Sledgehammer

This movie is an anomaly to me. It has some good gore but by god are some scenes slow as all hell. There's one scene in which a character is opening a door and it takes well over 10 seconds to reach and turn the doorknob. It would be another fun and charming sov movie put out by Intervision if it weren't for the dragging of scenes and cringy overacting.

My review was written in January 1986 after watching a World Video Pictures video cassette.

"Sledge Hammer" is a substandard example of the new breed of horror features shot with videotape cameras (such as "Copperhead" and "Blood Cult") rather than on film. It's strictly a home video shelf item.

Made in 1984, feature included explicit gore and some nudity but a very weak storyline. Cornball premise has a battered young boy killing his mom and her adulterous lover with a sledge hammer. Ten years later, he's grown up and killing young people staying for a weekend at the same house.

With the killer appearing and disappearing at will, plus a seance at the house, there is a vague element of the supernatural in this picture, but nothing of interest happens between murders. Chatty dialog seems improvised and overall production qualities seem closer to the videotaped porn genre than to a horror pic. Acting is perfunctory and pacing is quite sluggish.

I'm going to be honest, this might be one of the worst slashers i've ever seen, but at least it's entertaining. Let's list off the bad things about this film: The acting, the ridiculous plot, the dialogue, the special effects, the camera work. So what is there to like about this film? Well, it's probably pretty fun to make fun of with your friends. 80s slashers are known for being cheesy but this truly goes above and beyond. The parts that are supposed to be funny aren't funny, the serious parts are laughable, the acting is cringey, the special effects are truly horrendous, and the editing. THE EDITING. There are far too many slow motion parts that i'm assuming are supposed to be emotional but they aren't. And they go on. And on... and on.... the slow motion segues literally last for 1-2 minutes at a time, it is nind boggling. In summary I would recommend watching this movie only if you are drunk at a party and want something truly awful to laugh at.

First of all, I want to make clear this caveat- it takes a lot of effort to conceive of, write, and execute a film, not to mention actually get it into video stores in the earliest days of VHS. This alone is worthy of respect.

With that out of the way, as a representative of the art form, this is easily one of the worst movies ever made, from every conceivable standpoint. The characters are not even one-dimensional, what can generously be called a plot has galaxy-sized holes in it, the killer has powers which are hilariously inconsistent scene-to-scene, some shots linger well past the point of absurdity, scenes are needlessly drawn out and some, inexplicably, are in slow motion, with several ending in weird freeze-frames, and a key moment where the killer's motivation is revealed (I think) is so muffled that it is indecipherable.

This is a very hard movie to get through, and it clocks in at well under 90 minutes.

Watch this with a group of friends in the style one would watch The Room or Rocky Horror, the latter of which looks like Citizen Kane in comparison.

Sledgehammer (1983)

1/2 (out of 4)

A young boy is being abused by his mother so he brutally kills her and her boyfriend with (you guessed it) a sledgehammer. Ten years later a group of adults show up at the same house and soon start to get picked off.

Director David A. Prior's SLEDGEHAMMER deserves some credit for being the first shot on video slasher film but sadly there really isn't too many good things to say about it. I guess you can give the film credit for being the first of something but sadly the entire film is just one giant mess of a picture with very little going for it. As you'd expect, there are countless technical issues, the performances are horrid and there's one thing that makes the film almost painfully unbearable to sit through.

What is that? The film clocks in at 84-minutes and the reason it runs that long is that so much of it was shot in slow motion. This here is what really kills anything decent in the film because scenes just drag on for no reason what-so-ever. I mean, I understand using slow motion at times but when there's this much of it you just want to claw your eyes out. Even worse is that a lot of scenes drag on for no reason at all. For an example, the opening shot of the house. In most movies it would last a second or two but here it must drag on for thirty seconds and for no reason!

As I said, that there makes SLEDGEHAMMER impossible to enjoy and it's rather painful to have to sit through. I will say that the death scenes were creative enough for such a low-budget movie and there was one creative shot through the killer's eyes. Sadly that's about all this film has going for it but you have to give credit to Prior for making his own film and this helped give a rather long career off the ground.