Editor’s Note: This was originally published for FANGORIA on January 11, 2002, and we’re proud to share it as part of The Gingold Files.
What do you do when supplemental material directly relating to a movie isn’t available? In the case of Image Entertainment’s separate releases of these two ’70s schlockers, you pack the DVDs with tangentially related extras (culled from the Something Weird archives) that will appeal to the same audience. The approach is a success here, as a number of the varied bonus features are more entertaining than the movies themselves.
This is not to say that Axe and The Child don’t have their low-budget charms; both wring creepy minimalist atmosphere out of their rural locations, though the former is constrained by its limited storyline and the latter suffers from some poor acting. Both have been treated to very finely mastered fullscreen transfers (with little obtrusive cropping) boasting strong colors, and Axe bears only minor print flaws. Child, however, has significant damage during a sequence about an hour in, and a little more grain in its darker/smokier moments. The Dolby Digital mono sound on each is as good as the elements allow, with the dialogue occasionally low and indistinct in Axe and sometimes obviously post-dubbed and slightly out of sync in The Child.
For many, the highlight of the discs will be the trailers for not only these two movies but numerous other releases from Harry Novak’s Boxoffice International. No less than three spots for Axe are included, promoting the movie under that title and the alternate monikers Lisa, Lisa and Virgin Slaughter. (The latter two are visually identical but feature wildly different narrations, serving as an object lesson on how such a change could allow the same trailer to sell a completely distinct type of film.) My personal favorite in this collection is The Toy Box, which has narration so lurid that it’s hard to imagine any movie living up to it. Equally entertaining is the collection of exploitation promo art, backed by vintage radio spots, included on each disc.
And that’s far from all; each DVD also contains a complete second feature, though neither is being sold as a double-bill package. Axe comes with The Electric Chair, a crime thriller on which Axe producer and H.G. Lewis associate J.G. “Pat” Patterson served as writer, producer and director. The movie is no great shakes and the print is pretty worn, but hell—where else will you get to see this Southern drive-in obscurity? The Child, keeping up the zombie theme, is paired with an OK transfer of Del Tenney’s I Eat Your Skin, though even a pristine replication of this vintage junker wouldn’t make it worthy of a second look.
To complete the packages, the movies are each appended by a pair of vintage short subjects with varying degrees of relevance to the features. On Axe, “Mental Health: Keeping Mentally Fit” could presumably prevent one from turning out like the feature’s disturbed Lisa, or like the sword-swallowing stripper in the inexplicable “We Still Don’t Believe It” (we don’t either). More fun, in a Mystery Science Theater 3000 sort of way, are the shorts accompanying The Child: “The Outsider,” the saga of poor, outcast Susan Jane, which plays kinda like the first half of Carrie, and “The ABCs of Babysitting,” a tips-for-teens featurette that, in its intimations of the perils awaiting inattentive sitters, likely scared the hell out of its target audience.
This vault-raiding on the part of Image and Something Weird continues to add welcome flavor to their DVDs, and it’ll be interesting to see what they dig up for future releases. One suggestion, though: the logo burned into all the supplements on these two discs (even the second features!) is an unnecessary, annoying distraction, and should be done away with on upcoming DVDs.
