We watch several movies a week. Every Friday, we'll talk a little about some of the movies we watched that we felt were Worth Mentioning.
An '80s slasher, a look back at Cannon, Nicolas Cage, and Paganini.
EDGE OF THE AXE (1988)
I first heard about the 1988 slasher movie Edge of the Axe from my friend Jon Hodges, who I met back in the days when I was writing horror franchise fan fiction and running a fan fiction website. JH brought the movie to my attention in the late '90s or early '00s, and then it mostly faded into the back of my mind until it was brought to Blu-ray earlier this year. Watching the cleaned up version of the movie, I began to wonder why JH was the only person who ever recommended this to me over the last thirty-two years. Edge of the Axe should have been seen by a lot more genre fans, and hopefully it is being found by more people now that it's on Blu-ray. 1987's Blood Rage has finally gained appreciation thanks to a Blu-ray release and a showing on The Last Drive-In with Joe Bob Briggs, and Edge of the Axe deserves the same sort of late discovery.
Directed by José Ramón Larraz (under the name Joseph Braunstein), this was a Spanish production that was also partially filmed in California, as it's set in the U.S. and has English speaking characters. Barton Faulks stars as Gerald Martin, an odd fellow who lives in an elderly man's guesthouse and spends most of his time sitting in front of his computer - a character ahead of his time. Gerald is so advanced that he's even able to chat with other people through his computer, something I wasn't able to do until ten years after this movie was released. Gerald's #1 chat buddy is local girl Lillian Nebbs (Christina Marie Lane), who he gets into something of a romantic relationship with... and when people around their town start getting hacked up with an axe wielded by a white-masked killer who resembles Michael Myers with a shaved head, Gerald and Lillian are both likely to become prime suspects to the viewer.
Edge of the Axe is a really cool slasher with an intriguing "whodunit" element, a film that will keep you trying to guess the killer's identity throughout. In addition to Gerald and Lillian there are plenty of other people around to suspect - including Gerald's exterminator best friend Richard (Page Mosely), who married an older woman named Laura (Patty Shepard) because she had money, and likes to hook up with other women behind her back even before he finds out that she doesn't have money anymore.
Apparently Larraz said that Edge of the Axe was his least favorite of the twenty-plus projects he directed, but I think he and screenwriters Joaquín Amichatis, Javier Elorrieta, José Frade, and Pablo de Aldebarán made a good movie here, and recommend that slasher fans seek it out.
ELECTRIC BOOGALOO: THE WILD, UNTOLD STORY OF CANNON FILMS (2014)
Several years ago, I watched and enjoyed director Mark Hartley's documentary Machete Maidens Unleashed!, which covered the classic exploitation movies that were made in the Philippines. Now I have finally caught up on another Hartley documentary I have been meaning to get around to for a while, a documentary that covers the rise and fall of Cannon Films, a company that was run by Menahem Golan and Yoram Globus during its most prolific period.
The Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2 and Masters of the Universe are the movies I most strongly associate with the iconic Cannon Films logo, but those movies really came along when the Golan and Globus era was starting to crumble, and were two of nearly two hundred movies Cannon pumped out during the 1980s. Other Cannon films of the time include New Year's Evil; Charles Bronson vehicles like the Death Wish sequels, 10 to Midnight, Murphy's Law, Messenger of Death, and Kinjite; ninja movies (among them American Ninja); breakdancing movies; the Sylvester Stallone flicks Cobra and Over the Top; Chuck Norris movies, and the early Jean-Claude Van Damme movies Bloodsport, Cyborg, and Kickboxer.
Cannon had their arthouse contributions, but their specialty were schlocky B-movies built around violence, nudity, and explosions. In other words, they made movies that are very appealing to me. They just didn't handle their finances very well, and when their backs were against the wall they did the opposite of what they should have done: instead of making smaller budgeted movies they could profit off of, they boosted the budgets in hopes making blockbusters. It didn't work out.
Electric Boogaloo is an interesting look back at some very entertaining '80s movies, and the poor business decisions that brought the fun to an end.
PRIMAL (2019)
I was sold on checking out director Nick Powell's action thriller Primal as soon as I read a synopsis saying it would be trapping a character played by Nicolas Cage on a cargo ship with a bunch of exotic animals, including a white jaguar, that have been released from their cages. I was hoping the movie would focus more on the "nature run amok" aspect, but that's really only one element of it. The animals are not the primary threat in the film. The major threat is a "political assassin", being extradited to the U.S. with federal and military escort, that gets loose on the ship and starts knocking people off one-by-one. Basically, Primal is "Die Hard on a cargo ship", with some exotic animals thrown in the mix for extra spice.
Cage's character is big game hunter Frank Walsh, who is introduced as he captures the aforementioned white jaguar in the Brazilian rainforest. He loads the jaguar and other animals onto the cargo ship so he can deliver them to zoos, but then U.S. marshals and neurologist/Navy officer Dr. Ellen Taylor (Famke Janssen) show up with assassin Richard Loffler (Kevin Durand), who has to be taken to the U.S. by ship because he has an ateriovenous malformation that could rupture if he's put on a plane. Loffler escapes from his chains, and lets the animals loose as well.
Loffler causes a lot of trouble, but Primal does have some of the animal attacks I was hoping for after reading the synopsis. Monkeys rip into a man, the jaguar proves to be a man-eater, there's danger from venomous snakes... These things brought a bit of extra entertainment to a movie that wouldn't have been quite as interesting otherwise. That said, Durand does make for a capable, intimidating villain, so I wasn't too displeased that the animals weren't the most threatening thing on the ship.
Primal is sort of a generic addition to the Cage filmography, it's easy to image any number of action stars playing Frank Walsh, but I enjoyed it well enough.
PAGANINI HORROR (1989)
Paganini Horror is the sort of movie that's worth mentioning not because it's good, but because it's so bad that I had fun watching it and laughing at how ridiculous it was, how poorly it was put together, how atrocious the dialogue was. Director Luigi Cozzi wrote the screenplay with Daria Nicolodi, who plays a prominent role in the film, and I kept wondering if they realized how bad all of this was while they were on set. Did they start questioning themselves while bringing this mess to life?
The story (which Raimondo Del Balzo also gets credit for) centers on a rock band - consisting of three female members and one male - that's introduced performing a song that was built on the foundation of Bon Jovi's "Shot Through the Heart". I watched this movie with blog contributor Priscilla, and she picked up on the Bon Jovi inspiration very quickly. Desperate to prove themselves, the band makes a deal with a shady gentleman played by Donald Pleasence to acquire a never published song written by famed violin virtuoso Niccolò Paganini two hundred years earlier. The band will turn Paganini's work into a song called "Paganini Horror", and set up a video shoot in a house where Paganini once resided, with a popular horror filmmaker behind the camera.
There's a legend that Paganini sold his soul to the devil in exchange for eternal fame, and that legend seems to be proven true as soon as the band plays the song inside this house. Things get very strange, people involved with the video shoot start dying off, and everyone discovers that there's an invisible wall around the property that is keeping them trapped there, forced to deal with the evil forces they have unleashed.
The scenes of the characters being put through horrific experiences are not well done at all, and what puts this movie over the top into hilarity are the performances and the lines these actors had to deliver. Facing certain death, three women stand around talking about the situation and reveal themselves to be experts not only in wood fungus (fungus is important for a couple minutes of the movie), but also on the theory that the universe was founded on musical structure. They drop lines in a very matter-of-fact way, saying things no human being would ever say, and I would think that it's impossible for any viewer to make it through this scene without laughing at the absurdity of it all.
Paganini Horror is really bad, but there were times when it was unintentionally hilarious.
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