This movie fucking sucks and unquestionably deserves the red death coffin! You know the red death coffin is a funny little coffin if you examine it closely. Here at Splatter we mark certain films with the red death that have plunged beneath the no coffin, squalid rating and elicit feelings of pain, disgust and/or depression from viewing the respective film. But a red death coffin is not always a bad thing. The scantily clad sexy brunette inside the sarcophagus beckons, oh so subtlety. Some of us are drawn to the exotic, nerve wrecking, suicide-inducing films to watch with friends and enjoy with plenty of alcohol. Sledgehammer is such a film. Let me tell you all about it.
Being one of the first shot on video films to be produced and distributed (1983), it deserves some credit. Writer/Director David Prior (Killer Workout) knew this sort of thing was outside the norm at the time, but he couldn’t afford to shoot on film. He had access to some video cameras, basic lighting equipment and he really wanted to make a feature, so he went for it. The story is simple, ridiculous and lousy. It is like a jumbled nightmare, a boring one quite frankly. This no rules, dumbed-down dreamlike world and the drone synthesizer score are what seem to entertain people. It’s also been an extremely obscure and hard to find flick.
The story is your basic slasher plot. There is a horrific double murder and ten years later a group of college kids with booze and sex on the brain crash in the house where the murder happened. The killer has remained waiting for such an occasion to shed blood again. We witness the initial killings in the first 10 minutes. An adulterous woman and her lover are killed by someone with a sledgehammer. The son goes missing and some believe he was the killer. None of the college kids are likeable. The two main guys are very muscular and therefore shirtless for many scenes. They are always drinking beer and acting retarded. In one scene they have an awkward food fight which was very disgusting and unnecessary. The character interplay is alien to anything you could recognize as normal human interaction. The MANY slow motion scenes drag on and slowly rip your mind apart. Prior uses this editing technique every 10 minutes and time seems to stretch as your watching this slow, odd film.
The killer is a tall, burly man with a cheap plastic mask. He also likes to appear in the form of a child of eight years (also with a mask). He has powers such as invisibility, teleportation and superhuman strength. Although the film is called Sledgehammer the sledgehammer killings are just as uninspired as the rest of the movie. There are a couple of cheap gore shots but nothing even mildly stimulating. As two characters are having sex we see one boob (on a dead woman). That boob is as drab and dry as the rest of the film so you just really don’t care. I’m not kidding when I strongly urge you to watch this with friends and with booze.
If you want to subject yourself to terrible filmmaking that can induce an altered state of mind then this is the film for you. I recommend you watch it very late at night. Make it the tail of your bad movie marathon. Watch it when your exhausted and liquored up, when your mind is weak and vulnerable. That is fertile ground for this ultra-bore mindfuck! It came out on DVD in May 2011, so it‘s there if you want to indulge.
| - Jorge Antonio Lopez |
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