So I Married an Axe Murderer

DirecTV recently added the Epix package and included several weeks of a free trial, which allowed me to DVR some movies from the 1980s and 90s to do posts on. First up is the 1993 comedy So I Married an Axe Murderer.

Mike Myers plays Charlie Mackenzie, a man who lives in San Francisco and makes a living somehow, but don't ask how since his primary passion seems to be beatnik-type performance poetry with a jazz combo behind him and projected images. One day, he stops at a new butcher shop to buy some haggis for his parents, and meets female butcher Harriet (Nancy Travis). He goes back to the shop some time later to buy more haggis. Only, this time, the store is much busier, to the point that Charlie volunteers to help, since his own father (also played by Myers) had worked as a butcher.

It eventually leads to a relationship, and some time later he's going to take Harriet to meet his parents. Dad is ultra-Scottish, while mom May (Brenda Fricker), is a bit odd herself, reading the Weekly World News and thinking everything in it is dead-on accurate. When Charlie sees Mom this time, she's going on about a story in the rag about a Mrs. X who married three times in different parts of the country only for the husbands to disappear shortly thereafter.

Still, Charlie's parents and Harriet seem to have a mutual liking for each other, so the relationship deepens. But when Charlie visits Harriet's apartment, there's a poster of Atlantic City on the wall. That's where the first of Mrs. X's husbands went missing. Harriet also studied some sort of martial arts under a Russian instructor, and actually speaks some Russian. That describes Mrs. X's second husband to a tee. There's also coincidences about the third Mr. X, so Charlie begins to get paranoid about Harriet.

Charlie asks his best friend Tony (Anthony LaPaglia) for help, since Tony is a San Francisco cop and might be able to learn more about the Mrs. X case and whether there's anything to it. The coincidences keep piling up, leading Charlie to make the mistake of breaking up the relationship -- until Tony learns that somebody's confessed to one of the Mrs. X murders.

Amazingly, Harriet takes Charlie back and she agrees to marry him. But on their wedding day, Tony learns that Harriet is closer to all the Mrs. X murders than either of them could ever have thought. Can Tony save Charlie while he's on his honeymoon?

I really liked the premise of So I Married an Axe Murderer, although it's certainly a movie not without its problems. The climax goes on much too long and is much too manic, while I didn't care for the "poetry" at all. Many of the scenes that are more tangential to the plot actually work better, which I suppose shouldn't be surprising coming from a man who got his start in sketch comedy. Myers' Saturday Night Live co-star Phil Hartman has a good scene as a tour guide at Alcatraz, while Michael Richard plays an employee in the newspaper obituary section with a very dark sense of humor.

If you like sketch humor and/or quirky 1990s comedies, I think you'll really like So I Married an Axe Murderer. It's available on DVD if you want to watch it yourself.