“I have a hard time coming to an opinion on a film like this. At one point, I certainly won’t say it’s horrible, as it does have enough good moments to raise it above being classified as a waste of time.”
Sean Leonard – HorrorNews.net
Who made it? Directed by Marc Lawrence | Written by Marc Lawrence| Director Of Photography Glenn Roland | Special Effects/make up Bruce Adams| Music Charles Berstein
Who’s in it? Toni Lawrence | Jesse Vint | Catherine Ross | Paul Hickey | Iris Korn | Walter Barnes | Erik Holland
If you weren’t watching this the week it came out, you might have been watching…
Day Of The Jackal | Paper Moon | Soylent Green | Pat Garret & Billy The Kid
Production notes and whatnot
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0070537/fullcredits/?ref_=tt_cl_sm
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pigs_(1973_film)
What’s it all about?
Oooh! Well “Axe” opens promisingly for fans of the 1970s and all its garish kitsch, with some swirly-twirly technicolour studio credits, straight out of those lovely BBC ones they did for The Hitchhiker’s Guide To The Galaxy, if that means anything. And we can agree that nothing ages so badly as something that’s trying hard to look futuristic. But it promises fun ahead.
A lonely woodwind instrument that I can’t quite make out starts to whine and trill and Frederick Productions appears in a lush, almost romantic Hallmarky font. In the dawning sunrise behind us, we see emerging from a dusky silhouette, the kind of off-white clapboard farmhouse familiar to all horror-movie-goers. Not as grand as Forrest Gump’s gaff and a little less ominous than the Luntz’s Amityville Place. But rattly and weather-worn with a bit of chintzy olde worlde charm none the less.
Oh, note – clapboard is pronounced “clabbered” I think. This annoys me and I don’t know why.
The woodwind turns into the sad brass Krypton riff from Superman the Movie. This bit:
…and then a lonely piano joins in. One confidently expects Bill Bixby to wander past thumbing a lift.
They’re piling on the atmos. The titles go on. And on. And on. As does this movie, frankly. And we’ll talk about why later. But eventually it tells us it’s called “AXE” and some stripes of blood run down the screen.
That’s it. Got it? Farm-House. Axe. Frederick Productions. Its taken 2.5mins already.
Oh by the way, I’m going to try and not labour the point during the plotting of AXE about its repetition, long scenes, endless shots, repetition, padding and repetition. But take it from me. If you read each coming sentence of this review two and half times, you’ll get the idea.
Anyhoo, percussion hits. A drum freak-out. Jazzy cymbals. Proper bongo craziness and we are into the movie proper.
Some shady figures are walking through a lobby of some sort. An apartment building. An old school lift indicator sweeps up to the tenth floor. And out of the lift come the key characters we’re going to be spending about an hour with. Hey, lets’ meet them.
First is Billy. A timid and naïve type who doesn’t really fit with the cigar-swagger of his gang-mates. We sense he’s here against his will. Looks wise, he’s essentially the painter Bob Ross.
Next up is Lomax, who everyone calls Max. Cigar chomping, roly-poly, sweaty and pervy (which is also the name of my divorce lawyers), he barrels along in an obnoxious, fuck you manner. Not someone to mess with. Or reason with. Or eat with, frankly.
These two are corralled and encouraged by the gang leader, Steele. A more wirey and sinister type, he’s got a touch of the David McCallum’s about him. Its suits and skinny ties and lank hair. All mid forties. Nasty bunch.
More bongos on the soundtrack as they get off on the 10th floor and hide themselves away in a grotty apartment. Low furniture, cheap wood, crackly man-made fabrics, it’s got a definite 1973-ness. They’re waiting for someone. We don’t know who, but it isn’t for a birthday party. Bored and antsy, Max rummages around. He finds a blond wig, a pink dress. So they’re waiting for a cross-dresser, a drag act or Olivia Newton John.
