After losing another dust-up with his wife over her controlling interest of the marital purse strings, the husband storms out of the house, drives off into the night, and then picks a lucky spot to stop and cool off, near a canal, where he fortuitously witnesses someone disposing of a body by stuffing it into the boot of a car and then pushing both into the water, where they sink of sight.
How is this lucky, you ask? Simple. See, this man’s wife is loaded and ready for a divorce, while he’s a leech and a philandering deadbeat who’s about to lose his meal ticket. Thus, our scheming lothario has no intention of doing his civic duty and inform the police. Nope. Blackmail is what he intends. And though he has an insatiable desire for money, Giorgio (Hilton) is willing to barter for something else in this situation. And the price for his silence? Simple. He's willing to keep his mouth shut, and even offers payment for services rendered, if the killer will kill again for him and bump off his wife, Nora (Velázquez), which would give Giorgio all the loot and the last word on how he spends it. With such an offer he can't really refuse, the Killer (Antoine), who kinda looks like Peter Weller dressed up as Christopher Lee’s monster in Hammer's The Curse of Frankenstein (1957), agrees to this unholy bargain.
Now, their plan is to make Nora’s death look like a kidnapping for ransom gone wrong, with the Killer doing his part while Giorgio firmly establishes a rock-solid alibi at a cocktail party -- after one final shag with the wife, who forgives him too late because she's already dead but just doesn't know it yet, which firmly says what kind of a turd-burger this guy, Giorgio, really is. Thus, on the designated night when Nora is left alone, the Killer does the deed without much fanfare. And after placing Nora's body in the trunk of her own car, the Killer returns to the house to set the stage for the faux kidnapping. And once the ransom note is done, all that's left to do is dispose of the body and the debt will be fulfilled. Perfect plan perfectly executed, right? Well, it would’ve been except for one slight hiccup, signaled by the turn of an ignition key, which explains why, when the Killer returns to the street, the car, and the body, are long gone...
When most folks, myself included, think of Luigi Cozzi, the first thing that most probably pops into your collective heads is Caroline Munro as the leather bikini-clad space pirate, Stella Star, who teamed up with Marjoe Gortner, the Hoff, and a redneck Robot sheriff to save the galaxy in the whole six-pack of awesome known to we mere mortals as Starcrash (1978). Cozzi also churned out all those Lou Ferrigno vehicles in the 1980s, where the former Hulkster took a shot at Sinbad the Sailor in Sinbad of the Seven Seas (1989) and two shots at Hercules (1983) -- with the sequel, The Adventures of Hercules (1985), proving even more stupefying than the first one -- and we all remember how Herc punched a bear into orbit in the first one, right? So, yeah, Cozzi is mostly known for these hair-brained sci-fi and fantasy epics that are goofy as hell but pretty good -- eh, make that pretty great, on those terms -- if you catch my drift. And when judged against this later output it makes the genuinely impressive suspenseful quality of his first foray into feature film even more baffling.
By the time he was a teenager growing up in Milan, Italy, Cozzi was already a hardcore science-fiction and horror aficionado; an obsession which landed him a coveted spot as an Italian correspondent for Famous Monsters of Filmland magazine, giving him an outlet to espouse on those genre films he loved. Around the same time, Cozzi also managed to sell some of his own fantastic fiction and got published. This proved fortuitous, as it led to several contacts in the publishing industry, where he quickly moved up the editorial ladder, which led to more writing on film and a meeting with one of his new cinematic heroes, who we'll reveal in just a second.
For all the while Cozzi was putting pen to paper growing up, he was also shooting his own 8mm movies, aping one of his favorite directors at the time, Roger Corman -- who was in the middle of his Poe cycle by then, beginning with The House of Usher (1960); some complete with Cozzi’s own home-made stop motion animation, which would come to define most of his later sci-fi output. And as he honed his craft, using his literary contacts, Cozzi landed the rights to Frederik Pohl's The Tunnel Under the World (1969): a satirical, poke in the eye at the world of advertising and market research, which the novice director turned into a self-financed, meaning no-budget, avant garde piece of weirdness that became an underground hit in the Continental art-house circuit.
