Sledgehammer



A couple of love birds hiding out from their respective spouses take refuge in an isolated farm house where they can privately get their freak on. Except the lady brought her kid with her, and nobody wants tiny prying eyes. So she locks her 8-year-old son in a room upstairs and then heads to her lover. But just when they start to get their Bow-chika-Bow-Wow on, an unknown assailant barges in and kills them with a SLEDGEHAMMER ♪~ ! (And yes, because the line in the Peter Gabrial song is stuck in my head every time I think about the title, you all now have to suffer along with me.)

Some 10 years later, a group of seven “kids” show up at the house for a little weekend R and R. They eat. They drink. And they’re pretty merry…. Right up until Chuck (of course his name would be Chuck…) has the bright idea to perform a seance. The whole thing is meant to be a practical joke on his friends, complete with creepy voices and sound effects. But it has the unintended consequence of waking up whatever malevolent forces are present in the house. And said malevolence appears to like consistency, because it quickly finds its old SLEDGEHAMMER ♪~ and immediately proceeds with the bone crushing.


Ick

Before I get into the rest of the film, let us all first take a minute to appreciate the filmmakers dedication to their theme, by watching them smash their opening credits, that someone spent hours lovingly constructing, with their titular bludgeoning method of choice:


Let us all give a slow clap for their commitment to the schtick.

Anyway, SLEDGEHAMMER ♪~ (yup, I’m typing it out like that every time), is an independent  American slasher film from 1983, and is one of the earliest SOV (shot on video) horror films to grace the then burgeoning video rental market. And as expected it’s…not great. It’s the first film directed by David Prior, who would later go on to direct Killer Workout (also not good) and many action movies, including Operation Warzone, Future Force (eventually riffed by Rifftrax), and Night Trap, which also isn’t supposed to be great, but at least had a decent cast.


Unlike THIS film.

But the movie I shall least fondly remember him for is Deadly Prey, a film in which he cast his brother, Ted Prior, in the lead role, and then had him run around shirtless in the woods of California, almost constantly screaming and wearing cut-off jean shorts, a visual that has permanently seared itself into my retinas and that I’m sure will undoubtedly haunt me until my dying day. So thanks for that, you jag-offs. And yes, I was (not) shocked to see that Ted also has a starring role in David’s first film as well (in fact, he’s the only recognizable face in the whole film). And yes, he is again shirtless and seen screaming in quite a bit of it. But at least this time he’s not also sweating profusely and holding a gun. So… small mercies.


Though this image of him isn’t all that much better.

Another similarity to Deadly Prey, is that the plot to this thing is truly a mess. Because you really have no idea what’s going on half the time. I THINK what the movie is trying to convey is that some satanic force caused the kid to kill his mother and her lover. Because at some point there’s a bloody upside down pentagram on the wall, so I believe that was the implication. But I don’t know, as that bloody wall decoration is the only clue you get. I just know that sometimes you see the kid walking around with a knife and a mask, and sometimes you see this GIANT of a man walking around with a mask and his SLEDGEHAMMER ♪~, and they’re both supposed to be the same person. So the film says, anyway. Meaning the kid grew…somehow, and was able to kill his mother and her lover that way. And then he disappeared…somehow… and came back ten years later to kill again…somehow. I don’t know. The logistics are weird as hell and often nonsensical. Though I will give the filmmakers credit for finding the BIGGEST man they could find to play the lumbering killer. Dude had to duck to walk through doorways. If that creep came at me with a SLEDGEHAMMER ♪~ I’d run the hell away too.


Yeowser

But that’s the FUN part of the film, and you have to struggle just to get to that. Because most of this movie is slow. And by “slow” I mean sloooooooooo….ooo…..ooooow. You can really tell this was Prior’s first film, because like a lot of first time filmmakers, he clearly didn’t realize just how short his film was actually going to be. Up to and including the first death it’s mostly fine. The opening credits are a bit long in the tooth (3 minutes), but long opening credit sequences were pretty typical in the 80s. But then the “kids” show up and you get to watch riveting scenes of them unpacking their van, taking looong strolls outside, poorly dancing, having MULTIPLE awkward relationship conversations, AND THEN you get to watch them have a full-on food fight. And by this point you’re a good 30-minutes in, but everything has felt so stagnant up to this point that it feels like it’s been twice that long, and the damn “sometimes GIANT sometimes _{itty bitty}” killer hasn’t even shown up yet, and you feel like if you have to listen to these people talk any more, then you’re going to go mad and be forced to perform a reverse Ringu and crawl through your TV to kill them yourself. But then the seance occurs and things finally start happening and the movie picks up a little bit.


