The Axiom

I understand the desire to cut small-budget movies a break but a 7.0 rating for this film might be deceptive for someone deciding if they want to commit a couple of hours to it. 'The Axiom' is a decent enough movie but it's inferior in nearly every way to the lower-rated but similar 'The Endless.' The latter film has a better script, better acting (except for Taylor Flowers who's great in this), better cinematography and a more self-assured sense of what kind of movie it is. 'The Axiom' is a combination of cosmic horror and monster movie that has some effective moments mixed in with some barely adequate ones. I'm not saying skip this film, I'm only warning you that it's a bit uneven and not deserving of it's current (early March 2019) 7.0 rating.

The Axiom started out as an okay B-Movie. The picture quality is very good. The acting is also pretty decent. BUT the comic-relief guy was too much and really annoying. Aside from that small detail, I initially thought this really would turn out to be a decent watch. The intrigue and mystery was well put together. But then everything suddenly turned really cheesy and bad when they finally got to the cabin in the forest. I actually thought the monster makeup was pretty good so that's not the problem. It's just the script altogether is just really, really bad. It seems like they didn't know where to go with their story. It turned into boring nonsense and I stopped being invested in the movie. There is definitely something fishy going on with the ratings on the site. It's a pretty crappy movie with nice visuals, a 3 at best. By the time it ended I was down to a 2, however.

This is one of horrors that can't simply be said to deserve bad rating, but can't also deserve good one, because there are out there many better horror movies. What makes this good one is mystery, adventure, surprise, and weirdness. There is spiritual, religious, interesting world and dimensions. It's very good to be immersed into such dimensions because that way I was on the lookout for something that prevented me from being bored. But there is lack of explanation, good intro, real life scenarios like more people, animals, police, buildings, events. Everything somehow happened too quickly, in weird way, without good reason and explanation. There is lack of motive for occurrences and for the whole story.

For me it was one of those horror films that when I'm not screaming at the characters about how stupid they are, I'm laughing at how poorly their lines are delivered. It's a creepy premise but even that quickly fades by the time the third act approaches. How many times have you seen a horror film where a character sees/experiences a traumatic supernatural event, and then when the chaos passes, they say nothing happened and go about business as usual? Strangled by a vengeful spirit? Her actual explanation: "I must have just seen a rat." I mean even being assaulted by a human is enough to shake a woman so badly that she'd be visibly distraught for a while, but not this regular American girl, she handles it like a pro who has seen her share of mean stranglings. I'm sick of tropes like this and the old, "let's split up" or "I'll be right back" nonsense that was proven ineffective 20 years ago in satires like Scream. Somewhere buried in this garbage is an original idea, and it doesn't look like it was filmed on a cell phone, so for that I give it a 2.5/10.

For die hard horror fans this movie will not impress at all. Feels like concept is copied from similar movies and movie gets predictable. Also there not much horror in it. Don't know what's about the rating of the 7 🤔. Still it can be one time watch.