Tuesday, April 14, 2015

Axe Giant: The Wrath of Paul Bunyan - 2013

I think there needs to be a separate rating system for Sci-Fi original movies, as they are intended to be cheap-ass, bad-CGI messes that generally suck and are not supposed to do much besides kill your time and perhaps serve as alcohol background.  That said, there is a current surge of popularity regarding Sci-Fi (now called SyFy) movie Sharknado, because of it's ridiculous title, and the fact that it's becoming fashionable and cool to be nerdy and idiotic.

Sci-Fi has a long history of making just about the stupidest shit you'll ever see, and then sometimes having stuff that's surprisingly watchable.  Sure, the movies are bad.  They are supposed to be bad.  But like Milpitas Monster, the movies are also done with tongue-in-cheek film makers and they kind of suck you in.  They are "safe", they are low-rent, and they kind of remind me of my childhood, watching stupid movies but finding them entertaining anyways.

Some of the movies that perhaps won't make it to your TV any time again soon, but deserve for you to know about:
Wyvern, Roadkill, Planet Raptor, Sand Serpents, Mongolian Death Worm, Ice Twisters, Ogre, Sasquatch Mountain, SS Doomtrooper, Fire Serpent, Jabberwock, Metal Tornado, Roboshark, 3 Headed Shark Attack, Sand Sharks, Komodo vs. Cobra, Sharktopus, Rock Monster, Monster Ark, Dinoshark, Super Gator, Dinocroc....Oh I could do this all fucking day.
Granted I have not seen ALL of these I have seen MOST of them.

Axe Giant is the story of a group of some "troubled teens" that go out in the woods for some sort of military-run bootcamp to get them respecting their environment and whipped in shape, etc etc.  They run into trouble when a giant fucking ridiculous dude (Bunyan) in one of those foam outfits that's supposed to look like muscle comes out of nowhere and starts killing them.  Joined by local loopy hillbilly Joe Estevez, who at least looks like he had fun camping it the fuck up, they have to try and survive the various CG and bad effects that attack them every once in a while.

The plot is retarded, as you can tell, and it doesn't matter anyways.  People fight bad things.  There, that's the plot in 4 words.  There is an entire sequence, the backstory of Bunyan, that shows his fabled blue ox, which in this movie is depicted as some horrible looking CG thing straight out of a demented kids cartoon.  I do give mad props to the film for not having a CG Bunyan as well, although it probably would've looked better than the stupid foam body-suit.


The trend for these Sci-Fi features is to kill the baddie via explosion.  I just spoiled like, 85% of the Sci-Fi original movies for you.  Seriously, it's ridiculous.  This one doesn't take that road though, and they actually defeat Bunyan extremely easily, by shooting him.  Well, anticlimax, but maybe they were going for the possible sequel should billions of people love it and demand more Bunyan.

The kills were mostly lame, the characters sloppily acted and shallow, the script overly silly and just plain bad, and the "effects" well, read my previous comments on them.  The movie is bad.  But it's also awesome, a true Sci-Fi original in feel and execution.

As I already stated, I'm just going to review whatever I feel like on this website, so this doesn't fit into Grindhouse, but does fit into "phenomenally bad" so I think it's worthy of the web.  Plus there's like no reviews of this movie online.

I'm going to give it 1 star, not because it's bad, but because it should literally be impossible for any Sci-Fi thing to get more than that.

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