoped but the overall feel that goes along with a typical slasher is definitely present. The performances are also right on the money, they’re an interesting one to judge because they’re going so strongly for that 1980s vibe, which is generally on the trashy, cheesy side so they end up being purposefully not stellar. It works but it might be misinterpreted by viewers who aren’t your typical horror fan.
Bloody Axe Wound had a really fun idea but didn’t do it justice. It gets lost creating that combination of slasher and coming-of-age flick and never quite recovers. It’s a shame as the ingredients are there, both through the performances and visually, but the imbalanced nature of it is frustrating. If it could have kept the comedy and violence flowing cohesively, this could have been something special but unfortunately, Lawrence got tripped up putting so much focus on the romantic vein of the story.
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