Sledgehammer

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.

This is a homemade 80's slasher film that appears to have cost about 14 bucks to make and looks like it was shot on a VHS camcorder (I'm not kidding). It was shown at a theater in L.A. recently as part of a homemade horror video festival and I still can't get it out of my mind. The film begins with an abused child being locked in a closet while his mother has a drunken fling with a character referred to in the credits as the "Lover". Before the affair can commence a giant masked maniac armed with a sledgehammer beats them to a bloody pulp. A title card (old ass 80's camcorder text) tells us it's 10 years later and we are introduced to seven potential victims as they go for a weekend retreat in the home of the previous murders where they are systematically stalked and killed by the same sledge wielding madman. OK, I know it all sounds very derivative and there are much better, more professional cheap ass slashers out there, but this movie is "special" in a lot of ways. First off, the low production value and it's cheap, home video quality cinematography actually enhance the film a lot. That combined with a simple, yet effective, bass heavy synthesizer score, an amateur cast made up of muscle bound jocks and big hair bimbos, and a freakishly tall killer who wears a clear plastic mask and is genuinely creepy looking make this movie transcend into a weird kinda art piece. It's like if Pinter made a slasher movie at a friends house one weekend for beer money on his home video camera. There is also an unexplained paranormal bit where the killer can physically change back into the small child from the beginning so I assume the kid is the killer and he's a shape shifter. Huh!? This effect is handled with an old fashioned dissolve. There is a completely inappropriate food fight that is extended for so long it becomes almost disturbing on a sociological level. The killer is SO big he barely clears the hallway's ceiling as he chases a victim and he holds his sledgehammer in one hand the way most normal people hold a regular hammer. Freaky. This whole films visual style is unnerving and escalates it into something much more than what was probably intended. David Lynch meets The Slumber Party Massacre. If you can get a bootleg dub somewhere, get high and drunk with as many friends you can find and toss it on the old VCR. The 80's never seemed stranger.

Ted Prior was a Playgirl Playmate trying to get into acting, his brother David uhm, just owned a camera I guess, and so a fruitful collaboration started that has been going on for more than thirty years now. Their absolute masterpiece is probably 1987's "Deadly Prey", a complete and utter rip-off to "Rambo: First Blood" that is just irresistibly entertaining in all its wrongness. That one I can really recommend, but "Sledgehammer" is a whole other story. This thing is one of the most boring slasher films I have ever seen, it's clear the dynamic duo still had lots to learn when they made this. For example, David Prior hadn't figured out yet how to turn off the slo-mo effect on his camcorder. He uses slo-mo for the most random things. Some slo-mo in the grand finale, makes sense. Every single death scene in slow-motion, that's pushing it but fair enough. But why would you use it when the scene is just people walking around in a garden or sitting on a couch doing nothing? Is this young David Prior's creative force kicking in and not having a clue what it's doing? Not that the movie would be any good at a normal speed, but at least it would be lots shorter. Occasionally there is some almost-suspense (the clichéd slasher scene where one character tells the killer's legend isn't bad), the opening scene is also quite atmospheric, but as a whole "Sledgehammer" just doesn't bring much to the table to keep you entertained. It also doesn't help that you'll constantly have to yell "just get out of the house!" at the screen, my throat is still sore from yesterday. If this led the Priors on the road to "Deadly Prey" I appreciate it exists, but that's the nicest thing I can say about it.

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.

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.