Ironically enough, it was while writing about a different medium that brought Cozzi into contact with Dario Argento for that fateful encounter I mentioned earlier. Taking a half-assed rumor that inadvertently predicted the break-up of the Beatles just days before it actually happened, this "scoop" landed Cozzi a job in Rome, which gave him enough clout to pursue interviews with his favorite genre directors. A lone voice, apparently, for no matter how well the films did at the box-office, critically speaking, horror and sci-fi films held a spot just barely a notch above pornography. These interviews forged a lasting friendship that was cemented when Argento invited Cozzi to pitch-in with his latest project, which turned out to be Four Flies on Grey Velvet (1971), another gialli on the heels of Argento’s groundbreaking The Bird with the Crystal Plumage (1970) and The Cat o' Nine Tails (1971).
Defining what makes a gialli a gialli as opposed to a more conventional thriller / murder mystery is like trying to explain how a square can be a rectangle while said rectangle can't be a square. The basic elements are present in both: a murder, or string of murders; a murderer; a protagonist caught up in the investigation to catch said murderer; a few unearthed clues; a few suspects; and maybe a late twist or two to add some punch before wrapping it all up for the closing credits.
Where the gialli starts to differentiate itself from this formula is how this nebulous genre seems to be more interested in the howtheydunit as opposed to whodunit -- and the more baroque theydunit the better, and whytheydunit is basically irrelevant. The plots in these things are absolutely Rube Goldbergian in structure, starting with the protagonist, along with the audience, witnessing something -- usually a murder. This then sets off an unstoppable chain-reaction of other nefarious events or murders, usually made worse by the protagonist’s efforts to stop them. False starts, false leads, and a healthy dose of red herring doesn't help make things any easier to unravel or decipher what's really going on. Nothing appears to be what it seems on the surface. Nothing is concrete, and confusion the norm.
And while the audience, through the protagonist, is focusing on one thing, nine times out of ten our eyes and attention should be focused somewhere else. For once these plot dominoes start falling in these twisted menageries, it's hard to keep up with each separate line of falling blocks: some stall out, others reach a dead end, and some make pretty designs and a lot of noise but will prove pointless and irrelevant to the bigger picture. Which is usually why, when the climax is reached and the whys and whyfores come out, a viewer's frustration factor might be needling into the red a bit. And that's completely understandable when the big pay off craps out. But sometimes, well, sometimes the view along the way is still worth the trip.
Thus, Cozzi helped his friend Argento hammer out a script to fit these parameters by bouncing pillaged murder scenarios off of each other to fit the title and was encouraged to hang around the set once filming commenced, earning himself a spot as an assistant director. This experience, in turn, led to his first professional directing gig: Il vicino di casa (The Neighbor), which proved to be the most watched and definitely the best episode of Argento's TV anthology series, La porta sul buio (The Door into Darkness). And on the heels of that, when producer Giuseppe Tortorella approached Argento to do another thriller for him, Argento, ready to do something different, declined but gave Cozzi such a glowing recommendation he was soon in the director's chair again for Il Ragno (The Spider), which was eventually tagged with the much more blunt and matter of fact title, L'assassino è costretto ad uccidere ancora -- The Killer Must Kill Again (1975).
“I'm sick of the unknown killer,” said Cozzi, lamenting the sorry formulaic state of the gialli as a genre at the time. “You see the hands of the killer. You see the eye of the killer. You see the mouth of the killer. The finger of the killer. But you never see the face until the last shot of the picture. I wanted to start [this] picture with a shot of the killer.” And that's exactly what Cozzi did, which makes The Killer Must Kill Again less of a gialli and more of a conventional thriller, whose roots can be best described as a mash-up of Alfred Hitchcock's Strangers on a Train (1951) -- a man blackmailing another into killing his wife, and a novel by famed Italian crime-writer, Giorgio Scerbanenco, Al mare con la Ragazza (At Sea with the Girl), where a boy takes his new (and unwitting) girlfriend to the beach with the body of his ex-girlfriend tucked away in the trunk.
