Axe Giant: The Wrath of Paul Bunyan

Yes, no man can resist the sweet, succulent taste of a blue steak from a freakish 30 foot tall mutant ox dying of dysentery/acute decapitation. At least dining on tainted, rotting ox ass is still better than eating Hákarl, the worst thing ever mistakenly perceived as food in human history. Dan Haggerty appears in an all-too-brief role as the foreman of this 1890s lumber mill which somehow boasts an electric buzzsaw, a saw with the amazing power to turn a man into poorly-animated CGI giblets with its mere presence in the room.

We haven't even gotten to the horrendous conversations that make up 80% of the movie, by the way. Every single character wields irritation like a superpower that increases exponentially whenever they try to interact with each other. Especially the wanna-be police drill sergeant guy, whose performance can be summed up as the 'amateur comic bombing at an open mic night and then yelling at the audience for booing him off the stage' of bad R Lee Ermey impersonations. It's not like anybody kicking back and firing up the movie about a giant mutant Paul Bunyan stomping frat boys' guts out in the woods is going to have realism very high on their priorities list for the next 90 minutes or so, but if you're going to piss your time and money away to add yet another worthless steamer to the already endless pile of awful, unfunny, intentionally-and-totally-ironically-retarded horror flicks churned out every year, you might as well at least pretend to try to make it through 2 lines of dialogue that won't make your kids want to kill themselves out of shame in a couple years, right? Guys? Right?

Oh, and speaking of mythical creatures nobody's ever seen, say hello to Joe "No, the Other Other One" Estevez. If you took Martin Sheen, replaced his career with deep-seated mental illness/violent mood swings, and pumped about 10 barrels of moonshine through him for every episode of The West Wing until he couldn't even remember what it felt like to get through one whole day without shitting his pants anymore, you'd have a guy who would immediately get up and leave in disgust if Joe Estevez sat down at the table next to his at Chick-fil-A:

Gary Jones and his crack team of dropouts from the DeVry computer graphics school haven't exactly put together a non-stop thrill-ride of a horror/action movie here, Paul Bunyan or no. None of the axe-fodder characters are really particularly bad people, but they're all incredibly annoying, so although it's a relief every time one of them dies, being dismembered in gory detail by an enraged, humongous lumberjack seems a bit harsh. Joe Estevez's riveting one-man adaptation of One Flew over the Cuckoo's Nest throughout the film and Dan Haggerty's face getting annihilated by a buzzsaw are the main draw here, and possibly a metaphor for something involving their careers and/or what Dan Haggerty's gut is doing to both of their lunches, but we know you must be dying to double back and take another look at some of that science old man Joe's laying down right about now so we'll leave you to it. Godspeed, Joe Estevez. Godspeed.

– Garrett "Hydrogen" Neil and Sean "Trillaphon" Neil (@trillaphon)