Axes and Os – review

Director: Trent Duncan

Release date: 2024

Contains spoilers

The slasher film is a genre all of its own and this starts off as a typical slasher, with stereotyped characters and a psychotic killer (an axeman in this case). However, the film hints occasionally at a different genre and that is, of course, the vampire genre. After all, I wouldn’t be reviewing this if it was something else.

So, it starts in a house, with a record playing and we see a man, later revealed as Luther Dremel (Brandon Krum), who puts a camo cloak over a chair (the camera is close, showing parts of him only). He is clearly a large gentleman, and he taps the blade of a small axe hung on his belt. There is blood on the banister and he goes upstairs, a shower can be heard but, as he walks past a cupboard, a gun is fired from within and he falls. The shooter, a woman, tries to get the other woman with her to move. She doesn’t see Dremel stand, he uses the axe and he removes her heart.

Olivia and Leah

Olivia (Madison M. Bowman) is in bed and her phone goes. Leah (Cass Huckabay) is calling and asks if she is ready, but Olivia has changed her mind… too late, Leah is in the house and pulls the covers off her. The backstory seems to be that Olivia (who is the nerdy one and reading Call of Cthulhu at times through the film) has been hurt by Josh (Jake Nuttall) two-timing her and so Leah is taking her to Valentine’s Lake for a Valentine’s getaway of a girly weekend (they dub it a Galentine's getaway). It seems like Leah is part of the family who adopted Olivia.

he removes the heart

In the jeep waiting for them is Abby (Jamie Bernadette, Midnight Texas & All Girls Weekend) who will drive them and is the hard drinking one of the group. We note that Olivia makes sure she has her pills – normally this will trope towards a mental health thing, but not here. They pick up Dawn (Sara Wimmer) enroute who is the slutty one. They have hired a cottage. Elsewhere a woman, Margot (Noemi Cabrera), is training, she gets a call to check her email and realises she’s got Catherine (Eileen Antonescu) – finds and confronts her suggesting the killer will be back. Out in the woods a pair of hikers are killed by Dremel and the woman’s heart removed.

Brandon Krum as Dremel

Caroline is renting the girls their cottage and the girls meet her, Margot and local sheriff Preston (Cheyenne Hess) in quick succession. They head to the lake. When Olivia is on her own and slightly drunk, Josh shows up and she manages to get away by way of a swift knee between his legs, but ends up dropping her meds and then, angry, crushing them on the floor. Dawn finds and shags Josh and they are killed by Dremel. Of course, he is now hunting the girls in the cottage (which is the same cottage as seen in the prologue) In the main any character that crosses his path doesn’t tend to last too long..

vampire eyes

So far, so slasher. However, Olivia is having disturbed first-person dreams that includes sharp nails and Leah is concerned when she discovers Olivia no longer has meds. As they end up lost downstream, whilst escaping Dremel, they have a conversation and Olivia says that Leah must run if she starts to change… This is our vampire bit. The pills are keeping her vampire nature at bay (how she ended up in hospital, treated for vampirism, on a prescription and placed with Leah’s family are plot points that are not addressed) and without them she will have changing eyes, claws, fangs, and be a feral hunter. The scene is set for the showdown between axeman and vampire…

fangs

It is a shift up in what has been a fairly derivative and standard slasher. The police’s shock at the ongoing events and who the killer might be is best ignored too. It is take-your-brain-out slasher fare, until it turns on its head, pivoting into a feral vampire flick, and that is in the last ten or so minutes. It doesn’t set the world on fire, but it isn’t awful either. 4.5 out of 10 overall is fair.

The imdb page is here.

On Demand @ Amazon US

On Demand @ Amazon UK