Ax 'Em

When I watched "Ax 'Em" I found myself wondering one simple thing: How did this movie get distributed? Honestly, it is that bad. The film quality and sound quality are non-existent. Honestly, I've seen better quality from a VHS camcorder in a dark room recording Barbies. The plot is so asinine that I can't believe Michael Mfume actually got as many people to be in it as he did. I guess the best comparison of this movie is "The Evil Dead" made by Sam Raimi and a bunch of his friends (including Bruce Campbell) when they were in college. You could compare it to that, the only difference is while "The Evil Dead" is extremely well done for its budget and limited crew, this movie is just plain awful.

The title is spelled differently on the box than it is on the movie itself. There is really no ax in the movie at all, there is a small hatchet though. Words are misspelled everywhere in the movie's introduction. The opening credits look like something that could have been made on a 1986 camcorder and there is no editing. The same scene appears in the movie twice in a row. You really can't understand anything that the characters say, the sound is that bad.

The movie starts out with a bunch of young people dancing when a "Yo Momma" contest breaks out, and from here it actually goes downhill if you can believe that. When a group of characters like Rock and Breakfast go on a trip to a cabin in the middle of nowhere they are stalked by some guy. I'm not really sure if there was some connection there, but it was just basically some guy whose family was killed or something and now he's out for revenge.

This is a good movie for people who like bad movies. There are many parts that are so bad they are funny, although usually this isn't a good things in movies. If there was a way to give this film a zero I would.

1 out of 10.

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.

To call "Ax 'Em" the worst movie in the history of motion pictures would be too easy. Because that would imply that it's unwatchable, which on so many levels it is. Yet it's the absolute utter incompetence on all levels, from the direction to the script to the acting, that makes it just so damn entertaining, because you are simply stupified that anyone thought this could ever make a coherent film. If you enjoy watching a film for its mistakes, "Ax 'Em" will never leave your DVD player, because from the mis-spelled words and incomprehsible grammar, to the nonsensical ending 72 minutes later, "Ax 'Em" proves that no matter how incompetent you are with a video camera, someone will distribute it.

What makes this film so wonderfully special is that the director's father, Kweisi Mfume, was a U.S. Congressman, and former head of the NAACP! There are moments of D.W. Griffith-esque racism that were they not made by a filmmaker of color, would pass as a scenes from a training video for the Klan. It is nearly impossible to understand what anyone says, simply because the video camera is set up for a wide shot, and nobody talks anywhere near a microphone. The film, if you could call it that, makes no sense on any level, but moments like the fat guy walking around in the back of one shot holding the slate will have you laughing for hours.

This is bad filmmaking at its best. Thank you, Michael Mfume, for this wonderful gift.

Sloppy horror film - and it shows - about a group of not-so-bright teens on a weekend getaway in the woods targeted by a hulking maniac whose family was murdered years earlier. Amateur film (shot on a camcorder) suffers due to terrible acting, writing, directing and editing. More than half the film is muted so you can't hear what everybody is saying. The only thing that comes in clear is the rap music. If you rent this trash to get some laughs out of this, you'll be disappointed. Rent "Scary Movie," instead. My evaluation: (no stars).

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.