EDITOR’S NOTE: This was originally on the site on January 21, 2020 and is back for the week of Larraz movies.

Al Filo del Hacha, or Edge of the Axe, is a very late in the slasher game film directed by José Ramón Larraz, who also directed Estigma, a movie that I’ve been obsessed with for some time. Other films from him include Symptoms, Vampyres and The House That Vanished, which was also released under the titles Scream… and Die!, Please! Don’t Go in the Bedroom, Psycho Sex Fiend and Psycho Sex. The posters for that movie are great, as they shamelessly steal from The Last House on the Left’s ad campaign.

The crazy thing about this film is that it’s set in the rural Northern California mountain community of Paddock County, yet it’s a mixture of scenes shot in Big Bear Lake, California and Madrid, Spain. Most of the exteriors are in the U.S., while the interiors are a world away. For example, the car wash killing that starts the movie is split, with the signage and cars in America and the actual killing in Spain. It’s a seamless transition, which makes it even more interesting.

Before the credits even roll, nurse Mirna Dobson dies at, well, the edge of the axe at the aforementioned car wash. Just from this first incredibly shot scene, you realize that this is anything more than your basic stalk and slash.

Our hero is Gerald Martin (Barton Falkes, Future-Kill), whose cabin is filled with computers and video games, in direct contrast to the natural world all around him. This puts him at odds with his landlord, a hermit named Brock.

Gerald hangs out with Richard Simmons — no, not the guy who danced with the oldies, but instead a wanna-be lady killer — who works as an exterminator when he’s not acting as a kept husband to his much older wife. He’s played by Page Moseley, who was in Girls Nite Out, Open House and The Jigsaw Murders. And his much older wife? None other than Patty Shepard, who was Hannah Queen of the Vampires and appears in Assignment: Terror, The Werewolf vs. The Vampire Woman, and Slugs).

Gerald and Richard check out the smell coming out of a bar, which ends up being the corpse of one of the barmaids, who it appears has killed herself. As this is a small town, the police ask them to keep it quiet, kind of like how they ignored someone slaughtering pigs and leaving their heads in the bed, as if these California farmers were Jack Woltz.

Paddock County is a lot like my hometown. All that’s there are bars. Lillian Nebbs is the daughter of the owner of another of those many bars and she’s home from school. She loves technology and video games as much as Gerald, which makes this movie into some sort of science fiction story. Of course, she does wonder why he has a list of all of the dead women on his computer. He replies that he loves making lists of data, you know, as you do.

This is one of my favorite tropes of all movies — a computer that does more than computers in 1988 were actually able to do. This is a pre-Siri world, but the personal computers in this movie are able to speak in a very understandable voice. Trust me — I had a computer in 1988. It was a six-year-old Commodore 64 that took an entire evening to download less than a megabyte of info.

The killings haven’t stopped, as Rita Miller (Alicia Moro, Exterminators of the Year 3000, Slugs) is stalked and killed by someone she seems to recognize before her body is placed on the train tracks and torn asunder. Poor Rita — she has the best slash job I’ve heard of: beautician/prostitute.

This finally puts Officer Frank on the case. He’s just in time, because the farmer’s wife who found the pig’s head is killed and Richard finds the severed head of a nurse while out on the lake cheating with his wife. And oh yeah — yet another woman finds her dog murdered before the killer chops her fingers off and then chops her to bits.

Lillian tells Gerald her family secret — her cousin Charlie has just been released from a mental hospital. And he was there because she pushed him off a swing set and caused the injury. She feels that he’s the one behind the killings. She uses his computer to do research, attempting to learn more about the psychiatrists who treated Charlie.

Later that night, Richard’s wife learns that she’s bankrupt and gets wasted with local drunk Christopher (Jack Taylor, who was in everything from Pieces and Eugenie… The Story of Her Journey into Perversion to The Ghost Galleon, The Ninth Gate and The Vampires Night Orgy). On their way home, she drunk drives into a tree, only to be further inconvenienced by getting killed by the masked axeman.

At the scene, the cops find a pin from Lillian’s father’s tavern — the same one she pinned on Gerland at one point — which leads them to question her and her father.

So who is the killer, in this movie that feels just as much American/Spanish backwoods giallo as slasher?

Lillian accuses Gerald of being Charlie, which seems like a stretch. He responds by telling her that she is Charlie, as he’s learned that she had a head injury at one point and spent plenty of time in the hospital. It also turns out that all of the victims were either people who cared for her or women interested in her father. So Lillian attacks Gerald with an axe.

As the two fight, the cops arrive and shoot our hero. As Officer Frank tries to help Lillian, we notice that she’s smiling like a maniac.