And that's exactly what happens in the film, when two bored teenagers see and seize a golden opportunity -- a set of keys carelessly left in the ignition, and putter off to the beach, blissfully unaware of what's stuffed in the trunk, leading to several scenes where Cozzi really gets his Hitchcock on when the body is nearly but not quite discovered, keeping our couple also blissfully unaware of the danger they're in while the Killer relentlessly pursues them to get back what he needs. Meanwhile, thanks to the Killer's cock-up, Giorgio's kidnapping scheme starts to unravel when the cops, led by a wily Inspector (Fajardo), start poking into his ever-fraying account on what happened to his wife when things don't quite add up at the crime scene.
Back on the road, our two teenagers, Luca and Laura (Orana, Galbó), finally reach their seaside destination and follow their noses into an abandoned villa. There, the girl is charmed by the bizarre maritime decor but the boy has something else on his mind and an itch in his pants, which apparently does most of the thinking for this cretin. Rebuffed, a frustrated Luca is sent out to find some food. But once he's back out on the road, our boy is delayed when he stops to help a stranded motorist, which is why Laura is all alone when the Killer finally catches up with them, leading to the film's most notorious scene, where Luca, once more thinking with that itch in his pants, and the blonde ditz (Benussi) he picked up strip and have at in the back seat of the car, while poor Laura is attacked and brutally raped back in the villa by the Killer.
Disturbing and unforgivably explicit at first glance, Cozzi shot and edited this scene together much more skillfully than that on the second. Yes, the sex between Luca and Blondie is very explicit and titillating but the rape, thankfully, is not. And with his sure and steady hand, with the two scenes juxtaposed, basically right on top of each other, it's all as tough and nasty and repulsive as it sounds; as it should be, and it's exactly what Cozzi intended and I think he deserves some major props for how he handled it. And what gives that scene even more impact is the disquieting aftermath, when we cut between Blondie casually fussing with her hair while a devastated Laura tries to pull herself back together. Tough, tough scene, folks. And in lesser hands -- well, I'd rather not even think about it.
And so, staking Laura out as bait, the Killer waits for Luca to return with the car. Which he does, so he can introduce Laura to his new girlfriend and give Ms. Prissy-Pants the big kiss-off. And, really, can a viewer be blamed for cheering a little (okay, a lot) when Luca proceeds to get his ass kicked and his head caved-in by the Killer. But strangely enough, the Killer has no intention of killing these two car thieves once he susses out neither of them realized what's in the trunk. Well, check that. Seem he WASN'T going to kill them until Luca's little roadside tryst comes back to bite all of them on the ass. E'yup. Guess who finally took a look in the trunk?
And so, with his secret discovered, the somewhat reluctant Killer dispatches Blondie most gruesomely with a butcher knife (-- strangely enough, the only real gratuitous violence in the whole picture, though you'd swear there was more). Drained after all that blood-letting, the exhausted Killer slinks off to recuperate. And with Blondie dead, and worthless Luca beaten senseless, I guess it's up to Laura to save their collective hash -- which she does, in a scene of such Herculean effort it should be etched in stone in the annals of The Plucky Heroine Hall of Fame.
Thus, with the Killer dead, the body recovered, and Laura ready to dump Luca as soon as the Inspector is done taking their statement, all that leaves is that ass-hat, Giorgio, whose fault all this is, was, and ever shall be. Never fear; his goose was long ago cooked, even before the final coda, where the Inspector finally gets his man via the old hoisted petard.
Technically speaking, Cozzi's episode of The Door into Darkness was also based on Scerbanenco's novel, making The Killer Must Kill Again nothing more than another rehash, where he expanded that nail-biter to feature length. And Cozzi was up to the task, too, with this relentless, near pitch-perfect suspense yarn of constantly overlapping games of cat and mouse, keeping the tension pulled so taut from beginning to end I don't think any amount of hammering would produce a single note -- the piano wire was strung that tight, metaphorically speaking. And for being considered a gialli, the film makes way too much sense, plot-wise. Not a knock on the genre, mind you; just an observation.
