Abbie Bladecut is the teenage chick trying to find her place in the world. She wants to take over the family business, a rather run down video store that specialises in horror, oh and the whole being the local slasher villain thing. She wants to fit in with the teenage scene at the local High School. And she has just formed her first crush on a fellow student, Sam Crane, a character the film makers think is the bad girl element. Daddy dearest doesn’t want to hand the meat cleaver over to Daughter dearest, but after a cousin drops the ball masked killer wise Abbie has to rise to the occasion. Ever wondered how slasher villains get to retire, well this movie seeks to answer that question, and it has Jeffrey Dean Morgan in a cameo. What more could you ask from a horror comedy, well as it turns out quite a lot more, let’s get our masks on and slash into this one. 

Really thought we had got over the whole meta thing, which I blame fully on Kevin Williamson for introducing to the horror world. Williamson of course got it pretty much wrong, showing a lack of knowledge of horror flicks, but ensuring we know he has read that pseudo intellectual Carol J. Clover, who apparently watched a couple of hundred horror flicks over six months or so then twisted actual content to match her feminist agenda. Naturally people like Williamson lapped Clover’s shite up, cause she’s an academic after all. Let’s just say, American research methods don’t play well with the humanities. But here we go again, another movie that decides it would be good fun to reflect what maker Matthew John Lawrence has seen in the few slashers he has watched, without really delving deep into the lore.

So at least Lawrence gives us a reasonably unique situation in his plot. Abbie’s dad is the local slasher dude, and he has been taking toil of the local High School’s student population. Victims are chosen from the High School’s year book, where their pictures are circled, who by, don’t know never explained. Daddy is working his way through the year book taking out students left, right, and centre in creative fashion. Now the other part of Dad’s empire of blood is a video store, which is at least not a Blockbuster, Kids ask your grandparents. Weirdly someone is making movies of Dad’s rampages for rental by the video store clients, who this person might be is never explained of course. Like all good antagonists in slasher movies, daddy can recover, from even death apparently, but just recently his wounds have taken a lot longer to heal and he needs help getting out of the grave. Guess old age catches up to all of us, time is a harsh mistress people. Naturally the mantel of local killer needs to be passed on, you know those teens aren’t killing themselves, and Abbie thinks she is next in line for the title. Dad has other ideas, which may or may not be a good thing, and for sure Abbie has to help out some pretenders who are fumbling idiots at best. Well okay Abbie has to try to help one cousin, but plural sounds better don’t you think.

Mudding the waters is Abbie’s insertion into the local student population. Rather than making her stalk and slashing easier Abbie falls for bad girl Sam Crane. Sam skips class, smokes and drinks, and even worse plays drums in an Indie band. Naturally Sam is another chick, because modern movies have to have lesbo chicks in them. Yeah I was rolling my eyes as well, this by now is a meme, but hey why go with something traditional when you are pretty much treading already covered ground with your movie.

Where Bloody Axe Wound does get it right is by following some slasher tropes, that are pretty recognisable. This of course is what the movie is trying to do, you know you gotta do the meta dance cause it’s clever or something. Abbie and her Scooby gang try to get out of town, as the gang are clear targets of the local killer, and after car issues end up at an abandoned summer Camp. Excellent stuff, hey we are rocking typical slasher hunting grounds. And naturally things get real as Daddy dearest tries to get Abbie back on the straight and narrow, and put a machete in her hands.

Where the movie hits stormy waters is when it tries to mix and match horror tropes with slap stick horror. The movie isn’t as funny as it thinks it is, we have all seen slap-splatter before with scenes like a chick being disembowelled looking very familiar to veteran horror fans. Guess the humour might work for pre-teens who have been raised on a diet of Disney schlock and are just dipping their toes in darker waters, but which falls flatter than a pancake for more seasoned dark genre travellers. I didn’t find the humour painful or too over the top, but hardly raised a smile as things unfolded.  I did enjoy Eddie Leavy’s Glenn, a video store clerk aching to be involved in the videos of the kills by popping up in the background. He reaches true horror/comedy status by emulating Crazy Ralph from the first couple of Friday the 13th movies and being the harbinger of doom. Of course not all goes to Glenn’s plan, but hey at least he is trying to add some flavour to the videos that are getting increasingly stale.

Surprisingly director Lawrence gets the best out of his mainly young cast. Sari Arambulo (Abbie) pretty much nails it as the coming of age teen who is conflicted between the family slay together stay together and her burgeoning High School lifestyle. But really capturing the mood of the movie is Billy Burke (Roger Bladecut), who has to perform as the world weary slasher dude under an undeniable heavy amount of makeup. You can almost feel Burke rolling his eyes as his daughter strays outside the lines. There simply is no weak link in this part of the movie. Lawrence has his cast humming in tune to the beat.

Behind the camera Lawrence is nailing his requirements. He has a firm hand on every scene and is not rushing anything. The scene is well constructed, though slightly awry on the stalker part of things, but there’s nothing like pump and dumb scenes that are being made to simply to stretch things to movie length. Lawrence knows his narrative and is sticking solidly to the requirements to bring that narrative to life. I would like to see Lawrence with a bigger budget, but with someone else working on the script, and definitely that script not being informed by the mythical “modern audience”.

Bloody Axe Wound, which has a different meaning to readers from Australia than Lawrence might have intended, is pretty uneven. The movie mixes teen coming of age, slasher tropes, and I guess humour but needed a lot more work to stick it’s landing. By now meta is out of vogue, time to move with the times Lawrence, and that doesn’t translate to mild lesbo action, which once again is a worn out trope in the modern age. There was definitely a good movie lurking below the surface, which at times looked like it might surface and have us all rocking. Mild recommendation, the movie really doesn’t arrive with anything we didn’t expect, but don’t go out of your way to find a copy. Maybe six years ago this would have resonated more, but it’s all a bit meh to be honest.