Director – Ryan Cavalline (Mountain Devil, Demon Slaughter)
Starring – Dustin Ardine (Uncovered, The Grail), Eddie Benevich (House of Carnage, The Great American Serial Killer), and Adam Berasi (Demon Slaughter, Dead Body Man)
Release Date – 2007
Rating – 2/5
Tagline – “The ax is family”
Several years back I started collecting the Pendulum Pictures box sets. Most of these sets comes with 10 flicks but there is a handful that has 50 or 100 films in them. These sets are out of print but I’m a sucker for late 90s and early 00s no budget indie flicks. These sets usually follow a theme but you can typically find the works of Bill Zebub, Eamon Hardiman, and Ryan Cavalline in several of them. It’s because of these old Brain Damage Films released in these sets that I’ve become accustomed to the name Ryan Cavalline.
I’ve only seen one of his films to date but I have several in my collection so he is a name I’m very familiar with due to these box sets. Sometime back his film Day of the Ax, which I believe is in one of these sets along with Demon Slaughter, was released by my friends over at The Sleaze Box. This 2007 slasher got a new updated cover for the film and a few new special features courtesy of TSB. With work taking the slow dive due to the Covid-19 outbreak I decided to venture into my indie horror stuff and it was time to toss this one in to finally check out.
**Spoiler Alert**The film follows a masked madman who mutilates people with his trusty ax and along the way he has gathered a group of followers that believe he is the chosen one of sorts. When he’s not butchering people in the woods he is looking for attractive women with healthy wombs to carry his off spring so he can keep the family business going for generations. **Spoiler Alert**
This is one of the many Sleaze Box releases I had never seen prior to their release. I remember seeing the title somewhere, possibly in one of those box sets I previously mentioned, but I never got around to watching it. Now, after checking out this release I can say I’m kind of glad I put it off. This one wasn’t for me. I’ve seen my fair share of backyard no budget horror films over the years but this one just couldn’t hold my attention. Maybe if they would have followed through with the Texas Chainsaw Massacre fan film I think it was originally intended to be but the way it is now was not fun.
The acting in this one is not the worst I’ve seen but for a cast made up of mostly people with no prior acting credits I have to say I’m somewhat impressed. Most of the characters were painfully generic especially for an indie horror flick in the mid 00s, however, we do get a few stand out performances.
The story for this one mixes backwoods cultists with the classic Texas Chainsaw Massacre. We get an ax wielding maniac wearing a mask with Leatherface mannerisms, a Great Value Choptop, and several more nods to TCM. With that aside, the story could have worked as a short but it is stretched so thin to meet that feature length running time that we are given a film that moves at a snails pace and leaves so much on the table.
Finally, the film has plenty of blood but it’s not much of a saving grace like most slashers. The deaths are quickly tossed in and the viewer doesn’t get to really enjoy them like they do in most slashers. The effects are minimal and the kills are very lackluster. Overall, Day of the Ax could have been a solid TCM short fan film but as a feature length film with so much taken from TCM it just feels like a thrown together mess. I hate writing a negative review for someone’s hard work but I’m honestly confused as to how this film became to be.