In front of the camera, Christina Galbó steals the movie, despite Antoine St. John's best efforts as the stone-faced killer. Aside from Barbara Steele, I'm hard pressed to find a more alluring pair of eyes in film than Galbó’s. She just puts all her chips on the table for every role I've seen her in -- this, The House that Screamed (1970), What Have You Done to Solange (1972), and Let Sleeping Corpses Lie (1974), and sells it with everything she's got. And despite all these efforts, where she's put through the wringer, a lot, I think she's terribly under-appreciated as far as Euro Scream Queens go, which is a damned shame.
When it was finished, despite most of the violence being implied, The Killer Must Kill Again (also released as The Dark is Death's Friend) was hammered so hard by the Italian censors its release was held up for almost two years. From there, it basically disappeared off the cinematic map and Cozzi's film career became defined by the interstellar insanity that followed.
Fortunately, the fine folks at Mondo Macabro got this lost classic back in circulation in 2004, and I cannot recommend this DVD enough. Stuffed with all kinds of special features, including several interviews with Cozzi, the highlight of the disc is a commentary track with the director, where he breaks down the film in great detail (-- I've barely scratched the surface here, and why listen to me when you can hear it from the man himself), including the family oriented financing, with the producer's wife's car playing a pivotal role, and the producer's son's girlfriend making a cameo as a corpse. But most importantly, the film, though not as obscure as it used to be, is readily available for all to see. And when you do, I think you'll agree with those of us who have already rediscovered it, The Killer Must Kill Again is relentless, deliciously nasty, and just plain fantastic. And all the credit goes to Luigi Cozzi. Go figure.
What is Hubrisween? This is Hubrisween. And now, Boils and Ghouls, be sure to follow this linkage to keep track of the whole conglomeration of reviews for Hubrisween right here. Or you can always follow the collective head of knuckle on Letterboxd. That's 11 reviews down with 15 to go! Up Next: Canada takes one for the team as the Earth faces global extinction via an errant projectile. And if you thought The Deadly Mantis had a lot of stock footage, believe me, Boils and Ghouls, you ain't seen nuthin' yet.
The Killer Must Kill Again (1975) Albione Cinematografica :: Git International Film :: Paris-Cannes Productions / EP: Giuseppe Tortorella / P: Umberto Lenzi / CP: Sergio Gobbi / D: Luigi Cozzi / W: Luigi Cozzi, Daniele Del Giudice, Adriano Bolzoni / C: Riccardo Pallottini / E: Alberto Moro / M: Nando De Luca / S: George Hilton, Antoine Saint-John, Cristina Galbó, Alessio Orano, Eduardo Fajardo, Tere Velázquez, Femi Benussi
Our rather large body count kicks off with a bang -- well, make that opens with a splat, a really cool and sinister splat -- several of them, actually, as a nurse steers her car into a automatic car wash in the sleepy little mountain town of Paddock, and then waits patiently as the machinery kicks in with the soap and the water and the whirring brushes. But in the midst of all this soggy cacophony, the woman catches a passing glimpse of someone lurking nearby. But as she turns for a closer look to the right, through the obscured rear window, the person she saw managed to circle around to the driver’s side undetected.
And I suppose one should point out this person is wearing some kind of obscuring rubber mask, featureless, and stark white in color, and is armed with an axe, which they use to shatter the front windshield, giving them a clear shot at the startled nurse, who is subsequently, and rather ferociously, beaten and cleaved to death as the car’s interior is bathed in her blood. And once the deed is done, as the crime scene continues to trundle along until its eventual discovery, the killer manages to escape unnoticed.