Steele picks at his nails with a knife. Lomax burns holes in the dress. Billy is nervous. Some snakey tambourine joins the soundtrack to keep the bongos company.
A sound? Yep. It’s their victim. A chap called Aubrey (which is a name you don’t hear much anymore, forever ruined by the cartoon character. Like Garfield or Marmaduke).
Aubrey’s a camp one and he stumbles in, all flappy collars and corduroy, with his “male companion.” What Eddie Izzard might have called “a weirdo transvestite,” rather than the executive type.
The goons are waiting and its clear Aubrey isn’t happy to see them and knows what’s coming. His companion cowers as Steele and Max go to town, with sharp slaps, a bloodied cheek. Steele takes Max’s cigar and shoves it deep into Aubrey’s mouth, much to screams and squirms.
Then it’s a nasty minute of POV punching and beating, kicking and heavy handed pistol whipping. It’s not clear what old Aubs had done to deserve this. But he got it, either way. Aubrey lies still. Terrified and surprised, his companion makes a desperate run for it, throwing himself from the 10th floor window with a long, fading Wilhelm-ish Scream.
Job done, hurrying to get the hell outta Dodge, the hoods depart, into their non-descript sedan and head out of town to escape the cops. Streets become country roads become farm-track as they drive. Southern corny Country and Western toons twang and slide on the radio. Young Billy is shaken. “I didn’t know we were gonna kill him!” Steele is as cool as his namesake. They need to disappear. Find some folks who’ll put them up for a while.
A very efficient first 11 minutes. We have our villains.
Now we’re at the old clabbered farm house from the credits. A plan and simple plain interior. Tile, formica, stone, wood. Somewhere a dog barks. Indoors, in a wheelchair, silent and staring sits a gentle, beardy wizened grandpa type. Mind somewhere else, eyes blink out into the middle distance. He is not conscious of his surroundings. Thankfully Gramps has his granddaughter, young Lisa. A young girl, perhaps 15 or 16 years old? She tends to him. Cooking on the stove and making house. Plain but cosy.
Meanwhile, night falls as it inevitably does and our gangsters are hungry for fruit, hi-jinx and rough-housing and gun-play. But mainly fruit, it would seem. Bowling into a ratty, aluminium framed general store, Max and Steele start fucking about and being genuinely unpleasant with the shop staff. They yell and curse at the terrified and timid assistant, her shaky in pale skin and flowery tabard. They smoke in an obnoxious manner, upset displays, yell about the quality and then start a little skeet shooting antics with the rotten fruit and their loud revolver. To be honest, and a cursory Google hasn’t helped much, I don’t know what skeet shooting is. I heard it in movies. I’m going to assume it’s a US version of clay-pigeon shooting, and move on. Anyhoo, they do that for a bit.
Billy meanwhile, during all this nastiness, remains in the car. I imagine he’s asked for an avocado wrap or hummus falafel and is happy to wait and draw smiley faces in the steamy windows.
“Nice melons” Steele says as they approach the assistant, and then it gets even nastier. Clothes torn off, the poor woman trembles in her bra, milky white skin on show, depressingly putting up no kind of fight in the face of a revolver and two nut-jobs. Steele and Max kill time tormenting her for a bit, with some olde William Tell action and an apple on her head with gruesome looking results.
Meanwhile, back at the ranch. (How often can you honestly type that?) young Lisa is doing her mumsy farmhouse bit and tending to the chickens in the yard. If you want to picture Lisa, go with a young snubby nosed, fresh faced Linda Blair type with a bucket-load of Sissy Spacek feebleness thrown in. Wholesome and honest, but a stiff breeze might knock her over. She’s all lacy petticoats and milk n cookies.
Gathering eggs and doing her farm chores, Lisa grabs up a chicken and – in a nice bit of foreshadowing – takes a hefty axe to its neck. Off screen, but you get the idea. A nice heavy “clunk.” She’s done this before. Barefoot and humble, Lisa pads about the bare cold kitchen preparing a meal. A simple heavy fridge with milk and eggs, we watch as she fusses about. Upstairs, Gramps sits catatonic in front of a TV with no signal – just crackly voices and a blurry, fuzzy reception.
