Bring Me The Axe! Horror Podcast

This week we're taking a look at David Lynch's fourth feature, Blue Velvet. It is the first movie of his career that feels truly Lynchian in the way that we recognize the best of his movies. Blue Velvet comes hot on the heels of Lynch's disastrous failure, Dune, a movie experience that was terrible for everyone involved an led to a career low point for Lynch. But thankfully, Lynch found himself patronized by 80's super producer, Dino De Laurentiis, a producer who believed in Lynch's gift at a time when no one else would and were it not for Dino, we're not sure that we get the rest of the movies Lynch is so well known for. Realizing that Blue Velvet was commercially radioactive but supportive regardless, De Laurentiis transformed his entire company to also accomodate film distribution just for Blue Velvet and when the movie dropped it struck critics and viewers in such a way that they knew they were seeing something grotesque and special at the same time.
Blue Velvet sees Jeffrey Beaumont, a young resident of the sleepy small town, Lumberton, drawn into a world of violence, sex, and obsession when he finds a severed ear in a field which leads him to the city's underworld, a place occupied by dangerous people living a desperate existence. He falls in love with the femme fatale, Dorothy Vallens, runs afoul of drug dealer Frank Booth, and struggles to free her from Frank's grasp. The descent into the city's dark side reveals uncomfortable truths about Jeffrey and by extension, all of us.
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Just in time for Beltaine we're dropping in on the merry residents of Summerisle for a look at Anthony Shaffer's The Wicker Man from director Robin Hardy. This 1973 horror movie is a pivotal feature in the folk horror tradition and presents a daring departure from common horror movie tropes, choosing to set the movie in broad daylight with a color palette of primary colors and lush greens instead of the flashing thunder and shadows of night. The air of constant menace is replaced with a cast of common rural people who seem to be having the time of their lives in the pagan paradise of a community that celebrates the old gods. Starring Christopher Lee at his most charming and charismatic, The Wicker Man is a triumph of weird horror and is a May Day tradition in the house of Bring Me The Axe!
The story follows Sgt. Howie, an English cop who drops in on the Scottish island of Summerisle to investigate a the disappearance of a young girl but he finds the strange community of heathens uncooperative in his investigation and suspects that she may have been a victim of human sacrifice. There's a sacrifice, alright, but Howie has no idea to what lengths these people will go to in order to secure a healthy harvest.
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This week we take on George Romero's Martin from 1977. Is it a vampire movie? Maybe if you squint at it just right. Martin doesn't fit neatly into any genre and for that we're at a loss to properly define it. But one thing is for sure, this is our favorite non-zombie Romero movie. It's a very weird, very European movie with artsy tendencies and a good idea of where George Romer's career may have gone had he not been repeatedly dragged back to the zombie well.
In Martin, the eponymous young man drifts from house to house, a ward of a highly superstitious family who pass him around as a burden that must be contained lest his bloodlust lead him to mayhem and carnage but here's the problem: Martin doesn't seem to actually be a vampire. He walks around during the day, holy symbols and vampire wards have no effect on him. But he is no less monstrous, being an actual serial killer. The question remains, does Martin kill because he's been told for so long that he's a monster?
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This week we're bringing it home to Boston for a look at the 1981 slasher movie also-ran. Night School. Similar to the many, many slasher movies that dropped that year, Night School struggles to commit to the stalk and slash body count mayhem that was dominating box offices and instead lands closer, remarkably closer to an Italian giallo. When it's not shamelessly stepping on Psycho's toes it reminds us a little too much of What Have You Done To Solange and What Have They Done To Your Daughters.
In Night School a killer stalks the Beacon Hill neighborhood of Boston, decapitating women. Their targets all share one thing in common, they're all students at the same night school, sharing the same head hunter obsessed anthropology professor who is busily seducing each one of them. It's up to smarty pants Boston PD detective Judd Austin to put the pieces together and crack the case before the killer strikes again!
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This week we take a look at what is arguably Godfrey Ho's magnum opus as far as that director can have such a thing. We're watching Ninja Terminator from 1986, just one of scores of cheap, trashy martial arts movies made in the 1980s by Godfrey Ho in order to capitalize on the western appetite for all things ninja. Ho is famous for a technique of cut and paste filmmaking where he would cut out all the good parts of an Asian action movie, shoot some wraparound footage with western actors, and dub the whole thing over with a new audio track to make a new movie. Sort of. Plus ninjas.
In this one, Ho casts Richard Harrison as Master Ninja Harry who, along with some friends, absconds with three pieces of a statue sacred to the Ninja Empire. When one of them are killed and the Ninja Empire recovers one piece, the other two ninjas conspire to keep the pieces away in order reform the ninja empire. Maybe? Harry enlists his friend Jaguar Wong to seek out the missing piece and a whole lot of crazy bullshit happens in the meantime.
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