Axe to Grind (2015)

I can watch Debbie Rochon in anything, which is why I can watch Axe to Grind. She plays a seasoned B-movie scream queen rejected by the producer she’s sleeping with in favor of a younger model, so she cons her way onto the set of his new no-budget movie, takes up an axe and makes like the kitchen crew at Outback Steakhouse. Sounds great, right? Too bad that director Matt Zettell thinks he’s Quentin Tarantino and piles on the style so that we get lost in flashbacks and no longer care much about the present. He does a good job at the beginning when he parodies the multiple flavors of B-movie starlets, but then loses his breath as fast as me trying to run a 5K. Debbie Rochon saves the day though, as usual, clearly having a good time satirizing herself and putting on a psycho act. She’s still beautiful, has an intelligent sparkle in her eyes and packs the kind of screen presence with which none of her co-stars tries to compete. Even the fake boobs girl and the girl in a skirt the size of a cocktail napkin can’t draw our eyes away when the Queen Bee arrives, which is part of the joke (“The Meryl Streep of Horror”, the movie explicitly calls her). Shout-out to co-star Adrian Quihuis also, for a pretty good Dwight Frye impression as the creepy sidekick.