Imagine a horror movie set in a remote farmhouse, where a pretty young woman takes care of her sick grandfather and knows how to use a hatchet. That’s much of the premise behind Ti West’s terrific 2022 horror-comedy Pearl. Yet it’s also the basic setup of the shoestring horror that made its Greenville, North Carolina premiere at the Belmont Outdoor Cinema under the name Lisa, Lisa—but is better known as Axe. West and star/co-writer Mia Goth were clearly inspired by Frederick R. Friedel’s sharp debut, but while Pearl’s various homages suited its bloody satire, Axe is a more intimate, oddly somber thriller, starkly populated with alienated characters lost in the American South.
Axe begins as a crime drama, following three criminals as they shake down somebody who owed them some money. The aptly-named Steele (Jack Canon) is the leader of the gang, with the stocky Lomax (Ray Green) the most creepy of the bunch and Billy (played by Friedel himself) a naive, reluctant hanger-on. After dispatching of their first victim (to Billy’s chagrin,) they wreak havoc in a grocery store before the promise of sanctuary comes their way in the form of an isolated farmhouse where their only resistance is Lisa (Leslie Lee) and her incapacitated grandfather (Douglas Powers). She can’t cause them any trouble, can she?
Friedel, who was born in 1948, hoped to equal Orson Welles’ achievement of directing his first film before he was 25. The inexperienced filmmaker, with the help of producer J. G. Patterson, made a remarkably assured work, shooting the film in nine days on a $25,000 budget. Veteran grindhouse cinematographer Austin McKinney helps give Axe its sparse look, and Friedel takes his cast through what starts as a quiet heist film and leads them into something more alienating. There are strange grace notes, if that’s what you’d call them. When Lomax lingers on a bed imagining what he’ll do to the fetching farmgirl, he traces his meaty fingers on the stitching of a bare mattress. As he approaches Lisa, Lomax rubs the front of his thigh. It’s not an especially sexual gesture, but it makes the sweaty thug more sinister.
Friedel took the part of Billy to save the money it would have cost to hire another actor, but the director’s presence turns this into a figure of moral conflict; Friedel’s project is nothing like a murder, but is there a violence inherent in putting such a vision up before the public?
The stony-eyed and defeated-looking Jack Canon so impressed Friedel that the director built his second feature, the even more accomplished and loopier Kidnapped Coed, around the actor.
But it’s Leslie Lee, in her first only film role, who carries the film. Friedel has explained that he sought to cast actors who embodied the roles he had in mind, so they didn’t really have to act. As Canon was a perfect small-time thug, Lee was a natural as the troubled ingenue. Her expression barely changes throughout the film, yet it conveys volumes of despair and helplessness, and at the same time draws on powerful reserves of self-preservation at all costs. She’s like a Bressonian figure, and the efficiency of Friedel’s imagery as Lisa chops off the head of a chicken or mutilates her molester—each of these events depicted with streams of blood on white—suggest a talented storyteller who made the most out of limited resources, and created a surprisingly moving 72-minute piece of art.
Axe should have marked the start of a long and successful career, but if Friedel found a supportive mentor in Patterson, he picked the wrong benefactor in exploitation producer/distributor Harry Novak, who took over all rights to Axe and Kidnapped Coed. In 2003 Friedel attempted to regain control over the material by editing Canon’s footage from both films into the curio Bloodthirsty Brothers, about twin brothers separated at birth who both happened to set off on a crime spree on the same day, miles apart. What should have been a rich independent filmography is reduced to two short but impressive features and a copyright mongrel. Perhaps, in the director’s two primary films, art mirrored the creative process; his innocence was taken away from him, with devastating results. Fortunately, Friedel’s work is available in crisp transfers from Severin Films. In its way, Pearl, and Mia Goth’s remarkable monologue, gave voice to Axe, whose Lisa was a woman of few words. Hear her out.
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