She feeds him eggs, spooning them to his mouth like an infant. The soundtrack of a US version of Mr & Mrs, an old 60s game show seems to be playing through the TV.
All is serene, so the score goes a bit woodwind and piano. Actually it sounds like a piano playing the clarinet. Or an oboe being flung as a harpsichord. I can’t quite make it out. But ahhh, so calm. What could go wrong?
Well what a surprise. We’re about 18mins in and yep, it’s time for worlds to collide. Outside the farmhouse, Max and Steele and a freaked out Billy pull up. This humble farm looks like a place to lay low.
The soundtrack adds some castanets to accompany Max and Steele wondering around the clattery storm doors and cheap windows. Through the window they spy the messy kitchen, all eggs and spilt milk. A noise upstairs of breaking glass!
The two head in. An innocent Lisa confronts them from the top of the stairs. Max and Steele give it the old “Sick friend in the car,” routine. They need somewhere to stay. Is there room? Lisa explains it’s just her and old gramps who don’t move about too much.
Yep. This’ll do fine. The mood changes as Max and Steele start barking orders and elbowing around, taking charge. Even the arrival of a cop car causes no worry as they press the gun to Gramps’s head and tell Lisa to “take care of it, or the old man gets it” etc.
Forced to comply, Lisa dismisses the cops and cooks a chicken dinner for the 3 hoods. They chew and spit and lick fingers and generally make it clear they’d be rubbish on “Come Dine With Me.”
Finally at the end of his rope, torn with fear and regret, Billy uses the distraction of the poultry to make a run for it. It’s clear he doesn’t want any part of this murderous gang. Max and Steele head out to look for him irritably. That chicken will be cold by the time they get back, but might make a nice summer salad.
Upstairs, Lisa is oddly distant, spaced out. Dreamlike and silent, she wanders barefoot into the bathroom. A grimy, chipped white tile cold looking place, familiar to anyone who watched SAW and thought, “that looks nice.” We get the Krypton Superman music again. Lisa’s head swirls with visions: The mirror cracks, running thick with blood. In the bathtub, a snake writhes.
(We just say “bath” in the UK. We might say “tub.” We never say both). Lisa reaches forward to find the cut-throat razor that sits on the sink. (Or sink-bowl, as the Americans might say). Picking it up, aware of her fate, she trembles, holding the glinting blade to her pale wrists. Does she have the courage? We never know as suddenly Billy is at the door. He wants to talk. We sense, confide in her? We know he wants out and needs this girl’s help.
Steele and Max are back, now tormenting Gramps in the sitting room. As the TV burbles away, they find a picture of young gramps in his army gear. He was a colonel, it seems. Hence his interest in chicken perhaps? No, probably not.
They tease him, shoving a hat on his head, killing time while Steele cuts his toenails and Max smokes more cigars and Billy scuttles away, ashamed of the whole set up. Have he and Lisa cooked up a plot?
A while later, Max is bored and horny, which is a horrible combination. Probably. Lying on a thin mattress, filling ashtray on his bulging gut, he’s restless and fancies he might get some of that Lisa action. He gets up and prowls the home, past chintzy knick-knacks and china whatnots. Tambourines give a bit of rattle-snake atmos. Max finds young Lisa asleep on her bed. Clambering on, he hauls his bulk on-top of her, clear he’s going to take her (“even if it’s burglary,” in Uncle Monty’s infamous phrase).
Bit Lisa is too quick and, well prepared, reaches for the cut-throat razor, slashing and sawing at Max’s fat neck. He screams and gurgles and gasps and writhes but Lisa, silent and determined, hacks away methodically, letting crimson blood seep into Max’s collars, soaking the shirt and mattress and dripping on Lisa’s face.
