Axe Giant: The Wrath of Paul Bunyan

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

Let's get this out of the way first thing: Axe Giant: The Wrath of Paul Bunyan is a bad movie. Badly acted, badly directed, bad CGI effects (but, of course, you knew that as soon as you saw this listed on the SyFy Channel). And yet, it's entertaining in ways that its creators probably never intended. A group of teenage hoodlum wannabes are punished for their crimes...by being sent to camp. Their punishment comes in the form of drill-sergeant survivalist cop who clearly should not allowed within 100 feet of minors and a psychiatrist who wants them to get in touch with their feelings. For a teenager, I can't imagine which of them would be worse company for a weekend. As befits a horror movie that needs a body count, you will hate nearly all of these people and want them to die within 15 minutes. Don't worry, you'll get your wish. Pretty soon, the campers are getting pruned by a 15-foot-tall freak who appears to be developmentally disabled, until you realize that, somehow, he was smart enough to make or buy an double-headed ax with a 10-foot handle (C'mon, those things can't be easy to come by!) that's just big enough for a guy his size to use without looking like he's playing with a toy. He's given a back story familiar to anyone who's a fan of "maniac-in-the-back-woods" horror films. The movie plays out exactly as you expect it to. It "stars" (and I'm using the word in its loosest possible interpretation) Dan Haggerty and Joe Estevez. It's a hallmark of how low this movie sinks that its best-known performers are a TV actor whose last significant role was in 1978 and Martin Sheen's cheaper, less talented brother. Haggerty's role is little more than a cameo (and the scariest thing about this movie is, that apart from his hair and magnificently-sculpted beard going from blond to gray, he doesn't appear to have aged a day in the last 40 years). And Estevez spends the entire movie acting as if Gary Busey and Nicholas Cage are inside him, battling for possession of his immortal soul. There's nothing even remotely original about this movie: from turning a folkloric character into a generic psycho killer to the contrived excuses for why nobody's cell phone and car seem to work when they really need them, to the cookie-cutter characters whose odds of survival are inversely proportional to how annoying they are. Even Estevez's third-act freak-out seems oddly derivative. But if you approach this movie with appropriately low expectations, the cheese factor is good for a few laughs.

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.

I watched this because Dan Haggerty is in it,I remember very well growing up and watching Grizzly Adams on TV He doesn't have much of a role in this (lucky for him)but the acting is pretty bad and the cgi is also very bad I wont say anything stupid like I want that 90 minutes of my life back (that expression is so annoying) The blue ox was just terribly done Acting was bad cgi even worse Just not a good movie I also thought it might be one of those horror movies that was so bad it was funny no such luck At the end of the credits it says Paul Bunyan will return I certainly hope not.I searched and searched for something positive about the movie,it took a while but finally it hit me.The scenery is very nice,I don't know where it was made but the mountains and deep woods were very nice

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