Later that night, while a fierce lightning storm rages, this same killer strikes again, terrorizing some poor farmer’s wife as he stalks around the pig pens until seizing one of the animals by the ears. Drawn out by this ruckus, the woman can detect nothing amiss and heads back inside, where she finds the pig’s severed head leaking blood and brains all over her bed. And while this woman, whom the film never even bothers to name, is eventually killed later in nearly the exact same scenario, for now, this near miss was all a setup so we could meet what passes for law enforcement in this community; for when her husband reports the incident the following morning, the loutish Sheriff’s response to this brazen attack is to just ignore it by handing the farmer a quarter, and then brushes him off with instructions to use the currency to “call someone who gives a shit.” Your tax dollars at work, folks. Thus, while his given name as Frank McIntosh (Holliday), we’ll be referring to this guy as Sheriff Hole. Sheriff Ass Hole.
Meanwhile, we’re finally introduced to the nominal hero of the piece, Gerald Martin (Faulks), who has recently moved to Paddock to live with his grandfather. Here, we learn Martin is a tinkerer in electronics, who loves his computer and video games, and makes money on the side repairing appliances and doodads. But Martin’s main source of income, which he spends mostly on the upkeep of his totally boss computer, is working for his buddy, Richard Simmons (Moseley), who runs an exterminating business. And today, they’ve been called out to a local bar where something apparently died up in the rafters and is currently stinking up the joint. And while expecting the culprit to be a dead rat or squirrel, neither Martin, or Simmons, nor the bar’s owner figured on it being a woman’s dead body stuffed into the attic crawlspace.
The corpse is identified as Marie West, a waitress at the bar who hadn’t been heard from in about a week. And while the coroner won’t sign off on this being a suicide like Sheriff Hole wants him to, he is eventually bullied into just “sewing her up and putting her in the ground” as soon as possible; no muss, no fuss. Because god forbid Sheriff Hole from actually doing something about the alarming number of bodies currently piling-up around his town. But, nope. Mr. Move Along, Nothing to See Here, swears this was just another boating accident. I mean, another suicide. And it kinda makes you wonder how he wrote off the body at the car wash, don’t it?
Anyhoo, once they’re cleared from the scene, Martin and Simmons head over to Nebbs’ Bait Shop and Fishing Emporium. Along the way, we find out Martin doesn’t like talking about his past much or his parents, and Simmons is nothing more than a garden variety gigolo, who only married his much older wife, Laura (Shepard), because she’s loaded and hopes to outlive her. Simmons also figures his wife might be having an affair with old man Nebbs, which he uses as a ready excuse to screw around with Nebbs’ older but more age appropriate daughter, Susan (Blackburn). Martin, meanwhile, strikes up a relationship with Nebbs’ youngest daughter, Lillian (Lane), who is back in town for the summer before returning to school in the fall. And hit it off so well they do, Martin makes a gift of his old computer so they can constantly stay in touch with what passed for the internet back in 1988.
And while those two share some confidential bits and bytes, on the other side of town in a noisy juke-joint near the railroad tracks, a Rita Miller (Moro) is called to the phone and agrees to meet up with the caller elsewhere. But as she leaves the bar and crosses the tracks on foot, Rita realizes she’s being followed but then recognizes who’s been stalking her. What she doesn’t realize is the danger she’s in, when the unseen killer whips out a familiar mask and tugs it on before taking several swings at the victim with his trusty axe.
When the body is found, in several pieces, Sheriff Hole had hoped to write this off as a pedestrian vs. train accident but the location of the body doesn’t jive with this custom theory and the coroner won’t cover for him anymore. And so, Sheriff Hole finally faces the fact a mad-dog killer is loose in his town. Unfortunately for the health and safety of the residents of Paddock, Sheriff Hole, who never met a crime scene he wouldn’t jerk-off, will be the one in charge of solving this mystery. And so, yeah. I’d expect a few more bodies to show up before the identity of the killer is resolved...