Silently once more, with a sense of dreamy purpose, Lisa returns back to the bathroom. Bloodied smeared cheeks greet her in the cracked mirror. She turns the hand-towel into a maxi-pad in the style of Jules and Vincent, before fetching a huge old-style heavy chest.
Lisa retrieves the dead body of Max and drags his fat ass into the bathroom, heaving him into the “tub.” Then its “chicken time” again as she hacks, hacks, hacks Max’s corpse into bits, with huge heavy swings of her blade, using all her terrified strength. We hear it. We don’t see it.
She cleans up the blood, like a pernickety Norman Bates, mopping and wiping. We fade as church bells signal morning.
So, rise and shine! Billy, being the helpful sort, is up with the lark and keen to help young Lisa who appears to be struggling to move a huge fuck-off old trunk up into the loft. Being the kind sort, and Lisa being the feeble sort and not so quick on the missing Max+heavy trunk=mighty suspicious, he gladly steps in and hauls this heavy trunk up, up, up the stairs to the loft. We see the trail of shining bright blood that it leaves behind in spits and spots on the stairwell…
Trunk hefted up to the darkness, Billy catches the blood on his hands. Wrenching open the trunk, he is aghast at its gruesome contents. Lisa pleads that it was Steele that did it! She has been sworn not to tell!
Meanwhile, as Billy gets to grips with the gang falling apart in the loft (literally, in poor Max’s case), Steele wanders the farmhouse looking for his compadres. To escape the madness, Billy has grabbed Lisa and the pair are fleeing into the woods. We see Lisa armed again with the cut-throat razor. Can she off another hood? They stumble past the bloody axe, now buried in a tree stump. But Billy pleads for Lisa’s help. He just wants to escape! He sees the razor and takes it, mistaking Lisa’s intentions.
We begin to clamber to the climax as Billy hides out in the woods and Lisa returns to the house. Steele asks for her company, in a manner more seedy than the bread she gives him to tear at. He makes advances but Lisa is avoiding him. Finally, Steele decides he will take Lisa for himself and he drags her upstairs to Grandpa. As Gramps dumbly watches TV, Steele roughly grabs, tears, pulls and grinds with a terrified Lisa. On TV, Gramps listens to a horse race, equine gallopy tension mounting!
But Steele is overcome with lust and rage so is not watching for Lisa’s hands, which grab at the spare axe in a woodpile and bring it crashing down on him. Gramps and his TV and splashed with hot blood.
A while later, the house is calm. Billy returns from the forest to see what has happened, only to find a calm Lisa spooning tomato soup to her silent Gramps. “Where’s Steele?” Lisa says nothing. Billy goes looking. But no Steele to be found? Lisa feeds Billy some cold, unappetising looking soup.
Billy drinks and slurps…but is distracted by a noise. Tap tap tap? Drip drip drip?
Blood is dripping in the fireplace. Stunned, realising what may have happened, he barely notices the wedding ring floating in his soup…
And with a dull thud, a very carved up and very bloody and extremely dead Steele falls down the chimney, staring dead eyed from the grate.
Police sirens! Billy panics and runs! A cop car pulls up! Stop! Gun fire! Ross runs from the house! Gunfire blasts! Freeze Frame, Butch and Sundance style!
Meanwhile, in serene quiet upstairs, Gramps continues to drink his soup, Lisa quietly spooning it into his trembling mouth.
Freeze frame.
The longest 4 minutes of titles ever, considering it’s a cast of about 5 people.
End.
Relax.
Is it any good?
Well. Considering the brief running time, the low budget and the am-dram hand-made, “shot over a weekend” feel this picture has, there’s much been penned on the subject of its creation.
Writer-director Frederick R. Friedel had seen Citizen Kane, made by a 25 year old Orsen Welles and decided he too would have a crack at the movie game while he was that age. Gathering his cast, crew and script in a rented North Carolina farmhouse, he pulled together scraps and short ends of 35mm Kodak film stock (stored in producer Pat Patterson’s fridge) he could get cheap and spent $25,000 (about £140,000 today) filming on and around the house.
