Axe Giant: The Wrath Of Paul Bunyan (2013)

In the year 18-something-er-other, lumberjacks at a logging camp in the snowy mountains of Minnesota or somewhere are facing a harsh, lean winter. Fortunately, the cook has an enormous ox roasting on the spit with enough meat to last the camp for weeks. One problem - that ox was the famous Babe the Blue Ox, beloved friend of legendary giant lumberjack Paul Bunyan. And he is pissed.

Paul massacres the camp with his axe like he's felling a stand of cedars. There is digital blood and gore a-plenty - and even digital snow! The whole camp gets hacked up real good and then we fast-forward a hundred years.

(Sidebar: I'll never understand why digital gore effects have taken the place of the practical stuff in cheap horror movies. It can't be that much of a cost savings. Maybe cheap-o filmmakers are just lazier these days. Well, laziness is apparent in every other aspect of this movie. Might as well have lazy gore effects, too.)

So we join the modern day with a van-load of small-time criminals being shipped up the mountain for a boot-camp sort of experience: the First Offenders Program. The half-dozen or so walking clichés are supervised by a no-nonsense R. Lee Ermey-wannabe drill instructor and a kind-hearted social worker.

Up on the mountain, the group gets put through various humiliations until one of them breaks the horn off of a giant animal skull he found on a hike. Turns out this, naturally, was Babe's skull. And Paul Bunyan (who has some convenient disease whereby he grows huge and lives for well over a hundred years) is pissed. More digital hacking ensues.

Eventually a crusty old mountain man played by Martin Sheen's brother, Joe Estevez, tells the remaining not-yet-dead protagonists all about the "real" story of Paul Bunyan. Then there's more digital hacking and a cheap-o ending and a folksy song about Paul Bunyan over the closing credits.

Axe Giant: The Wrath Of Paul Bunyan makes for a nice palate-cleanser after The Poughkeepsie Tapes. It fits right in with the usual Syfy Channel lineup (though surprisingly was not made by The Asylum) with watchable levels of cheese, bad acting, bad computer effects, and general good-natured half-assery. If you're looking for a fun, light, bad horror movie to watch and you don't want to fool with shark-dispensing tornadoes, you could do worse than queueing up Axe Giant on Netflix and riffing on it with friends.