So I Married an Axe Murderer (1993)

(In French, On Cable TV, December 2018) Being someone who really started watching movies in the 1990s, everything since that decade tends to blur into a single continuous timeline contiguous with my own personal history, meaning that I have a lot of trouble watching something from the 1990s and thinking ”wow, that’s dated”. Or so I thought before watching So I Married an Axe Murderer, which is indeed fixed in time in the early nineties. The soundtrack sure helps a lot in establishing the year, what with “There She Goes” and “Two Princes” in particular. Taking place in San Francisco with beat poetry doesn’t help either. Still, there is something about the style of comedy that makes it feel a bit more modern—this is a film filled with snark and genre awareness, as a genre-aware man comes to suspect that his newlywed wife is a serial killer. The film does expect a bit of movie literacy from its audience, which works perhaps better in the post-ironic now than in the early 1990s. So I Married an Axe Murderer is a rare Mike Myers comedy that’s not part of a series (à la Shrek, Austin Powers or Wayne’s World), but you can see here the early draft of some later Scottish characters in Austin Powers. A number of known comedy actors show up, sometimes for a moment or two—Myers himself is fine whenever he reins in his showboating antics, while Nancy Travis is not bad as the love interest/suspected killer. It’s worth noting that So I Married an Axe Murderer is early Movie Myers—After the first Wayne’s World but before everything else in his filmography. As a result, expect a (thankfully) more restrained but not yet fully formed comic persona. The film is decently amusing without being particularly striking—the thriller genre mechanics sometimes clash with the comedic instinct of the film, and the ending ultimately picks romance over suspense, which is a safe defendable choice but not a completely satisfying one. I still liked it, but not a lot.