Jackhammer

When the credits of a movie contain listings like "naked junkie girl" you know this is going to be about as far removed from art as you can get. Okay, maybe I am being a little too hard on this movie. On second thought . . . no I'm not. This starts out as a straightforward drama about a yuppie who tosses his career into the dumper because of his addiction to drugs. Actually this all happens rather fast and I was hoping for a little more character development but heck, the director was in a hurry to get to the gore and that's what the people who went to see this movie were waiting for.

So then . . . Jack, our anti-hero, has a job as night watchman for a warehouse and he is usually too stoned to even do that. His supplier is after him for money, his boss fires him, his only pal dies in his arms of an overdose; what's left of his world is crashing down and what's a drug addled loser to do? He goes nuts of course and grabs the nearest power tool he can get . . . in this case a jackhammer.

Now then here's the stuff you were waiting for. Anyone who ventures into that warehouse for the rest of the movie is fodder for Jack's hammer. There is ample gore but you have to wonder when one of the potential victims is going to figure out the obvious; just run far enough that Jack runs out of extension cord! Does that ever happen? Maybe I should tell you and save you from having to suffer through this movie like I did. Hmmmmmm . . . no! Ain't I mean?

The acting is okay, the effects are pretty good, the plot is cabbage. This is the sort of things that would have played in grindhouses back in the heyday of 42nd St and the Combat Zone. Now you can rent it on DVD and turn your own living room into a grindhouse. Hey, it's much safer that way.

The Jackhammer Massacre (aka Jackhammer) follows the exploits of Jack the Junkie. Always high and looking to score Jack takes a leap off the deep end when a friend OD's. The first thirty minutes are basically him conning to get a score, boring. Back and forth he sways with the ethereal wind until one of his suppliers comes calling g for his cash. Oddly enough even as a full-time junkie Jack can find a job as a security guard at a warehouse with construction weapons, err tools. It seems Jack's paranoia really kicks in with a little help from his OD'd friend's ghost. Well hey this is where that jackhammer of the title rears its head and Jack goes to town thinking everyone's DEA.

The first 30 are slow and boring, who wants to see someone continuously shooting up. I don't at least. An interesting arm infection is a highlight of the first reel, not even bare chests and breasts can help that. But when the slaughter begins you can at least start cracking the power cord jokes (a la MST3K) and giggle and snicker at the bad dialogue and horrible delivery.

Just when you thought it was safe to go back into the theatre, there's Jack Hammer.

A movie about a Jack, whose drug addiction leads to homelessness, weakness, and murder.

He lives as a security guard in a abandoned machine shop after losing his cushy day job to drugs, when his best friend OD's and dies on the street in a bad part of town.

He had it all, nice car, a yellow Viper, I wouldn't have gone with yellow, but okay - the great job, but he lacked self esteem, his ego being a little too big for his britches syndrome if you will. He had no real direction. So far it seems a pretty realistic approach, but soon the movie flails like a fish out of water - to become a cliché, and unredeemable display of stupidity so profound, I am ashamed for the actor who had to play Jack.

I'm just gonna get real nitpicky here a second and say - JackHammer was one of the worse movies I have ever seen in my entire life.

A "making of" featurette for Jackhammer Massacre would look like an episode of MacGyver in how director Joe Castro and a few side-kicks made a movie with a stick of gum, a few boxes, and a door bell ringer. That in itself is quite an impressive feat, and the final production value quite honestly does not show the laughable budget and resources (laughable by Troma standards no less.) Don't get me wrong, this movie does obviously look and feel low budget (really low budget) – it does not come across as a couple guys who borrowed the digital camcorder and shot at home using the props found in the glove-box, back seat, and trunk. And while praising the film, let me also add that the film has some good moments of gore (specifically, the gore not affiliated with the jackhammer.) Sadly, this praise does not mean this has yielded a good film.

Jackhammer Massacre presumes that we care about Jack and his tragedy while it flashes back to his formerly successful life as a prick businessman destined to screw himself over with bad choices and become the psychotic prick killer. Jackhammer presumes wrong.

