So I Married an Axe Murderer Is an Eminently Re-Watchable Cult Classic from Mike Meyers' Glorious Heyday
Welcome, friends, to the latest entry in Control Nathan Rabin 4.0. It’s the career and site-sustaining column that gives YOU, the kindly, Christ-like, unbelievably sexy Nathan Rabin’s Happy Place patron, an opportunity to choose a movie that I must watch, and then write about, in exchange for a one-time, one hundred dollar pledge to the site’s Patreon account. The price goes down to seventy-five dollars for all subsequent choices.
The 1993 dark comedy So I Married an Axe Murderer is a good example of what I like to call a Cable Classic. Those are movies you stumble across on basic cable and think, “Oh shit, I love this movie!” and watch to the end no matter how many times you’ve seen them before.
I’ve consequently seen massive chunks of Mike Myers’ poorly received follow-up to Wayne’s World countless times without ever seeing it in its entirety before I was professionally obligated to do so for this column.
That seems appropriate, since So I Married an Axe Murderer finds Myers growing as an actor, movie star and romantic leading man while clinging tightly to his sketch comedy roots.
The rhythms of So I Married an Axe Murderer are sketch comedy rhythms. It’s full of scenes that could be surgically removed and aired as stellar Saturday Night Live sketches with only the smallest of adjustments.
That’s true of Wayne’s World and Austin Powers as well but in all three cases the massive amount of sketch comedy in the creative DNA does not keep them from being wholly satisfying motion pictures as well.
Mike Myers has had a strange, unfortunate career arc. I am a HUGE fan of everything he did up until 1996: Saturday Night Live, Wayne’s World, Wayne’s World 2, So I Married an Axe Murderer and Austin Powers. Yet I hate just about everything Myers did after that with the exception of his cameo in Inglorious Basterds, but particularly The Love Guru, The Cat in the Hat and the Austin Powers sequels.
At a certain point I, and the rest of the world, found Mike Myers, AKA lovable Wayne Campbell likable and charming as well as funny and talented. Then came Austin Powers: The Spy Who Shagged Me and all those fucking Shrek movies and he became oddly, even uniquely unlikable as a public figure as well as an actor.
Myers lapsed quickly and permanently into lazy self-caricature. Like Johnny Depp, Myers lost himself in pounds of make-up and crazy get-ups and kooky accents. Myers lost track of what made him so appealing in the first place, and a profoundly gifted writer-actor who once knocked it out of the park each time at bat, movie-wise, seems to have lost his cinematic mojo completely. He no longer makes us horny. No, Baby!
But in his radiant youth, Myers really was an extraordinary talent as both a writer and a performer. It’s tempting to imagine what might have happened if So I Married an Axe Murderer had been a hit and he’d experienced success as a romantic leading man and not just as Austin Powers, Wayne Campbell and Shrek.
Myers stretches successfully in So I Married an Axe Murderer but the market was not impressed, and the movie flopped where Wayne’s World was a surprise smash.
Watching So I Married an Axe Murderer in 2022 is like mainlining 1993. It’s pumping that uncut shit straight into your veins. To quote my all-time favorite meme, feels good, man!
From a nostalgia perspective, So I Married an Axe Murderer is pure bliss. And that’s just the soundtrack! The movie begins with Boo Radley’s cover of “There She Goes”, one of the loveliest songs ever composed about the joys of heroin.
So I Married an Axe Murderer’s soundtrack could not be more thoroughly and adorably 1993. It features, in addition to the aforementioned Boo Radley’s, Toad the Wet Sprocket, Soul Asylum, Big Audio Dynamite II’s one hit, Suede, The La’s original version of “There She Goes” and Ned’s Atomic Dustbin covering “Saturday Night” when it was still considered terribly ironic for a new band to dip a toe in a hopelessly tacky and out of date genre like disco. Then we all realized that, actually, disco was the best form of music and it was mopey alt-rock that fucking sucks and should be relegated to the (Ned’s Atomic) Dustbin of history.
The soundtrack also features a spoken-word piece from Mike Myers in character as Charlie MacKenzie because the film was released during that brief, unfortunate cultural window when spoken word poetry and poetry slams were a thing.
Myers plays what Wikipedia describes as a “popular local beat poet." That is of course an oxymoron. There is no such thing as a popular contemporary beat poet but the movies are a world of make-believe and wonder. If you can believe that a man can fly, you may be able to also swallow that a full-time poet of questionable talent would make enough money to afford a nice apartment in San Francisco, that most expensive of cities, and drive a sports car.
Charlie may be inexplicably and implausibly well-off for a poet but his fear of commitment leads him to find faults in everyone he dates until he meets cute with sexy butcher Harriet Michaels (Nancy Travis) while looking for haggis for his family.
Charlie volunteers to help out at the butcher shop and the two engage in dead animal-based flirtation, goofing around with formerly living creatures to the accompaniment of Big Audio Dynamite II’s infectious anthem “Rush.”
