Axeman

“The sun rises and sets in that woman’s ass. So does my face.”

Look out Aaron Sorkin, here comes Axeman, or Axeman at Cutter’s Creek, truly one of the worst modern horror films (or film of any genre) you’ll ever see anywhere. Thanks Netflix.

Before we hit straight-ahead cabin in the woods territory, the prologue also, for reasons unknown, offers up three gang-bangers as sacrificial lambs to the Axeman in question. If only this set-piece was to showcase some spectacularly gory kills. It doesn’t.

One of the gangsters gets a knife to the eye; another an axe through the back of the head like a remedial My Bloody Valentine 3D. The third? Damned if this reviewer can remember.

In this “vacation to dismember,” a poster pun worthy of a hatchet to the cranium, nine tedious chowder-heads reunite ten years after college. What state school has admission standards this low, nobody knows.

The group includes the usual straight-arrows, but also two lewd lesbians and a black guy with a boombox on his shoulder like he’s time-traveled to The Bronx, 1979. (Maybe while he was there, he could’ve watched Alien and The Brood and reported back to Axeman’s director about what constitutes good horror.) There’s also a fat undersexed nerd named…you guessed it…Randy.

And local legend has it…that something that happened near Cutter’s Creek, in the immediate vicinity of their cabin. And that tale is regaled on the porch by the leader of the group while everyone’s getting drunk in Adirondack chairs and swilling booze straight from the bottle. Is this yarn about people hacked to bits in their own homes apocryphal? You bet it ain’t.

In a way, Axeman is like a bottom feeder version of The Mutilator, which is by no means a classic for the ages.

It’s poor in every possible respect: grainy, day / night continuity issues, exposition-filled, self-satisfied, stilted, boring. And with stinky CG to boot.

But where this turd really falters is in the chatter, as mindless and as imbecilic as anything we’ve come across in the indie horror world (and that’s really saying something as Noël Coward types don’t exactly flock to the genre).

Examples: “In college she took so much c*ck, I thought she was a survivalist stocking up for World War III.”

“I should c*nt punch you both off this porch.”

“Your liver is like a Tic-Tac.”

“Choke on a wiener, f*cktard.”

Not only is Axeman stupid, vulgar and depressing, it makes a little part of you die inside.

* (out of 5)