Axe Giant: The Wrath of Paul Bunyan

While "Axe Giant: The Wrath of Paul Bunyan" isn't among the worst of movies that I have seen, it is far up on the scale.

This slasher movie tries to incorporate the Paul Bunyan tale with some good old fashioned teenage slash-fest. But ultimately the end result was rather tame and less than interesting, to say the least.

A group of young delinquents are sent away to a reform boot-camp in the middle of a forested mountainside, under the supervision of gung-ho police officer Sgt. Hoke and a psychiatrist. However, the group run afoul a giant that is stalking the mountainside. The giant is wielding a massive axe and is ferocious and hellbent on killing anything in his path.

Storywise, then "Axe Giant: The Wrath of Paul Bunyan" was a very generic and genre stereotypic slasher movie, although trying to put in some legend and folk lore - which failed miserably.

The effects in the movie were adequate at times, while at other times they were so low-budget that you can't help but shake your head in disbelief and laugh out loud at them.

I don't recall a single face seen throughout the movie, and as such I suppose that is a good enough thing, as it is nice to see unfamiliar faces in movies, as to not draw associations to previous roles the actors or actresses have portrayed.

"Axe Giant: The Wrath of Paul Bunyan" wasn't entertaining and it was very tempting to let one's attention drift towards something else as the movie trotted on mundanely on the screen. Sometimes you just wonder why certain films gets produced, funded and even makes it off the drawing board.

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.

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

The acting is questionable. The CGI is unpolished. The script is predictable. It makes Sharknado look like Hamlet. DON'T LET ANY OF THIS PUT YOU OFF!!! I wanted something lowbrow and silly to kill a bit of time one afternoon in lockdown. That is exactly what I got. This film knows it's not high art nor even a particularly great horror movie, but it seems to revel in what it is and doesn't pretend to be anything other than that. If you want a B-movie that is cheesier than cheddar fried in Monterey Jack, that is exactly what Axe Giant is going to give you, unashamedly and in bucket loads. Best enjoyed with friends and a few drinks!

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