Axegrinder 5: Blood Vengeance

Axegrinder 5: Blood Vengeance is a direct continuation from part 4. This means for the first 25 minutes there's lots of footage from part 4 including all of the kills. Dennis Devine returns to direct here as does one of the convict girls and the sister? Of the pretty Asian chick. This feels like something made quickly to cash in on the "name" value of the franchise. There's about 3 new kills here which are decent. The all female rock band only mentioned in the first film are the main focus here. There's also an annoying, weird, redheaded, short White dude who is somehow related to the cute Asian girl. He eats sunflowers to add comic relief. Part 3 was pretty awful and 4 redeemed the series a bit. This feels like a regression but at least it didn't feature a plethora of footage from parts 1-3. David Sterling seems to like to hamstring his directors with very limited budgets which force them to reuse footage from previous films all the time. This is only 71 minutes and is barely passable as far as backwoods slashers go. When is part 6 with footage from all 5 previous films coming out David?

IDEA: Instead of churning out 27 movies per year, how about saving your money and putting it all into one AWESOME movie over the course of six - twelve months? I know, that's a lot to think about, but the quality of your films, not to mention, your reputation, will soar to new heights! This is what you can do with all the money you have saved:

1. Invest in some paint for your walls. Go to a Savers store or a Goodwill and get some inexpensive furniture and wall hangings to build some nice sets that fit the story, instead of filming everything in your backyard or in the middle of nowhere.

2. Get yourself some sliders and dollies to escape "shaky-cam" syndrome! Spend the time to set them up to make a world of difference!

3. Spend some money on a skilled editor and colorist! Those washed out scenes look like crap! Really ... don't cut corners here! Multifaceted software and the people skilled to use it will create a paradise of eye candy, which shall, in turn, make your film stand out from the rest of the heap as not being part of said heap.

4. Audio is huge and, many times, especially in low budget film-making, overlooked in lieu of the video. Invest is some awesome mics, and enrich the ambience of each scene. Being a professional musician, I can tell you that proper mixing and ADR (Automatic -or Audio- Dialogue Replacement), though time-consuming, will make or break your project.

5. Lastly, for the sake of all that is sacred, invest in actors that have, at the very least, some high school drama classes under their belt!

NOW ... do these things, and I will see you in about two or three years, NOT this year, TWO or THREE years, with Axegrinder 7! And it will far outshine the previous six installments! Thank me later!