The Weekend It Lives

A group of African-American college students head out to the country for a weekend of fun and find themselves being slaughtered instead in this film written and directed by Michael Mfume. Sadly, the killer's first victim must've been the sound man because barely a word spoken in this film is audible. Now let's be honest folks. We users of the IMDb tend to be a little too quick in declaring that this or that film the worst one ever made. People have certainly done that about this film too. The difference is that this time they are right! This film is simply unwatchable. Even cheese-lovers will be tempted to poke their eyes out. So many people have complained the time they wasted watching this DVD. Well, I'm one up on you. I actually saw this movie in the theater! That's right, back when it was made, around 1992, the film managed to get limited theatrical release in Mfume's hometown of Baltimore. (This disservice to the movie-going public was probably as a result of the fact that Mfume's father was a US Congressman from Baltimore at the time.) The film was originally called "The Weekend It Lives." I don't think I walked out on the movie. I was with some friends and I believe we were all too stunned to move. As stunned as I was at the time, I am even more stunned that someone actually released it on DVD. It's not simply that the movie is bad. There are plenty of bad movies out there, and I enjoy many of them. What surprises me about this film is it's total lack of film-making competence. The sound is horrible, as if they were only using the built-in microphone on a camcorder. The picture is almost as bad. I have seen better films made by grade school students.

If there is one saving grace to "Ax 'Em", it's that there is about a 10-minute window where the film becomes the funniest movie I've ever seen in a long time. Unfortunately it's just 10 minutes worth of laughs (including a white victim who keeps falling down as per the usual black critique of white victims in horror movies). The film itself is visually atrocious. I don't really know what happened, but my bet would be that the filmmaker shot the film in 16MM, transferred to tape in order to edit it, but somehow forgot about tape degradation that comes with generational dubbing. As a result, nearly half of "Ax 'Em" looks like a grainy home video, only that would be insulting rainy home videos. This is, incidentally, perfect fodder for Mystery Science Theater 3000, if only that show was still around.

Without exaggeration, I can safely say that this is the absolutely worst, most low-rent movie I have ever seen in my life. It simply has to be seen to be believed, and even when I was watching it I could hardly believe what I was seeing. Everything about it is atrocious from the effects to the "acting".

For one thing, I have never seen a movie that had a box around the picture. It's really hard to believe that this isn't someones bad student picture that accidently got on the shelves of the video store. The fact that this movie was actually distributed boggles my mind. The sound is so bad you can't hear half of what's being said. The direction is non-existent. The characters are the dumbest, most annoying jerks ever. The effects are so cheap they belong in an Ed Wood movie, not in a film made in 2002. The production values are worse that Manos: the Hands of Fate (chew on that for awhile). I can't say enough how phenomenally bad this movie is. Michael MFume, I hope you are hanging your head in shame.

AX EM, an "urban" flick purportedly about a slasher, is one of only two movies I have given a "1" rating here. The other is NIGHT OF THE GHOULS. I would place MANOS in the same category, but I forget if I ever wrote about it here. AX EM is not a film, and it is hardly even a home movie. It was shot using a camcorder and the cam's mike, so that the sound -- uncorrected, natch -- is beyond the point of muddy. AX EM makes that dancing killer scarecrow movie and that pot-bellied mummy movie look like CITIZEN KANE. A big piece of the running time is given over to footage of an actual urban parade! AX EM is truly unwatchable. I should have known better. I rented it from a store, behind which sits a huge Section 8 housing project. Truly a numbnuts film for numbnuts.

Shocking. Bizarre. Nonsense.

Those are the first three words that came to my head after watching this truly amateur production.

Shocking because this "film" was actually released to the general public and available in video stores around the nation.

Bizarre because of the storyline. A person kills his family and himself and then comes back from his grave 13 years later to exact revenge. On who? Himself? His dead family? His dead self? Nonsense because of the completely random dialogue and scenes. Why does the movie start at a random party and then jump to some dance completion at Morgan State University? Please don't try to answer that question.

Nonsense because there are four grammatical errors in the opening sequence explaining the events of the movie.

Nonsense because after one scene you can actually hear the director clearly say "cut." Nonsense because you cannot understand what the characters are saying unless they are three feet from the camera. And when you can hear them clearly, which is only about 24 percent of the time, its all Ebonics and curse words.

Think of the worst movie you have ever seen. Think Plan Nine from Outer Space. And then lower your standards. That's how horrible this movie is. It's in a completely alternate stratosphere than even the lowest F-grade movies you've seen. This picture honestly looks like a high school cinema class production that drags on for 70 minutes and I say that with 100 percent seriousness.

It deserves 0/10, but that's not possible, so I'm forced to give it 1/10. I am literally going to go back and change every movie I ever gave 1/10 and give it an extra star or two simply because even those awful pictures are 10 times better than this garbage.