As one digs into the history of Eurosleaze filmmaker and earnest provocateur, José Ramón Larraz, one can find copious amounts of reviews, dissertations, and hot takes on his early career and films from the 1970s, where ghastly graphic horror and sensually explicit eroticism met on the graph with films like The House that Vanished (1973), Symptoms (1974), Vampyres (1974) and Stigma (1980). There’s also plenty to read on his farcical sex adventures, The Violation of the Bitch (1978) and The National Mummy (1981). What you won’t find, however, aside from a few fleeting mentions of his late career contributions, is much information or background on Larraz’s two straight-up conventional horror films, Rest in Pieces (1987) and Edge of the Axe (1988), which he shot under the alias of Joseph Braunstein. And while I’ve never seen Rest in Pieces, having finally watched Edge of the Axe for this retrospective, I think I have a pretty good idea why they’ve always gotten the short stick when it comes to expounding on the director’s oeuvre.
Born in Barcelona, Spain, in 1929 to a left leaning family, not an easy thing to be under the Franco regime, Larraz dropped out of college when his father passed away to help support his family as a full time illustrator and comic book writer. Inspired by Tarzan, his cinematic hero, Larraz specialized in jungle adventures. Around 1952, the artist got married and moved to Paris, where he landed a lucrative contract with the King Features syndicate. When the 1960s rolled around, Larraz also dabbled in fashion photography but found the beautiful models too tempting to fool around with as a married man and soon returned to illustrating, where his work started showing up in the United States via Warren’s Creepy and Eerie magazines.
For all of his life, Larraz had also been a passionate film fanatic but his career in filmmaking came about by sheer dumb luck. Seems Larraz was friends with one of the producers on Sergio Leone’s seminal spaghetti western, A Fistful of Dollars (1964), and the artist just so happened to be on set the day an extra got sick and couldn’t perform. Thus, Larraz stepped in; and though it was only a bit-part, he was hooked for good.
Around this same time, one of Larraz’s Belgian-based publishers had some money burning a hole in his pocket who also wanted to dabble in film production. Softcore sex films were huge business in Europe at the time, and were even starting to make their way over to America. And so, Larraz punched out a script about a couple of murderous pornographers and their latest victim. When filming commenced, Larraz also wound up in the director’s chair. And while he had no experience whatsoever, he had plenty of enthusiasm and an artist’s eye for composition and an illustrators sense for filling the frame for the most dramatic effect. Beyond that, he freely admits to relying on the crew, especially the lighting technicians and his cinematographer, who helped establish Larraz’s signature look. And once the cheap exploitation film was completed, Larraz used his Italian connections to find a distributor out of Denmark with Sam Lomberg, who released and marketed Whirlpool (1969) around the world as Adults Only, and the rest, as they say, would be Eurosleaze history.
Over his near two decade career one of Larraz’s signatures be it horror, thriller, or comedy, was how the act of sex was integral and moved the plot along as opposed to other adult films and filmmakers, where the sex scenes can be seen as more of a time-out to get the required skin quota in to square things up with the audience while derailing everything else, momentum wise. Edge of the Axe, however, is startlingly chaste; and as a latter day slasher movie cash-in I was kinda surprised by the lack of any T’n’A whatsoever. A lot of grisly violence, sure, but not even one single solitary shower scene or boob shot can be found and ogled. This may be explained away by it’s jumbled production history, as Edge of the Axe was a Spanish-American co-production, which some sources claimed was shot as a TV series or a TV movie, Al filo del hacha, for Spanish broadcast sometime in 1988, which would be later cut together and dubbed over into a feature and released directly to home video in 1989. To me, this doesn’t quite jive, especially with that kind of gory and blunt force trauma content, and feel the whole thing reeks of being a DTHV shot feature all along.
It looks like the film was shot, or at least did some extensive location shooting, somewhere in northern California or Oregon (-- other reviews say it was all shot in Greece). And Edge of the Axe has a strange Twin Peaks vibe to it even though it predates that TV series by almost two whole years; a rural off-kilter keen in both oddball location and quirky characters, enhanced by the screwy, not quite in sync looping of the Spanish actors as we run through the list of possible axe-murder suspects as Sheriff Hole starts to follow up on the Rita Miller homicide. And while not technically a prostitute, Miller kept a little black book filled with the names of all the married men she’d slept with and later extorted cash from -- Sheriff Hole included, who honest to god brags about tapping that piece of tail while her body parts were still being tagged and bagged-up at the crime scene.
