Axe Giant - Die Rache des Paul Bunyan

Being British I'm not familiar with the legend of Paul Bunyan, but this is a slasher version of the story. An ugly, 15ft, hundred odd year old giant kills a bunch of teens (old looking teens, it has to be said!) attending boot camp in the Minnesota backwoods. With a huge axe! Wonder where he got that from? This is a low budget movie with some wooden acting and very çheap CGI effects. It also has a local loon (a la Crazy Ralph, etc), and sex means death. Slasher movie staples. But hey, we watch these movies because we want to see people get killed. And there is plenty of that here. Limbs amputated, bodies sliced in half, very graphic but also very cartoonish. I rarely like these cheap, made for TV movies (Sci Fi, etc) but this one was reasonably entertaining.

The scenery is really quite beautiful, the make-up for giant Bunyan is very well done and fearsome and Thomas Downey also was appropriately gruff and humorous. Unfortunately that is all that Axe Giant: The Wrath of Paul Bunyan has in its favour. Apart from the scenery, the look of the film is shoddy, with rushed-through special effects and editing and too many scenes that are shot too brightly. The giant Bunyan looks fearsome enough, but we don't know anything about him and he doesn't have that much of a personality, never coming across as genuinely menacing. And that does dilute things a lot. The dialogue has cheese and awkwardness written all over it, with the banter truly inane. The characters range from obnoxious(Joe Estevez) to bland(pretty much everybody else. The acting is bad really with the best it gets generally being forgettable, only Downey makes any kind of impression. Joe Estevez especially is so bad it's almost comical. What hurts Axe Giant: The Wrath of Paul Bunyan is the story, generally too padded and pedestrian with nothing exciting, suspenseful or even engaging with a lack of any heart. It also takes far too long to get going, we get forty minutes of tiresome and increasingly irrelevant banter before Bunyan arrives on the scene, and sadly even with his presence the movie never quite takes off. Overall, SyFy have done much worse and it is certainly nowhere near as bad as most of the stuff The Asylum has churned out, but still not a good movie at all. 3/10 Bethany Cox

We begin on a cold and wintry day in 1894 Minnesota. Lumberjacks are getting ready to feast on a big mammal - unfortunately, the beast turns out to be Paul Bunyan's legendary blue ox. The wrathful Mr. Bunyan arrives and chops up everyone in sight. Discovering the massacre, graying "Grizzly Adams" star Dan Haggerty (as Bill) is appalled. We will get to see the bloody opening scene in even in more detail, during a later flashback. In the present, the area is apparently a corrections facility for first offenders, and we see a group arrive for correction. They are not "technically" a group of five teenagers, as is pointed out by kindly psychologist Kristina Kopf (as Ms. K)...

The "boot camp" is run in a drill sergeant manner by Thomas "Tom" Downey. On a hike, handsome hunk Jesse Kove (as Zachery "Zack" Moore) finds Paul Bunyan's ox' horn and makes it a keepsake. This desecration rouses monster Bunyan, who has grown into a much bigger ugly monster. He decides to chop everyone up, like he did in the past. One good thing about the story was the inability to predict the numerical death order for the males. The females are easier. Amber Collins (as Claire "CB" Tanner) makes the most of her role. Some of the early scenes are okay, especially nice is the deer and bear. By the end, Bunyan is laughable. The filmmakers should have showed less.

Axe Giant (6/1/13) Gary Jones ~ Amber Connor, Joe Estevez, Jesse Kove, Thomas Downey

Synopsis: Paul Bunyan practices his axe swing on some doofus teens.

Rating: 3.5/10. Good location for the film, and it's actually a good premise. The characters are all very stereotypical and the dialog is bland. All that is really needed for a good creature film is a good creature and some good kills. There were some okay kills, and the creature wasn't bad when he was by himself, but the interactions with others devolved into these ridiculous scenes of humans cowering on the ground while a giant hand reached out for them. These scenes aren't silly enough to be funny, and not serious enough to maintain any tension or dread. It just doesn't work. Bunyan was actually better in the beginning of the movie as a regular sized man.

Survival Lesson: Don't mess with totems. you never know what power they hold or what they mean to other people.

Group of indistinguishable young-offenders are sent to a boot camp for delinquents where there meet a murderous Paul Bunyan. Apparently shown on Syfy channel first (I didn't see it until it appeared streaming on Netflix today), it does have the vibe of their brand of low- budget shenanigans, but it could've been much worse as thankfully the putrid stretch of The Asylum (who didn't make this, but does countless Syfy films) isn't anywhere near this one. That's about the only positive I can say for this pedestrian, mundane, silly, badly CGId little film. Might be (somewhat) passable for a rainy-day Saturday afternoon but not more more.

Eye Candy: Jill Evyn is briefly topless