[AXE GIANT: THE WRATH OF PAUL BUNYAN
screens Saturday June 1st at 9:30 pm with director Gary Jones in
person.]
Review
by Bob Ignizio
What we have here is your basic “spam
in a cabin” movie, as Joe Bob Briggs would say. A bunch of youthful
miscreants are given the option of a backwoods bootcamp instead of
jailtime for their various misdemeanors, and under the guidance of
corrections officer Sergeant Hoke (Thomas Downey) and psychologist
Ms. K (Kristina Kopf) they head off into the wilderness. The
characters are, of course, all various types, with our main
protagonist being CB (Amber Connor), daughter of the local sheriff
who got in trouble for driving drunk.
Of course we already know from the
flashback prologue (featuring Grizzly Adams himself, Dan Haggerty)
that bad things have happened in these woods long before the
requisite crazy old coot Meeks (Joe Estevez) warns the hapless city
slickers to stay away. Of course they don't listen, and it isn't long
before the kids have inadvertently earned the titular wrath of the
titular legendary lumberjack. Much CGI bloodshed ensues.
This is pretty much everything you'd
want from a “B” movie. Writer/director Gary Jones cut his teeth
working with Sam Raimi and his pals, doing special effects on movies
like ARMY OF DARKNESS before
moving into directing on the Hercules
and Xena
shows, and he clearly shares their fun sensibility. AXE
GIANT
is professional without being slick, commercial without being crass
about it, and like so many drive-in classics of yore, has a great
high concept premise and cool looking monster that are far more
memorable than the movie itself. And following the formula devised by
the King of the Drive-In himself, Roger Corman, there's also a bit of
social commentary, albeit more to the right politically than anything
Rog would have done.
There
really aren't a lot of mid budget exploitation films like this being
made these days. The few remaining drive-in theaters that once were
home to these kind of movies now play more or less the same stuff as
your local multiplex, so it's nice to see a movie like AXE
GIANT get a chance to be seen
on the big screen, even if only for one night. Unlike the kind of
movies Hollywood considers “low budget” horror flicks, there's
still room for some kind of personal touch from the filmmakers that
helps make up for some of the rough edges. That's kind of a hard to
pin down thing, and probably not that important to the kind of
audiences who flock to see a FRIDAY THE 13TH
remake, but for some of us, it makes all the difference. 2 1/2 out of
4 stars.
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