Jackhammer

"The Jackhammer Massacre"

Jack is a yuppie with a secure job and a penchant for occasional heavy drugfests with his best buddy. When his friend overdoses, Jack flees the scene and leaves him to die, not wanting to get caught with illegal substances. Unable to live with the guilt, Jack becomes a full-time junkie. He loses his professional job, garbage picks for food, and starts sporting a nasty infection (read: gigantic puss-filled growth) on his arm. As he downward spirals, he begins to hear the voice of his dead best friend, telling him to...well...murder people with a jackhammer!

This B-grade movie is pretty bad and starts out really slow. After the first few sequences, it starts showing an offbeat charm and the rest proves to be entertaining. The gore is more amusing than realistic, and it is nasty to watch Jack poke at his "infection" with a cotton swab and watch it ooze grossness. The hallucination scenes are twisted. If you have a fear of needles, or a fear of someone lurching at you and stabbing you with a syringe filled with an unknown substance, then that is the only real scare factor in "The Jackhammer Massacre."

The acting is below average but you can't help but laugh at the curious casting choices. All the members of the male cast look like gay porn stars and at some point all (10 or so) of them find it appropriate to take their shirts off and show their waxed, ripped torsos. It is hilarious and rather bizarre, as this movie is marketed as a straightforward slasher. A guy ODs, he takes his shirt off. A guy gets drenched in blood, he removes several layers until his chest is bare. Every single male cast member has his moment where he gets to remove his shirt. I found these inexplicable topless scenes highly amusing, as they reminded me how ridiculous it is when female characters randomly strip for no reason in genre movies. Jack also seems to have a fondness for stripping his male victims down to their undies for no apparent reason. And it is hard to ignore the sexual innuendo of Jack's Hammer--often murdering his victims by forcing his tool through their mouths. Is Jack repressing his sexuality? Does the voice of his dead (shirtless) friend represent more than what it seems? If the director is intending homoerotic undertones, he doesn't bother to clarify why, and it doesn't really matter because this movie is just a goofy spectacle.

For a movie that is basically saying "drugs are bad and will ruin your life," this doesn't take itself too seriously, so it is easy to laugh at its ridiculousness and be grossed out. And isn't that what B-horror movies are supposed to be about? Bonus points for featuring two characters that just so happen to be lesbians.

My Rating: 5.5/10

Jack Magnus (Aaron Gaffey) is a successful businessman who periodically does drugs with his best friend Mike (Kyle Yaskin). When Mike takes some bad stuff, Jack panics and leaves him to die. His guilt eventually causes him to become a full fledged, utterly pathetic junkie. After being force fed a particularly nasty brew by a vindictive supplier, Jack seems to only grow stronger, surviving the ordeal and living on to become a crazed jackhammer killer. He's now utterly paranoid, believing that everybody is out to get him, with his paranoia manifested in visions of his dead friend.

This viewer won't deny that this mostly routine little movie is crap, but it's crap of a very amusing variety. Co-writer / director / special makeup effects creator Joe Castro knows he's making just about the furthest thing from high art, and is clearly having a ball creating sordid characters and grisly scenarios. Some horror fans may feel that the movie isn't quite gory *enough*, but it does deliver a respectable dose of tacky in-your-face splatter. The story works best when it comes to the visions of Mike, getting positively trippy and insane.

The acting may not be much good, but it serves its purpose in a tale of this variety. The exception is Gaffey as Jack. This guy really is pretty good. Once he's descended into 100% junkie mode, he's always completely dishevelled and constantly drooling. He looks like an absolute wreck, and his insanity is damn entertaining. It also doesn't hurt any that the ladies in the cast, such as Nadia Angelini as Sam and Trudy Kofahl as Tori, are easy on the eyes.

Fun stuff for very undemanding viewers.

Six out of 10.

Yes, people, the summary above is true. If you took a crap and it came out disc shaped and you put it in your DVD player, you'd have The Jackhammer Massacre. I'm not kidding in the least, bruh. This movie is one of the worst pieces of crap I've ever seen, and I like a lot of crap movies. I don't like to bash movies because it makes me look like an idiot who probably couldn't make a better movie if my life depended on it, but I could film myself sleeping for two hours and it'd be more entertaining (and plausible) than this turd.

Let me start off by commenting on the acting by giving a witty analogy: If someone told you to eat a burger filled with cat turds and then act as if you enjoy it, you'd eat it, and try to act like you enjoy it. Of course, you're acting would be horrible, but in comparison to this, it'd be more believable than anything you'd see in here. The movie is about a junkie, so naturally, the guy should be able to look like a junkie. Instead, it looks like the director messed up his clothes and told him to act like he drank about a dozen cups of coffee. Because that's what it looks like, it looks like the main actor is perked on coffee.

The story. Let me tell you something witty and funny. The writer of this movie probably wrote this movie on a typewriter. If he did, which I like to believe, I commonly refer to the typewriters which bad movies are written from to be TRIPEwriters, HA-HA! Okay, back to the story. The story is about a man, named Jack (I smell irony and witty writing with that name!), who has a good job, a cool car, and lots of money. But, underneath the high paying job and cool car, Jack has an addiction…an addiction to DRUGS! One day, he and his buddy go to a rundown part of town to get high (this also happens literally five minutes into the movie; I guess these movie makers never heard of CHARACTER DEVELOPMENT!). They do get high, but Jack's friend overdoses and dies. Jack, being a narcissistic idiot, lets him die on the road. Then suddenly, from that one bad experience, he loses everything. Mind you, we never see him lose everything, we just assume that he has because again, he's wearing dirty clothes. But whatever. Now, after his downfall, he works as a security guard in a garage, and is still a junkie. He owes some bad people some money, so here's what they do: They go to him, kick the ever loving s*** out of him, and pull out a syringe of some kind of drug that's supposed to kill him. Now, even though this stuff if supposed to kill him (and was probably supposed to kill everyone they shot it into), one of the thugs says that he's heard some 'bad' stuff about the drug, that it can make you really strong. Yes, this makes sense. A drug that's been made to kill people has supposedly made people strong, even though it's made to kill them. How did the people who were injected even alive to exhibit these super powers if the drug's made to kill them? Exactly. Because this movie sucks. Jack is injected, he gets ridiculously powerful, and starts to kill everyone with a jackhammer. I smell an Oscar! Oh, wait, no, I smell a crap story, my bad.

Someone who likes this movie can argue, "Well, this movie is supposed to show the horror of drugs, are you stupid, LOL(!)" I would have to agree with this statement. As much as I hate this movie, I do agree that it shows what comes from drug use. It's obvious that the people who made this were on some kind of drugs, and made this piece of misery. Now kids, if you're reading, when you do drugs, you make stupid movies like this, so don't do drugs!

That's my two awesome cents on this movie. This movie's stupid, boring, and stupid. For a movie that's supposed to discourage drug use, it sure does make you wanna take something afterwards to forget that you ever saw it.

Score: 1 out of 10.

Wait, I take that back.

0 out of 10.

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.

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.