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 the 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.

DISCLAIMER: This movie was sent to us by Arrow Video.

Known in Spain as Slugs, Muerte Viscos, this movie is based upon the novel Slugs by Shaun Hutson. You may think, do I really want to watch a movie about slugs? And then you see who directed it: Juan Piquer Simón, the director of Pieces, one of the most insane pieces of cinema ever filmed.

Trust me, you want to see this. You want to see it right now.

When a rural town discovers that black slugs spawned from the disposal of toxic waste have infiltrated their water supply, all bets are off. Only a health inspector named Mike Brady has a chance to save any of them, but the authorities ridicule him at every turn.

You’re not watching this for the story. You’re watching it for the moments when slugs come ripping their way out of human bodies, like the guy who has them come out of his nose while he’s toasting a client or the unfortunate couple whose post-coitus comes with a nasty case of murderous mollusks.

Slugs don’t have teeth and certainly don’t kill people like they do in this film. Screw that — these slugs are awesome. This is the kind of movie that I will force you to watch when you visit, yet I’ll be jealous that this isn’t my first time watching it.

You can watch this on Tubi and Amazon Prime.

Based on Catherine Storr’s book Marianne Dreams — which was also the inspiration for the early 1970s British TV series Escape Into Night — Paperhouse was an early film from Candyman director Bernard Rose.

11-year-old Anna Madden is dealing with mono and the fever she endures is giving her horrifying dreams in which the house she’s drawn during the day becomes a real place. After drawing a face at the window, she meets someone else, a boy named Marc who is suffering from muscular dystrophy.

Sadly, Elliott Spiers, who played Marc, suffered a negative reaction to an anti-malaria medication that he never recovered from. He dies at the Royal Free Hospital in London just before the second film he appeared in, Taxandria, was released.

Anna’s father is an alcoholic who has been away from his marriage. She draws him one day in the hopes that he can carry Marc away to safety, but her true feelings emerge and she draws him with an angry expression. That drawing becomes an angry ogre who chases the children whole brandishing a hammer.

To top that off, Charlotte Burke — who played Anna — never acted after this film. Years after it was made, she called Rose and told him how much she loved the movie. In fact, she loved it so much that she never wanted to do another film afterward.

This movie is pretty astounding — a dream world where children’s fears become living and breathing monsters. Sadly, it was never released in the US on blu ray or even DVD. Luckily, it is currently available on Amazon Prime. Please check it out while it’s still streaming. It’s so worth your attention.

Sometimes, slashers go into the winter. This would be one of those times.

This was directed by Jeff Kwitny, who also directed Lightning In a Bottle, Illegal Alien and Beyond the Door III, which is also known as Death Train and has nothing to do with any of the other Beyond the Door films. I mean, that’s par for the course. Bava’s Shock was also sold as Beyond the Door II. If you want to see that one, Vinegar Syndrome has just released it.

We’re here to talk about Iced.

A group of teens watch one of their friends die while skiing. Yeah, that was a crazy idea — Jeff and Cory were racing to see who would get Trina. Cory was in love with her, Jeff was a jerk, he catches the two of them in bed together and then, you know, he goes off the trails and crashes into the rocks.

Five years later, they have been invited to the opening of a ski resort, but there’s someone in ski gear that starts to kill them one by one.

Normal people wouldn’t recognize a single actor in this one, except that I’m not normal and can tell you that lead actress Debra De Liso was in Slumber Party Massacre. Janette is played by Lisa Loring, who in addition to being married to adult star Jerry Butler, was Wednesday Addams on The Addams Family. Rodney Montague, who played Biff, went on to be a visual effects artist. And that’s pretty much it.

If you’re wistful for 80’s movies with bad interior design and worse hair, good news. This movie has all of that and a Casio synth soundtrack that is at odds with every single scene that it plays behind. That’s pretty much a good review around here.

Ruggero Deodato, how I love you. I love that you somehow convinced a real actor, Michael York, to be in an insane film about a man getting progeria way past its due date and murdering people left and right. I can get how you got Donald Pleasence. I can even sort of understand how you got Edwige Fenech. But Michael York?

York plays Robert Dominici, a pianist who suffers from that previously mentioned genetic condition that causes him to rapidly age, and by that, I mean that his face starts looking like Klaus Kinski. To make up for the bad hand he’s been dealt, he starts killing people and targeting Inspector Datti ‘s (Pleasence) daughter Gloria.

Deodato would later say, “I did Phantom of Death because it was based on a true element — the idea of growing old. And I got to work with Michael York and Donald Pleasence.” He also threw in that the producer demanded Fenech, who was miscast. This is also one of the few movies where she isn’t dubbed, so you get to hear her real voice.

The poster for this says it all: In the tradition of Friday the 13th and Halloween…

Notice: It doesn’t say from the makers of. Or from the people who brought you.

Also known as Close Your Eyes and Pray in the U.K., this movie is all about a bunch of teens having a graduation party in a furniture store before they’re stalked and slashed by a cross-dressing killer. Obviously, the movie Chopping Mall doesn’t exist in this universe, because I’d never celebrate in a furniture store after that one.

After the murder of a hooker, we get right into the story, as four couples all gather in the aforementioned furniture store without realizing that an ex-con is living in the basement.

A game of hide and go seek turns into two different sexual situations that are broken up by the cross-dressing killer, who uses a trident to kill the first two of many. And of course, despite those two being missing, the gang continues its carnal lock-in and just goes to sleep.

This is yet another continuation of the trope of sex equals death. There is, however, an amazing kill in this one where an elevator completely severs the heads of one of these teens.

It also has an amazing reveal at the end: the killer ends up being Fred’s gay prison lover, who feels like the kids were coming between them. Yes, Fred was dating all of the kids. That makes sense, Zack. Yes, Zack is the killer’s name. Have you ever heard of a frightening killer named Zack?

Director Skip Schoolnik also edited Halloween 2 — the original — so he should know a thing about a good slasher.

You can get this from RoninFlix.