And so, while the Sheriff starts running down names in the book to stir-up some spoiled herring gone red, let's stick with the folks we’ve already met because there’s a lot of baggage to sort through there. First we have Lillian, who admits she used to be on a ton of medications but has recently gone off them cold turkey. (Whether these meds were for physical ailments or mental defects isn’t known -- yet.) Lillian also bears some childhood trauma scars concerning a cousin, Charlie, who suffered a catastrophic brain injury after he fell from a swing when she accidentally pushed him too hard and too high. Haunted by flashbacks of the incident, which seem to be getting worse, Lillian has been trying to track Charlie down for several months now since he no longer seems to be at the mental hospital, where her father and uncle swore he was, using Martin’s computer to hack into the hospital records to see where he went but can find no trace of him.
And while digging further, Lillian discovers Martin also spent some time in the same mental ward, and there are ominous clues and cues saying Martin may just be Charlie or the killer or both. For Lillian also finds a file containing the names of all the victims collated with the location and cause of death on their shared computers. And let’s not forget the offhand comment Martin made to Simmons, saying if he asked nicely maybe the axe killer would take out his wife, Laura, next, solving all of his money problems. But, turns out Laura was totally bankrupt due to some bad investments, which her husband recently discovered, throwing some suspicion on Simmons, too, I guess. But there’s also a creepy priest acting creepy, the church organist who keeps vanishing, and then there’s the possibility of Charlie being the killer -- if indeed he and Martin aren’t the same person. And I wouldn’t rule out Sheriff Hole, either. I mean, Maybe there’s a reason he doesn’t want these murders investigated too closely?
And while all this speculating is going on, the killer strikes again, chopping up the farmer’s wife; and again, teaching holier than thou church gossip, Anna Bixby (Heatherly), a harsh practical lesson in judge not lest ye be judged; and again, when the severed head of ...SOMEONE, is found floating in the lake; aaaaaaaaand again, ambushing Laura out on the road, causing her to crash. Her passenger, with whom Laura was having an affair, not Nebbs but the organist, dies on impact, while she manages to limp away but doesn’t get very far before *whack* *splat* *gush*.
I swear a person almost needs a scorecard for Edge of the Axe to help sort through all the characters and help keep the suspects and victims straight, and keep a running tab on who was screwing who since no one actually does any screwing. Not helping matters much is a script written by a quorum of four whose English was obviously a second language, resulting in some pretty preposterous dialogue to make everyone sound more ‘Murican. But all these plot contrivances really don’t matter much once we breach the climax, which hits us over the head with one late twist after another as Lillian feels she has finally found proof that Martin really was Charlie and the killer all along. But before she can do anything with this information, Martin stops by her house with a few accusations of his own.
And, well, turns out Charlie never existed according to Martin, and was just a figment of Lillian’s imagination. See, it was Lillian who fell out of the swing and fractured her skull ten years ago, says Martin, which caused some catastrophic brain swelling, which triggered a constant psychopathic state, making Lillian very unstable and very dangerous, which is why her father had her committed. Charlie isn’t some split personality, she just made him up to distance herself from this other person suffering from these psychotic breaks, not realizing it was herself all along; outbreaks which were kept under some modicum of control with medication once she was deemed fit for release -- medication she’s no longer taking. As for why she killed all those women? And only women, I might add. Seems Lillian was afraid they’d discover her secret as all of them had some ties to the psychiatric hospital she stayed at in some capacity or other. I think. Maybe. Eh, who the hell knows.