Larraz considered Edge of the Axe his worst feature film, but it has more quality in it than ten slashers. Seriously, I’ve been holding off watching this for a while, as I had always loved its poster art and felt it could never live up to it. Good news. If anything, it exceeds it.

Unlike most slashers, which are content to ape from Halloween and Friday the 13th, this film spends more time making us care about every character, even the side ones like Richard’s wife. This isn’t kids in the woods screwing around, making us count the seconds until they’re decimated. These are real people caught up in the web of a killing machine.

The killings themselves are bursts of the unreal that intrude upon the problems that all of these characters face — money woes, marital infidelity, family secrets — and that makes each of the very creative death scenes even more effective.

There’s a new Arrow Video blu ray release of this movie, which features a beautiful 2K restoration from the original camera negative. You can choose to watch this in English or Spanish (which also has newly translated English subtitles). There’s also commentary by lead actor Faulks and The Hysteria Continues podcast. Plus, there are interviews with Faulks and make-up artist Colin Arthur.

You can buy this from Arrow Video. It’s also on Tubi.

Also known as The Curse of the Monestary, Blood Screams and The Bloody Monks, this starts with a whole bunch of minks dying to satisfy the blood urges of a demon or to steal gold or who knows what, but it’s non-stop monk death and you know me, I’m in for this movie as of immediately.

Karen (Stacy Shaffer, Cannon’s The Naked Cage) is traveling through Mexico along with a magician named Frank (how if Russ Tamblyn even in this movie?) and she just wants to escape and she falls for a boy named Jaime (Rafael Sánchez Navarro). They jump the train and I start wondering, is Karen Frank’s wife? His daughter? Is there any connection? Is she one of those giallo heroines who is gorgeous yet brings death to everyone around her because she has some strange malady? And hey Jaime, take my advice from watching so many movies: don’t go back home and solve the mystery of your father’s death.

This movie has 75 minutes to share with you enough to fill up ten other films; the magician being racist to Mexicans who laugh at him, a witch (Isela Vega, Bring Me The Head of Alfredo Garcia) who has possessed a woman, Karen’s mysterious past, Jaime’s mysterious past, Karen’s mysterious dreams of Jaime’s mysterious past, zombies who are the monks we saw die earlier, missing gold, Russ Tamblyn doing magic tricks and acting as his own stuntman as he dove off a train in a move that seems ill-advised for anyone much less an actor already 54 when this was made and oatmeal-based makeup.

Jaime and Karen get blamed for a series of murders when we know that it was the zombies that did it because we’ve seen enough Blind Dead movies. Perhaps the biggest mystery of this movie is that it was distributed by Roger Corman’s Concorde Pictures and released on video by Warner Brothers.

You can watch this on YouTube.

Brad and Bonnie may share a detective agency but as soon as you realize that Godfrey Ho directed this, the sooner you’ll come to accept that Brad (Marko Ritchie) and Bonnie (Hsu Ying-Chu) are from two different movies that are only connected by the telephone, the same way that Chrissy Snow could keep talking to Janet Wood and Jack Tripper despite the contract negotiations of Suzanne Sommers.

How do we know we’re in America when we’re watching Brad speak to Bonnie by staring at her photo as if this is a late 80s Facetime? The Coca-Cola cans everywhere, of course.

After that call, Brad takes a call from a girl named Pam who wants to hire him to take her case before she’s killed by this movie’s big bad, Decker (Mike Abbott), who has bad guys in his employ from yet another movie, Tiger and Ringo. He’s running a modeling school that hooks girls on drugs and then into white slavery and somehow does this by uniting multiple films into one strange and branching narrative.

So what does the modeling school teach?

Aerobics.

Will Bonnie go there?

Of course.

She’s from a movie called Lover and Killer and she’s awesome.

Meanwhile, we keep cutting back to Brad, who somehow becomes a red ninja because suddenly someone remembered that this was a ninja movie and then it all ends with a gunfight.

Huh?

This is also known as Ninja Phantom Heroes. There are moments where you have no idea what is going to happen next or even where the story is and the confusion feels like when drugs work. When the high isn’t scary and you’re doing what Huxley said about the doors of perception and you’re just feeling that life makes sense because this ninja madness makes no sense whatsoever.

You can watch this on Tubi.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Jennifer Upton is an American (non-werewolf) writer/editor in London. She currently works as a freelance ghostwriter of personal memoirs and writes for several blogs on topics as diverse as film history, punk rock, women’s issues, and international politics. For links to her work, please visit https://www.jennuptonwriter.com or send her a Tweet @Jennxldn

There’s a moment in Tim Burton’s Ed Wood where Eddie, while watching the debut of Plan 9 from Outer Space thinks “This is the one I’ll be remembered for.” It’s almost certain Ed never had that thought. Similarly, Fred Olen Ray probably never thought his little horror comedy shot over 5 days on a series of weekends using equipment rented for another film would be “the one.” If you’ve never seen a Fred Olen Ray film, or you’re about to induct a new virgin into your own basement B-movie cult, this is the one to watch. Often imitated but never duplicated, Hollywood Chainsaw Hookers is Ray’s self-professed “message film” about the dangers of heading to a hotel with a lady of the night. “Because they might be a chainsaw-wielding maniac!” 

