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 lack people all over the world have always maintained that
if everybody in Slasher movies were black, they would all survive because, the
theory goes, black people have more common sense than white folk. This notion is
reinforced somewhat by the token presence of at least one black character in
Slasher films. According to my own theory, if this particular Token Black
Character is sassy enough, he will officially earn the status of Sassy Black
Guy, which means his chances of survival has just increased tremendously.
"Ax 'Em" explores the age-old question of black
folk being different from white folk when it comes to machete-wielding maniacs.
Oddly enough, according to co-star/writer/director Michael Mfume, there's not
that big of a difference after all. The movie concerns a group of black college
students who leave the sanctuary of their urban life for a weekend in the woods.
There, they encounter a machete-wielding black man who is, the film's opening
title card tells us, also mentally deficient. (Or retarded to you politically
incorrect folks out there.) After a lot of running, mugging for the camera, and
100 versions of, "No way I'm getting killed by no machete-wielding
sucker!" half of the characters get killed off and the other half ambush
the killer.
First off, "Ax 'Em" is one of the most visually
atrocious films I've come across in a long, long time. To be honest, I
had trouble concentrating on what was taking place onscreen because I kept
trying to figure out how director Mfume could have destroyed his movie's
aesthetics so badly. Movies are usually shot on rolls of film, which are given
to a lab to process into working prints, which are then used to "cut"
the movie -- that is, arrange the shots into a useable state. When all the films
are shot, processed, and edited, you have your movie. This is the most basic and
traditional process of making a film.
What must have happened with "Ax 'Em" is this:
Director Mfume, in an attempt to save money, had his film rolls processed, but
instead of making a working print, made videotape masters. Using these masters,
Mfume made copies, which immediately degrades the quality of the movie right
there. Mfume then cuts the movie using the videotape dub of the master -- using
a two-VCR system, one to play back the movie and another to record/edit it.
Then, with each copy of the "finished cut", Mfume must have gone back
and re-cut the movie, and each time he had to dub the previous cut into another
generation. (Remember what happens when you keep dubbing copies of the same
movie, but instead of using the original copy to make your new copy, you dub
from the copy of the copy?)
As a result, there are whole sequences in "Ax
'Em" that just looks horrendous. The scenes are grainy and nearly
incomprehensible. Mfume must have either realized what was happening and stopped
doing it, or by a stroke of luck didn't have to keep dubbing other copies over
and over. The film constantly cuts between scenes with fairly decent aesthetics
to one that looks like someone had stepped on it, ground it into the mud, kicked
it around the woods for a couple of weeks, and then processed it.
As a Slasher movie, "Ax 'Em" is parts comedy and
parts camp. The actors have been instructed to act as goofy as possible, which
may or may not be a good thing depending on how you approach Slasher movies. If
there is one saving grace to the film, it's this: there is a 10-minute window
where the film is really, really funny. In this window, a white female
character shows up just long enough to get killed; the funniest thing is that
the character keeps tripping for no particular reason as she's walking through
the woods!
The less said about the kill scenes the better. I'm not
sure why filmmaker Michael Mfume decided to make a Slasher film in the first
place. (Aside from that whole notion of entertaining the prevailing black
thought that black characters would act with more common sense than white
characters in Slasher films, that is.) The director doesn't have an inkling
about how to film a kill scene, the heart and soul of all Slasher movies. The
movie's idea of kill scenes is to let its lumbering serial killer (a black man
who, for some odd reason, bleeds yellow blood?) lumber toward a victim, then cut
to the victim laying dead with a big gash on his/her head. The whole thing is
just too incompetent for words.
If you ever had a passing thought that characters in
Slasher films would survive more often if only they were more like black folk,
then "Ax 'Em" is for you. The film is definitely not much to look at,
even by Slasher standards. Despite its slick movie poster, I am tempted to call
"Ax 'Em" an average student film, but even the average student
filmmaker has more talent and skill than Mfume shows here. And despite its short
running length of 70 minutes, the film is actually only 60 minutes long, with 10
extra minutes consisting of a "dance show" filmed at a black college
campus. Can you say, "Padded running length?"
FYI: Despite the title, the serial killer actually only
uses an ax once. The title, I suspect, is a play on the Ebonics slang where the
word "ask" is replaced by "ax", as in, "I axed
him" instead of "I asked him." Get it?
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