While roughly a third of the running time is dedicated to the unsympathetic tragedy that is our killer Jack and his cartoony (not to mention comical) delusions, the victims show up just long enough to be killed. Or in other words Jack is treated as the main character, it develops him with a prepackaged uninteresting scenario of how his friend ODed and he became addicted . . . and the movie assumes we'll sympathize with everyone else because "they're walking into a death trap." Jackhammer assumes wrong.

Ever hear the overstated remark "The hero is only as good as the villain he faces"? Jackhammer built up their villain but forgot the hero entirely, resulting in a narratively unbalanced film. It's not the fact that Jack's development is screwed that hurts the film – don't get me wrong, though, that alone cripples it – the real nail in the coffin is the fact there's really no one with any cinematic weight and screen presence to metaphorically oppose him. The head of the salvage crew gets a heroic introduction shot, and that's the extent of her character development.

Jack's sister and her friend? The movie literally throws them away before the audience can gain any emotional investment in them. Jack's boss? We see his face long enough to memorize it before he bites the dust. The guy buying the shop and his assistant? They walk in, perform the horror gimmick of looking around and then die. The salvage crew? They live a little bit longer, but to say these characters are introduced would be a severe and misleading overstatement. A very precise tagline for the film would be "Show up and die." Outside, LA life goes on. Across the globe, the sun sets, and the world keeps on turning. And nobody cares about the handful of strangers we never met whom we'll never see again.

Slasher films need to kill characters to be effective. Jackhammer kills cameo appearances.

Then there was Jack's delusions, his dead buddy who returns from the grave to haunt him with phrases like "You let me die" spoken in a tone that sounds curiously similar to that smug and sarcastic Randal in Kevin Smith's Clerks. As a direct result, the scenes came across not as a delusion haunting a man to drive him insane, rather as a smart-ass ghost heckling the living for kicks. Granted a number of scenes in the film were intentionally comical (Jack's hallucination of running from the spotlight, for example), I don't sense Joe Castro intended the ghostly apparition to have that caliber of goofiness.

While speaking on the comedy element, it never quite hits its mark. The presentation of the horror/comedy blend feels eerily similar to those unintentionally lame 80s rip offs of Friday the 13th made by incompetent hacks who fail to realize how idiotic a situation they've presented. And only through the overwhelmingly ludicrous scenarios and cutting does it become apparent that the Jackhammer Massacre has its tongue in its cheek . . . in places. In other places, like with the previously discussed tragedy of Jack and the heckling ghost of Overdosed past, does the film realize how ineffective that is? I have my doubts.

With Jackhammer's various misfires, it's not surprising how tempting it becomes to target the things the film never cared about. For example, how impractical is it to kill with an 80lb jackhammer? Who is stupid enough to fall in a puddle of blood mixed with intestines and then peel off his soaked shirt as if he just had a coffee stain? How long is that extension cord? And of course, Jackhammer's obedience to the horror formula with a set of characters making out because they can.

Jackhammer is a slasher, and thank God it knows it's a slasher; however, it's still apparent that it doesn't know how to be a good slasher, which is okay. It has a ton of brothers and sisters on the rental shelf next to it to keep it company.

The Jackhammer Massacre (a.k.a. Jackhammer – 2004) C-89 min. D: Joe Castro. Aaron Gaffey, Kyle Yaskin, Bart Burson, Nadia Angelini, Evan Owen, Rob Rotten, Rachel Rotten, Desi O'Brian. A direct-to-DVD revenge/slasher movie details a successful businessman's fall into insanity and growing love for his jackhammer, thanks to drugs. The first slasher movie in memory to blame its killer's antics on drugs...for a while, it even works too (with some nasty & gory special effects). It's nice to see a direct-to-DVD slasher gorefest. Unfortunately, the film's horrendous acting (worse than anything the 80s slasher films had to offer, which is really sad) and laughable last 20 minutes lead to its downfall. There is no excuse for the filmmakers to have been satisfied with the amount of bad acting in this movie (though the lead, Aaron Gaffey, isn't half bad). RATING: 3 out of 10. Rated R for graphic violence and gore, grisly images, drug use, sexuality, adult themes, and profanity.