In order for a romantic comedy to really work we need to fall at least a little bit in love with the actors playing the leads. Myers meets that threshold here. We like him. We identify with him. We root for him to get the girl, assuming that she is not, in fact, an axe murderer.
The same is true of Travis. She’s funny and charming and quirky but with the dark undercurrent you would expect from a character who might be a dream girl or might be a nightmare.
Myers would go on to become a distractingly selfish performer. He didn’t act, he did shtick that was nowhere near as funny as he seemed to think it was. But in So I Married an Axe Murderer Myers engages with Travis in a way that’s unexpected but revelatory.
The straight man role of Charlie MacKenzie, lovable goof who is unlucky in love, calls upon Myers to do things utterly foreign to him, like forego crazy wigs, costumes, accents and make-up and play a recognizable human being rather than a crazy cartoon character.
Of course this IS a Mike Myers movie so he decided to hedge his bets and play a relatively straightforward romantic lead AND that character’s larger-than-life dad Stuart, a cantankerous, excessively Scottish conspiracy theorist brought to life through crazy wigs, costumes and make-up.
Myers doesn’t just go the Eddie Murphy in Coming to America/The Nutty Professor route and play multiple members of a single family; he matches Murphy’s brilliance and versatility. That is very high praise.
As Stuart, Myers fucking destroys. Everything that comes out of his mouth is a singular combination of hilarious and quotable. When Stuart is monologuing angrily about the secret forces that rule the world and his hatred of Colonel Sanders an undercover detective played by Anthony LaPaglia is guffawing.
In another context this might come off as unprofessional. LaPaglia the actor is clearly laughing at Myers’ performance but instead of taking us out of the moment it pulls us further into it because Myers’ performance is just that fucking funny.
LaPaglia is a serious actor in a dark comedy populated by some of the funniest performers of the 20th century. When it came to filling out minor parts, So I Married an Axe Murderer apparently had unlimited access to the 20 funniest living Americans.
Need a virtuoso for the scene-stealing role of an Alcatraz tour guide who is WAY too invested in the grimy details of prison life, particularly the parts involving shivs, bitches and vicious beatdowns? Great, because Phil Hartman is up for the role. Require a deadpan specialist for the tiny, insignificant role of a driver who has his car commandeered and is none too happy about it? Charles Grodin is inexplicably down to shoot for about eight hours. Have a one scene part for a hilariously inappropriate obituary writer who can’t stop making bad taste quips about the recently dead? Great, Michael Richards is onboard. In the market for a deadpan delight for the small but juicy role of a kooky pilot with no concept of time and a limitless interest in his own dreams? Wonderful! You’ve got the Duke of Deadpan, Steven Wright, in the part.
Finally, for the bigger and more central, but still unmistakably supporting role of LaPaglia’s kind-hearted boss So I Married an Axe Murderer got a first ballot Comedy Hall of Famer in future Academy Award winner Alan Arkin.
There’s a lot of competition but Arkin may score the biggest laugh of the film when his subordinate complains that his job isn’t anything like in the movies, and he wishes that he would cuss him out and tell him that he was tired of defending him to his commissioner and Arkin’s kind copper replies, “I report to a committee, some of whom are appointed, some elected, and the rest co-opted on a bi-annual basis. It’s a quorum.”
So I Married An Axe Murderer gets a lot of its appeal from its obscenely over-qualified and stacked supporting cast but it’s just as assured and funny in its central plot, a kooky dark comedy riff on Fatal Attraction and other paranoid thrillers about the deadly danger posed by an ominous outsider entering the life of an unsuspecting protagonist and turning it upside down.
Myers recently revisited this material for a Netflix series based on one of the dad’s paranoid rants called The Pentaverate. I have zero interest in ever watching the series because I have learned to be VERY wary of late-period Mike Myers vehicles and I don’t want the sour sadness of the bad years to detract from my fond memories of the seven years when Myers could do no wrong and created a formidable legacy he has spent the ensuing years destroying.
Check out The Joy of Trash: Flaming Garbage Fire Extended Edition at https://www.nathanrabin.com/shop and get a free, signed "Weird Al” Yankovic-themed coloring book for free! Just 18.75, shipping and taxes included! Or, for just 25 dollars, you can get a hardcover “Joy of Positivity 2: The New Batch” edition signed (by Felipe and myself) and numbered (to 50) copy with a hand-written recommendation from me within its pages. It’s truly a one-of-a-kind collectible!
I’ve also written multiple versions of my many books about “Weird Al” Yankovic that you can buy here: https://www.nathanrabin.com/shop
Or you can buy The Joy of Trash from Amazon at https://www.amazon.com/Joy-Trash-Nathan-Definitive-Everything/dp/B09NR9NTB4/ref=tmm_pap_swatch_0?_encoding=UTF8&qid=&sr= but why would you want to do that?
Check out my new Substack at https://nathanrabin.substack.com/
And we would love it if you would pledge to the site’s Patreon as well. https://www.patreon.com/nathanrabinshappyplace