Bloody Axe Wound (2024) review

Dir. Matthew John Lawrence

By: Steve Pulaski

Rating: ★★½

Bloody Axe Wound is an inventive horror-comedy that stops just short of reaching the breakthrough with its formula. Here’s a film that conjures up a premise just original enough to remind us of the likes of Scream and Happy Death Day, but conveniently forgets it was the characters and the world-building that made those series hum in conjunction with the slashing. We remember the kills because the victims were compelling.

The film — written and directed by Matthew John Lawrence, the man behind Uncle Peckerhead in 2020 — turns serial killing into a family business for real-life slasher, Roger Bladecut (Billy Burke). With the help of his teen daughter Abbie (Sari Arambulo), Roger videotapes his brutal murders and sells them to the folks in the small town of Clover Falls via a family video-store.

Immediately, this setup is murky. The narration at the start explains to us that the real murders, committed by Roger, are the ones filmed and sold in the video-store. The opening scene, however, shows Jeffrey Dean Morgan committing the murders, suggesting the contents of the tapes are dramatized. The people of Clover Falls eat up these slasher/snuff films, and have made them a series. Lawrence seems so excited by the ingenuity of his premise that he forgot to fill us in on the details of the world in which they exist.

As Roger’s age catches up to him, he wants to pass the torch (blade?) to Abbie as his heir. He’s got a yearbook with high school teens circle in blood-red marker; they are set to be his victims. Posing as a high school student herself, Abbie buddies up to the presumptive victims in an attempt to get close enough to go in for the kill. Things change when one of them, named Sam (Molly Brown), accidentally ends up stealing her heart, leaving Roger questioning if his next-of-kin is cut out for the slaying business.

Lawrence’s film amuses on the surface, but falls apart if even the slightest tinge of scrutiny is applied. For one, there doesn’t seem to be any rhyme nor reason for Roger’s handpicked victims. For a town with such a high murder-rate too, nobody seems to be aware of his scuzzy video-store and its assortment of slasher films bearing the kills. This really shouldn’t be too complicated of a plot, but poor world-building is the film’s Achilles heel.

Save for Abbie and Sam, the additional slew of victims are mostly faceless and unremarkable. There’s flutterings of substance, such as a line Sam speaks, revealing that she’s been to many, many funerals since the start of her high school career. The vague suggestions of the surrounding trauma and damage the Bladecut family has inflicted on their community remain only that.

Where Bloody Axe Wound finds its greatest success is in how it shows Abbie stumblebumming her way thru her first solo kills. Her struggles to assume the family business are essentially the horror version of a young man inheriting his dad’s business. The process of coming home from a long day to get grilled by your deformed dad about all your youthful shortcomings might be too relatable. However, in this case, Roger points out that Abbie didn’t stab her victim fast enough, or waited too long to go for the jugular (literally and metaphorically).

It’s easy to accept Bloody Axe Wound on its surface, but difficult to recall specifics, mainly because the script gives us so few. At only 84 minutes long, it doesn’t have enough time to develop Abbie into a meaningful character. It doesn’t contextualize her childhood and her relationship to her father, so much so that the two performers lack chemistry. She feels more like Roger’s understudy than daughter — another angle that could’ve been explored. Lawrence’s film simply wants to hack, slash, and have a good time. It succeeds until it ultimately dawns on you just how unmemorable it all is.

Starring: Sari Arambulo, Molly Brown, Billy Burke, Eddie Leavy, Sage Spielman, Margot Anderson-Song, and Matt Hopkins. Directed by: Matthew John Lawrence.