In short: Ax ‘Em (1992)

aka The Weekend It Lives

A rather large group of school buddies – nearly all of them black – make their way to one of those cabins in the woods where the young habitually go to get brutally murdered. As luck will have it, there’s a potentially undead killer with a machete (and sometimes a hatchet) on the loose, so there will indeed be a bit of brutal murder for those interested as well as for those running away screeching.

I’d love to get into the nature of the killer in Michael Mfume’s (who stars, writes, directs, edits, and so on) Ax ‘Em. Alas, the film was made in the spirit of backyard made cinema and cheapo indie SOV slashers all over the world, and so at least half of the dialogue is unparsable because nobody involved knew how to mike a scene properly, nor did anything happen to improve the situation during post-production.

Yes, it’s one of those films, not really watchable as a traditional horror movie for civilians – though some of the gory bits are technically pretty decent. The film does, however, work very well as the sort of cultural documents where we watch pretty much live and unfiltered how a group of young people come together to have fun, improvise jokes funny, strange and unfunny, screech into a camera, and overact lovingly, in the manner of their place and time. Seen as part of this specific SOV slasher subgenre, Ax ‘Em is actually pretty great, not just because there are very few films of this kind made by Black Americans, but because the enthusiasm level of the participants seems exceptionally high, and Mfume manages to go from scene to scene rather more quickly than you usually get in these films.

Seen this way, it’s actually a pretty great film.