Confronted with the truth, Lillian refuses to believe any of this (-- and frankly, so do I), and tries to get away from Martin. And as they scuffle around the house, they eventually tussle over a handy axe. And as this fight intensifies, Lillian manages to break away and flees from her house, just as the Sheriff and his posse arrives. And who called them? No. No. I’m asking you! Whoever or whatever I got five bucks says Sheriff Hole shoots them both just to be safe. And as they arrive in force, they hear Lillian screaming as she flees from the pursuing Martin. And as the sobbing Lillian collapses into Sheriff Hole’s arms, Martin, still holding onto that axe and looking a little suspicious, gets cut in half by the deputy’s shotgun. And as Martin bleeds out, and the Sheriff assures Lillian it’s all over, we see a clandestine smirk from the girl, who just got away with everything.
OK, so, turns out I have a long and sordid history with this film. Well, sort of, but not really. And it all dates back to the early 1990s and the Video Kingdom, my local video rental store that was both awesome and then some. There I was, wondering the Horror aisle, when the VHS box for something new called Edge of the Axe caught my eye. And I will give this to the Forum Home Video VHS release; it had some truly kick-ass cover art, which was complemented by some excellent grue-filled stills on the back. Alas, the film had been checked out. As it was the next time I came into rent something. And the next, and the next time, too. Several months passed, I think I might’ve even put a reserve on it, which was pretty long, but I never did get the damned thing rented and watched before the old VK dumped their VHS stock to make way for DVDs. In fact, I think the rental tape was long gone before then.
From there, I kinda forgot about the film, and the title, but the image of the VHS box still lingered and I tracked down a couple of titles later -- I remember something called The California Axe Murders (1974) and Axe (1974, thinking it might be the same film but, alas, they were not -- though those two films did turn out to be the exact same damned movie. And it wasn’t until a few weeks ago, as I massaged the web, looking for a film that began with the letter E for this nonsense, when Edge of the Axe once more got on my Must See radar. Of course it hadn’t made the digital leap yet, and those old VHS tapes were stupid expensive on eBay. Further digging showed Arrow Video had a remastered release of the film due sometime next year, but that didn’t do me much good right now. Luckily, I knew a guy, who new a guy, who knew a guy, who got me a rip of this film -- thanks, Doc; and so, now, finally, I have seen Edge of the Axe.
Which leaves the question, Was this closure worth the wait. Enh, it wasn’t that terrible. It definitely lacks the usual psycho-sexual razor’s edge and the true doomed delirium of Larraz’s earlier work. One easily gets the sense the director treated this as work for hire, and it's perfunction shows. Still, there are a few flashes of brilliance -- the opening sequence in the car wash is just amazeballs, but nothing that follows can recapture the energy of that first bloody salvo. As a slasher film it’s passable, just so. The plot makes little sense, which is not helped by that desperate Hail Mary of an ending that fell way short of the goal line. The score is fairly effective if not highly derivative. And the only thing really going for Edge of the Axe is the signature look of the killer, with his hooded black rain slicker, axe, and the white featureless mask, giving that contrast a nice spectral quality as he/she moves around in the dark. The film is also very, very graphic as we see the axe impacting the flesh and the resulting explosion of blood and gore, making Edge of the Axe effective enough for those into such things but it’s just not really in service to a whole lot else.
What is Hubrisween? This is Hubrisween. And now, Boils and Ghouls, be sure to follow this linkage to keep track of the whole conglomeration of reviews for Hubrisween right here. Or you can always follow the collective head of knuckle on Letterboxd. That's five reviews down with 21 to go! Up Next: Ever wonder what would happen if somebody took a skeevy pornographic horror movie, gave it a soft reboot, and turned it into an ersatz Lifetime Original Movie? Yes? No? Mabye? Well, tune in tomorrow to find out either way.
Edge of the Axe (1988) Calepas International :: José Frade Producciones Cinematográficas S.A. :: Forum Home Video / P: José Frade / D: José Ramón Larraz / W: Joaquín Amichatis, Javier Elorrieta, José Frade / C: Tote Trenas / E: Barry B. Leirer / M: Javier Elorrieta / S: Barton Faulks, Christina Marie Lane, Page Mosely, Fred Holliday, Patty Shepard, Alicia Moro, May Heatherly