With the sparce script and flat performances, it was unlikely Friedel was going to get a full 90m picture from such a basic set up: Young girl kills three gangsters – so many attempts were made just to, let’s face it, pad the damned thing out. Hence the exhaustingly long and slow opening and closing credits, and many repeated shots of the cast idling and waiting. Steele must pick the same finger nails and Max must chew the same bit of dry chicken about eight times. The lift rises to the 10th floor twice. We see soup and eggs being cooked in real time. And nothing is cut-to, if we can see the plodding meandering prep and faffing and approaching and driving there. It barely squeaks into it’s 60mins plus running time, and would certainly have made a snappier 30m TV episode.
We have, to further grow our understanding of how this made it from grotty typewriter to Kodak cast-offs with a short piece I tracked down, penned by Richard W. Helms who was credited as focus-puller but was on set as a general helper with gaffing, sound and some cut scenes of driving stunts. He has this to say on the making of AXE…
“While my memory of events might be tainted after forty years, it does seem that there was a great deal of plot left on the cutting-room floor, because of time constraints placed on Patterson by his distributor. AXE (aka LISA,LISA) was planned to play as part of a three-or-four film bill at local drive-ins, and the owners of those drive-ins didn’t want people hanging in their cars TOO long without making a trip to the concession counter… The target audience was the drive-in crowd who needed some background noise while they made out. For that reason, Patterson may have seen little need for such dramatic devices as back story and character development. In those days, people attending drive-in movies paid for darkness and privacy, not great cinema…”
Is it worth your time?
Well it’s a curio, certainly – but then that’s been true of almost all the banned, prosecuted and withdrawn movies we’ve sat through so far. It’s no Last House On The Left (although the influences are clear as day. Influences? Blatant rip offs? Rips-off? I’m being nice). It is pretty charmless, with remarkably thin characterisation as Helms notes above. Who has time for that? So what depth of backstory we get can be summed up by standard tropes. Cigar guy, beard guy, knife guy, wheelchair guy, apple woman, chicken girl etc.
We can talk about the casting. All the main troop are doing their best with the flat, grumpy lines they’ve been given. To save money on casting, Billy (our Bob Ross lookalike) is in fact director Friedel. Our store woman is probably the most realistic of the bunch, being cast specifically for her amateur, non-acty reactions and timid shy paleness.
There’s not much to say about our goons who are given so little to do that beyond sitting about and complaining, there’s little there to allow their dramatic chops to take flight.
Similarly poor Gramps is required to sit motionless throughout and show no response or reaction to the horrors and taunts. He does, to be fair, look sufficiently dopey in the hat and can slurp soup and eggs like a young Anne Ramsay, and was cast due to his “evocative” face. Or “face” as I would have put it.
Which brings us to our hero, young Lisa. Playing a timid teen, Leslie Lee was in fact a strapping 23 years old at time of shooting. Friedel put the casting of Lisa down to her “feeling” and he felt, walking into the audition room, “she really was Lisa…”
Certainly Lee has a captivating presence and is ultimately very watchable. With tiny, bird-like movements, we feel her anxiety and panic, but what is interesting and a nice choice is that fact that – learnt perhaps from Grandpa – there is no panic, no fight, no helpless final-girl screaming and wrestling. Lee is flat, dazed and brings a sense of exhausted inevitability to her role. All her fight has gone, possibly from the thankless taks of feeding and cleaning up after her granddad day after weary day. She knows a fight is useless. That pounding and screaming are only going to make things worse. So she seems to visibly slump and give in to her attackers demands…all the while, hidden inside, a razor sharp mind – dulled by domestic monotony – takes flight with her plans and plotting.
