“He’ll be crying himself to sleep tonight on his huge pillow!”

Justin’s rating: Cameo Award Of The Year

Justin’s review: This movie makes me laugh. It makes me laugh every time I see it. More, perhaps, than the time before. It’s so screwball and genuinely funny that it needs to have all the people it can crusading its cause. That means YOU, buckaroo!

So I Married An Axe Murderer is the one post-Wayne’s World, pre-Austin Powers Mike Meyers comedy that never really took off. Unlike most of Meyers’ other movie characters, Axe Murderer’s Charlie is much more of a normal fellow and less of a parody. To compensate, his world and friendship circles are quite off-kilter, giving him plenty of material to riff off of. Everyone in Charlie’s world is outright strange. His best friend Tony (Anthony LaPaglia) is an undercover cop dissatisfied with his not-so-TV work experience. His father (also played by Meyers) is a haughty Scottish coot. His mother, a shameless flirt. His brother, a mute kid with an oversized cranium.

Charlie is a man on the prowl, possibly because the movie script failed to give him a job. Now, I’m not sure if this was an intentional in-joke or not, but I’ve had many a discussion with friends about what, exactly, Charlie does for a living. They never say in this flick! He’s always hanging out with his friends or girlfriend at their place of work, but never seems to have a pressing need to get somewhere. Maybe he’s a panda assassin? Professional coffeeshop poet? Both are despicable professions, I think we can agree.

Anyway, he lives in San Francisco and is unhappy with every dating possibility that comes along for some Seinfeldian reason or another (“She smelled like soup”). This makes Charlie desperately unhappy — that is, until he bumps into Harriet (Nancy Travis), a smiling vision of heaven and grace. Initially, Harriet comes across as the sanest one in the room. (Everyone: “At FIRST!”) But as Charlie’s falling in love with her, he can’t help but notice her more… peculiar habits, and he starts to suspect her as a serial killer.

If you’ve never seen this movie, you might be astounded how many amazing cameos there are. Phil Hartman steals the show as Vickie, an Alcatraz guard with grim tales to tell. We also encounter Michael Richards (Kramer), Alan Arkin, Steven Wright, and Charles Grodin.

So I Married An Axe Murderer is such a great forum for Meyer’s talents. He can alternately play the comedy quack and the straight man, just being funny for funny’s sake. He’s a little neurotic, but that’s no shocker — aren’t we all? If Charlie’s life was taken into a sitcom format, I guarantee you it’d be one of the most popular on the tube, he’s that quotable. This film is a laugh riot and gets better with each viewing.

PoolMan’s rating: One large capucino, minus the cinnamon, and not enough whipped cream.

PoolMan’s review: Every once in a while, your friends (the weird ones who work in chocolate stores and the like) start raving like loonies about a movie that you missed. “Oh man, you have to see this, it’s just too funny!” And you start to nod, and you start to believe, and as they feed one-liner after one-liner into your head you start to think it’s the greatest thing since sliced bread. And you curse the day you turned down seeing it. So you rush out to the video store, grab the box, and run home (forgetting your car entirely) to see it. And then you’re INEVITABLY let down, not because it’s bad, but because you expected more. Enter the Axe Murderer.

So I Married An Axe Murderer tells the story of a man named Charlie who finds wonderful women to date yet constantly rejects them early on in the relationship because of his own immature fears of rejection. He nitpicks. Heavily. Enter new wonderful woman, Harriet, who is a butcher at a store Charlie buys haggis (GREAT Scottish references throughout this movie, by the way). They chat, they date, they rut like weasels. But when Harriet’s checkered past starts to resemble the story of a serial killer Charlie’s mom read about in a tabloid, Charlie once again superimposes an unjustified reputation on his lady fair… or is it unjustified?

This movie is fun, no doubt, but it seemed like there was a constant need for a commercial break. The part that REALLY made this movie funny to me was Charlie’s heavily Scottish father. The man is funny beyond description in that “oh my goodness, he didn’t REALLY just say that, did he?” sort of way. It’s a combination of this character and the other small “back bits” (the poetry club, the horny mom, the butcher jokes) that bring the film to life, not the main plot.

There are great points to this flick, sometimes to the point of insane hilarity (I just about died hearing some of the lines listed below), but not quite enough. I’m not sorry I saw it, but truth be told, it was a lot like drinking beer from a teacup. Sure, it’s fun, it’s good, but do you really need to bother?

DnaError’s rating: Kooky Kharacters

DnaError’s review: In honor of the freelance poetry in this movie, I’ll present my review in beat poem prose. Hit it Sam….

Meyer’s movie, funny in parts, didn’t make me mad.
But drags on, a little to long, not enough Scottish Dad.
YEAH!

To expand on my little ditty, I first saw So I Married An Axe Murderer at a weird time in my life. I was having a powerfully nasty case of the flu and was dizzy with fever and tripping on Nyquil. To help pass the time in-between vomiting and sweating, I was watching HBO and this movie came on. Being a hard-core Mike Meyers fan, I decided to watch it. To say the least, I didn’t like it. Maybe it was the fierce bacterial battle raging inside me, but I couldn’t get into it.

After that, I saw 54, and I almost swore off Mike Meyers forever. Then Austin Powers came along and I decided to give Axe Murderer another chance now that I was no longer hovering over the toilet asking God to please kill me.

Well, I no longer hate it. The movie is genuinely funny, full of clever one-liners and kooky characters. The kookiest character being the Dad, a dangerously Scottish man who hates the KFC Colonel and loudly blasts bagpipe music while cleaning his pictures of Sean Connery. The main problem with this movie is that there isn’t enough of him! Meyers is at his best when his playing slightly off-kilter characters like Dieter, Wayne Campbell, Austin Powers, Dr. Evil, or this Dad.

Here the main character he plays some vague, generic average guy whose name I can’t even remember. The character, aside from having a fear of commitment and writing pop-culture-based poetry, is completely uninteresting without his kooky, kooky dad.

So, that’s my verdict, a good rental or TV movie with Meyers, a good amount of chuckles and, that’s right, Kookiness. Just, try to watch it when you’re in good health.

Didja notice?

• The Large Cappucino – all in one take!
• Scottish Wall of Fame
• A disturbing kiss goodnight from mom
• The meat shop sequence… so full of puns and gags, it’s terrific
• The oversized poster of Atlantic City
• Mike’s shapely legs
• Vicky’s speech about Dillon
• The “What’s Worse?” game
• Weekly World News – 8th highest circulation in the world, we’ll have you know!
• Who has a closet with a glass door?
• Charlie really likes that thighmaster
• The busboy who eeps and runs when Charlie demands he stay
• This is the only movie I’ve seen where a guy racks a girl in return for being racked