Axe (1977)
Starring Leslie Lee, Jack Canon & Ray Green
Directed by Frederick R. Friedel
Written by Frederick R. Friedel

 

So, when you sit down to 1977's AXE, a movie put out by this distribution company with serious boundary issues, about a hot young girl living alone with her disabled grandfather in an out-of-the-way farmhouse which is about to be overtaken by three fugitives on the run, you think you are in for one huge perverted boink-fest, right? Um, not really.

AXE (a.k.a. THE VIRGIN SLAUGHTER, LISA, LISA and about a dozen other titles) lets you know right up front what you are in for. The opening credits are simply a still of the farmhouse and the most insane music ever. A bizarre mixture of synthesizers, piano and bongo drums plague most of this movie, waging a full-on war with your eardrums. It is the musical equivalent to unleashing a pack of unruly toddlers on a room filled with instruments.

When the film finally starts it is hard to get a grip on what exactly is happening. Choppy editing gives us Steele, Lomax and Billy (Jack Canon, Ray Green and AXE director Frederick R. Friedel), a group of career criminals sitting in a bedroom where they appear to be waiting on someone (clear audio would have been oh-so-helpful at this point). Endless quick shots of Billy holding a gun, then of Lomax smoking a cigar and Steele cleaning his fingernails were done to create some sort of tension I'm sure. Suddenly, a fourth guy enters the room and punches start flying. They are literally made twelve inches away from the actor's face but somehow he falls to the ground where Lomax puts out his cigar in the knocked-out loser's mouth.

The movie goes out of its way to show us these guys are bad. A quick stop at a late night market has Steele throwing tomatoes and melons at a young female cashier. Of course, she is instructed to take off her top to show him her melons and is led to one of the aisles where Steele places a tomato on her head and goes all-William Tell on her. The fun is missed by Billy, who is sulking in the car and hit by a sudden case of the guilts regarding his chosen profession.

Lisa (Leslie Lee) is a sweet girl caring for her invalid grandfather who basically spends his time staring off blankly into space. She doesn't get any interaction with people so she too stares blankly off into space (most likely after reading the script) and doesn't speak. One thing Lisa does seem to enjoy is preparing dinner which consists of her going out to the barn to select a chicken for dinner. She then proceeds to hack off its neck with an axe (I love foreshadowing!) I guess it could have been gross had it not been for the fact that the blood looks as if they melted a huge pile of red crayons and drizzled it all over everything. During this sequence we are whacked over the head with the fact that Lisa is young and innocent. We watch her have milk and cookies and prance around in a little girl’s dress. I guess we are supposed to pretend she doesn't look like she is old enough to run with the soccer mom crowd.

It takes the bad guys what seems like three days to reach the farmhouse. Lisa has just finished giving her grandfather a sponge bath (ewww!) and doesn't speak in the film until the thugs arrive but when she does you kind of wish she would go mute again. When they break into the house Lisa's reaction is equal to her being told the restaurant she is eating at has just run out of the daily special and she will have to order something else. It's as if she had taken a big handful of Tylenol PM before the scene. She finally musters up enough interest to ask what they want. Then she feels the need to tell them it's just she and her grandfather. who can't walk, all alone in the house. Gee Lisa, why not just tell them where you keep the knives? Would it have been that hard to spout the cliché line, "My (insert any name here) went into town and they'll be back soon"?

Once they announce their intentions to stay at the farmhouse until the heat wears off they instruct her to make them something to eat. As they sit down to eat Lisa exits the room, they seem completely unconcerned about where she is going and what she is going there for. At one point they even leave the house to go after Billy, leaving Lisa alone in the house with the car keys! After that it is a lot of sitting around and awkward glances made in Lisa's direction. It is at this point Steele decides to take off his socks to clip his toenails. No, I'm not kidding.

Later that night, while everyone is sleeping, Roly-poly Lomax decides to engage Lisa in a rousing game of Hide the Salami. Finally – some action! (Hey, don't judge me!) Big mistake! Lisa slices him with a switchblade. During this scene we are treated to flashes of all her delicately innocent wall hangings interspersed with shots of Lisa covered in red Crayola soup. Just in case we didn't get it before, Lisa was young and innocent and just look at what the big bad meanies made her do. She then drags the body to the bathroom to dismember it (offscreen) with an axe. More flashes of those delicate wall hangings. We get it, OK! She isn't innocent anymore! Sheesh.

Lisa stuffs him in a wooden trunk and the next morning gets Billy to lug it up to the attic for her. He discovers Lomax is inside but she quickly makes up a story that she saw Steele kill Lomax in the middle of the night. The old “turn them against each other” trick. There is hope for our Lisa yet. You think it would be easy to get rid of the other two. Billy doesn't want to be there anyway and it would be a cinch to kill Johnny Toenail Clippers. She would just need to sneak up on him while he is grooming. Suddenly Billy decides he needs to leave for a while but announces he will be back.

Steele wakes and demands that the axe-wielding nymph make him something to eat. As she heats up a can of tomato soup he starts telling her how pretty she is and makes the creepy-crawly suggestion they do it in front of her grandfather. He drags her into the living room and they struggle for what seems like decades until Lisa finally is able to reach the axe conveniently placed next to the fireplace. She goes back to tending to lunch as if nothing has happened. Billy comes back and he sits down to lunch while Lisa feeds her grandfather soup. It is implied she has put Steele's blood into the soup. She would have to! One can of soup feeds three people? I don't think so.

Billy discovers what she has done and goes running wildly out of the house where he is awaited by two cops who immediately shoot him. Apparently in this town there is a “shoot first, ask questions later" policy firmly in place at the police department. Lisa is changed forever and even gets away with it. I don't think she was transformed by the experience so much as she was just waiting for people to show up at the farmhouse so she could kill them.

The interminable end credits leave you dumb-founded that it took nine dozen people to make this movie. There really was a script girl? There was an assistant to the sound man? Where the hell was he? Out taking the world's longest smoke break, I imagine. Also, there was a script consultant? Why wasn't there a consultant on whether they should have made the movie?

I gotta hand it to director Friedel though, who directed the equally as goofy 1976's DATE WITH A KIDNAPPER a year before he tackled AXE. He managed to make a Seventies exploitation movie about three criminals left alone with an attractive girl and avoided any nudity or graphic sex, which was a huge draw in many of the films BoxOffice Pictures International distributed.

I'm being tough on AXE, I know it. I mean, really, if the movie was so bad then why did I excitedly click on the extras section of the DVD immediately after the movie was over? Because I really do love this stuff, that's why. When it comes to these movies I'm like a drug addict. Yeah, you shoot up but you don't go around announcing to everyone you have an addiction to heroin.

But I can be myself around you guys, can't I?