Here, the hookers in question are members of a chainsaw-worshipping cult who dismember their clients in service of their gods and master Gunnar Hansen of Texas Chainsaw Massacre fame. Elvis-loving Mercedes (Michelle Bauer) delivers the most memorable kill totally nude in a shower cap while bloody Halloween shop rubber prop body parts fly around.

Although the dismembered body parts were fake, the chainsaws were real. Even when the chains were removed, Ray insisted on extreme caution from everyone on the slippery, blood-soaked set because “Anybody who is not scared shitless of a moving chainsaw blade is a fool.” 

Jay Richardson plays film noir prototype private detective Jack Chandler who stumbles upon the cult while searching for a missing runaway named Samantha (Linnea Quigley) amongst the dive bars and strip clubs of 1980s pre-“cleaned up” Hollywood. In the end, Sam and Jack defeat the cult while chaos in the temple erupts around them, while every single crew member runs through the frame screaming.

The film is silly and fun and utterly harmless despite what the British Board of Film Censors would have you believe. Yes, they banned both the poster and the film itself for a time during the “Video Nasties” panic. Here we are, 35 years later, and police have arrested not a single British prostitute for involvement with an underground chainsaw cult. Come to think of it, that brothel I lived next door to for a while in London was pretty suspicious…

You can watch this on Tubi.

The Phantom Empire is a very meta film. Its title refers to the 1935 Gene Autry movie serial — which was kind of remade as part of the show Cliffhangers! — as well as having Robby the Robot in its cast, Jeffrey Combs’ character Andrew Paris saying that he went to Miskatonic University (the same school from Re-Animator) and vehicles from director Fred Olen Ray’s movie Star Slammer and Logan’s Run show up, as well as footage from 1977’s Planet of Dinosaurs. Maybe by referential sometimes I’m also saying cost-effective.

Ray got the idea for this film while filming Commando Squad in a Bronson Canyon cave. He wrote the script over the weekend and then started filming the day after Commando Squad wrapped, using the same cast and crew. That’s impressive but the original inspiration for the 1935 Phantom Empire is wilder. Writer Wallace MacDonald came up with the entire movie — plot, characters, their names, costumes, literally every single moment of the serial — while he was being treated with nitrous oxide by his dentist.

A cave creature with millions in diamonds around his neck emerges from a cave and rips someone’s head off before it’s stopped. A party is made of Cort Eastman (Ross Hagen), Denae Chambers (Susan Stokey), Andrew Paris (Combs), Professor Strock (Robert Quarry) and Eddy Colchilde (Dawn Wildsmith, Ray’s wife) to enter the caves and see what they can salvage.

They soon find a hidden world, Robby the Robot and a queen played by Sybil Danning, which is really why most people rented this. Throw in Michele Bauer as a cave girl and that’s why they definitely rented this.

You can watch this on Tubi.

Jesse (Robin Antin, who helped form the Pussycat Dolls and choreographed Paris Hilton’s Carl’s Jr. commercial) murders her abusive stepfather and gets sent to prison, a prison filled with all the WIP cliches, like delousing showers, mean girl butchery thanks to Maxine Farmer (Rhonda Aldrich, Cynthia from Boogeyman II) and her henchwoman Echo (Robin Cleaver) and a mix between prison blues and the clothing that would define breakdance.

When I hear phrases like “women in prison plus breakdance,” a part of me passes out I get so excited and I wake up and the other part of my brain is just yelling at the screening and dancing around the room like I’m on Solid Gold in 1982.

Luckily, Jesse has the nerdy Peggy (Valerie Jean Richards, Hard Rock Nightmare, Appointment With Death), singing tough girl Samantha (Jacqueline Houston) and Mouse (Annie Livingstone, Skatelady from The Wizard of Speed and Time) on her side.

It also has a cruel warden played by Ron Lacey, who once he was Toht in Raiders of the Lost Ark knew he’d only be slimy villains. And even though director Phillip Schuman made the X-rated Randy, which starred Juliet “Aunt Peg” Anderson and Desiree Cousteau, he forgets that most people come to WIP movies for the nudity and sleaze, not girls practicing long and involved dance numbers under the guise of escape.

Filmed in 1984 and released long after the death of the craze in 1988, you should watch this in the only way that matters: a battered VHS rip dubbed into a language that  it was not shot in.