Ax 'Em

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.

Normally I'm very cinematically tolerant, I can find good in very bad movies. For example I think "Invasion Of The Blood Farmers" is a great film. "Ax Em" has nothing redeeming about it. This is a backyard production but that does not always mean a bad viewing experience, there are several creative amateur productions on the video market. This is not one of them. The sound is inaudible most of the time, yet you can clearly hear the director say "cut" after every painful scene. The cast frequently all talks at once making it impossible to understand anything. There is not one effectively executed sequence in the whole production. It is absolutely amazing this film got distributed WIDELY on home video by a company which specializes in "Urban" features. If you subtract all the technical ineptness, you still have a poorly written, poorly directed, poorly photographed, creatively sterile waste of time. Take it from me I have watched 20 years worth of B horror movies.

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.

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.

THis movie is amazing. I rented it from Hollywood Video after hearing it was the worst film ever, I though, "A movie worse than The Item? A Miracle!" No this is not worse than The Item. I rented it on VHS, and the small screen is funny as heck. Then I had to, I had to buy the DVD. The DVD sucks. No disc menu, and they enlarged the screen! The sound is supposed to be stereo sound or whatever but you still cant hear them....friggin hysterical. This movie has so many problems, it is just funny. I cant wait to show this crap to my friends. Check this one out if you wanna see a bad, bad, bad, bad movie. But get it on VHS cause of the small screen. Makes the movie funnier. Micheal Mfume we love you!!!!!!