There;s no fight when thegang arrive, no breathless race for the phone, no trip wires or Laurie-Stroud bent coat-hangars. Just a weary submission to keep the men happy.
Even in the bathroom, as she toys with the straight razor and wonders nervously if it would be easier to just trake her own life, we are with her desperation. Not all heroes can be Descent-like warriors or Ripley-esque bitch-slappers. Some are simple young girls who, having being submitted to a life of servitude, might just see such a gruesome home-invasion as yet another weight on the yoke.
Lee’s blankness as she chops, slices and destroys her foes is not a Hannibal psycho numbness. There is no glint in the eye, no mischief, no glee or sadism. Lee despatches her assilants with the same dull plodding routine as she does in, what we will now call, Chekov’s chicken.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chekhov%27s_gun
In other notes I scribbled.
Big nods and well done’s to Friedel’s budget use. To have put the Grandpa infront of actuial TV footage would have been a fucker to edit, continuity wise, and cost a small fortune in TV rights. In a brilliant move, he has the TV show nothing but rights-free static and has the sounds of the TV acted out by performers from his own script. So we get realistic sounds of game shows and horse-races, for only the cursory cost of the $80-100 the crew were given as a one-off payment for the full 9 days shoot.
Axe was originally released under the title Lisa, Lisa, under which it screened in Greenville, South Carolina, beginning December 9, 1974. It was re-released four years later in January 1978 under the title Axe, premiering in Los Angeles. Friedel did not favour this blunt (or sharp) new title as he felt it lacked the subtlety, “surprise, and irony” of Lisa, Lisa. Which I suppose is true. A movie called Lisa, Lisa that has a teenage girl hack up a gangster and shove him up a chimney is a shock. A film called AXE can hardly say to surprise you with the same sketch.
Nasty?
Sadly, once again we are treated to the before and after of all the bloodshed. We see axes raised high! We see wide eyed responses! We see axes thud down to hit “something” off screen, just out of shot. We hear things. We see blood splash on TVs, on tiles, on clothes. But there is, if I recall (and I may be watching an edited cut), no blade on flesh action. It’s all threat and aftermath, much like the disappointment of Mad Doctor Of Blood Island (see earlier review #4).
The nastiest part of the movie, to be fair, is the opening scene in the hotel when poor Aubrey gets his corduroy in a muss during his beating, kicking, slapping and cigar-in-the-mouth torture. This sets up a level of violence that simply never pays off.
What does it remind me of?
Blimey, it ticks lots of boxes. We have Craven’s Last House On The Left/Krug & Co to thank for the set up. Yes, it lacks the horrors and bloodshed, or the smart Virgin Spring revenge motive. But we are still in gang-home-invasion territory. Lisa’s visions and toying with straight-razors in grotty bathrooms we saw done better in Pigs/Daddy’s Deadly Darling. The towels and blood, as said, are straight out of Pulp Fiction. The score has a touch of John Carpenter at his stabby synth best (see Halloween) and the bathtub (I know…) killing gives us enough Psycho to be going along with. Oddly, the black skinny tie in the red blood gave me Mr Orange flashbacks from Tarantino’s Reservoir Dogs.
The chintzy household knick-nacks we last saw in Schoolgirls In Chains (see also Rob Reiner’s excellent King adaptation Misery) and And the freezeframe ending – while done for running time extension – will have you Western buffs recalling Butch and Sundance.
Oh and Billy is still Bob Ross.
Where can I see it?
Lisa Lisa (aka AXE) was released on DVD by Image Entertainment on September 25, 2001. In 2006, it was released by ILC Prime on March 27. It was later released by 4Digital Media on October 20, 2008. The film was released for the first time on Blu-ray by Severin on December 15, 2015 as a double-feature alongside Friedel’s Kidnapped Coed. The double-feature was also released on DVD that same day. But you can get the version I saw on YouTube if you sign-in and pass their age restrictions here. Enjoy!
letsgetthebannedbacktogether.uk 