Ax 'Em

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.

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.

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.

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.