It just occurred to me, that the SLEDGEHAMMER ♪~ doesn’t look like a weapon, but just more poorly thought out body hair on this guy.

But wait, we’re not done! It gets worse! Because just making the movie feel longer doesn’t actually make it longer. So in order to stretch it to ‘feature length’ Prior had to stretch things out…. A lot. How? Well, for starters, the opening shot of the farmhouse, literally the very first thing you see, lasts 30 seconds before the camera finally starts to move. Which, to reiterate, it does sloooowly, as it zooms in towards the upstairs window. Then we see mom lock the kid in the closet and as soon as the door is shut you see her turn the lock sloowly and walk away even more slooooowly. I mean, dear gods, they even have the SLEDGEHAMMER ♪~ come down slowly on people’s skulls! IT’S INFURIATING! And this is basically what’s done during THE WHOLE MOVIE in order to incrementally stretch out the run time. Long needless pans over things that aren’t important. Lengthy static shots of things we’ve already seen. In every other scene, you can almost bet that something is going to be shown in slow-mo, whether it warrants it or not. Or – and this may be my favorite part – during the seance, while Chuck is explaining what happened in the house 10 years ago, we get treated to the first scene again where the kid gets locked up and mom and lover boy get meat tenderized. Only this time you get to see it in all in sepia tone. You know, just in case you forgot what happened less than 20 minutes ago. Really just anything to make the film longer, because clearly, Prior was doing whatever he could to stretch this thing out. And of course to top it off, the end credits are needlessly long, unnecessarily slow, and last a whopping 8 minutes. I suspect that if everything had been shortened to a more natural and reasonable length, the movie would have been lucky to clock in at 60 minutes.


Well, for starters I think you need a new interior decorator. Or maybe just some wall art, perhaps?

But that’s not even getting into the technical side of things. Video quality? Not the best. A restoration might help it, but the initial camera quality is so poor that I doubt it would do much. And several scenes would have really benefited from better framing. Just way too many butt shots or the back of characters’ heads for my liking. But to Prior and company’s credit, they did actually know how to light the film (thank GOD!). So while it’s pretty grainy and the contrast royally sucks ass, at least there’s never a time where the video plunges you into total darkness and you can’t see what’s going on. You can always see the actors quite clearly. And there are even a couple of times where they try to get arty, so that’s nice too.



The sound though, is another matter. For most of the film it’s okay. I suspect they may have actually known how to mic the rooms and everything. So good for them. But there are also a couple of instances where you can’t hear what’s being said, or the characters were clearly dubbed and things start to look and sound weird.

The worst part though, is towards the end when the ghost kid finally speaks and he gives an explanation for why he’s doing what he’s doing. “But wait,” I hear you say. “You said you didn’t know what was going on in this movie.” Correct, dear reader! And if you watch this movie, neither will you. Because the problem with the kid’s explanation is that you can’t comprehend half of it. Not only is he mumbling, but they put some kind of filter over his voice to make him sound more “spooky”, so you can’t understand him. I know, I tried. And then I got fed up and turned on the subtitles for some help, but it turns out the subtitler couldn’t hear what the kid was saying any more than I could, because half the time he talks it just says “(mumbling)”. That’s it. That’s all the help I got. Is what he said nonsense? Does it explain everything?! No idea! But I’m sure at least part of it was important. And of course it was probably the part that was completely unintelligible. So unless someone out there develops super hearing or has a copy of the script handy, I suspect whatever he said shall henceforth remain a mystery for all time.


ARGH!

Lets see, what else was there? I’m sure there was something…. Oh! I’d love to know how the fuck old all these people are supposed to be. Half the descriptions online say “teens”, which is why I initially put this movie on my watch-list for the month. But as soon as they all got out of the van I knew that couldn’t be right, because one of the guys looks like he’s about one month away from having a full Grizzly Adams beard, another one’s sporting a porn-stache like a pro, and ole’ shirtless Ted looks like a carpenter who just stepped out of the pages of a cheesy harlequin romance novel.

“Gee Mr. Prior, those bookshelves look fantastic. But golly… it seems like I don’t have enough money to pay you. Whatever shall I do?”

“Don’t worry, ma’am. I’m sure we can think of something together.” *ziiiip….*

So I am highly dubious about those claims. Even though most of them certainly act like teens, thanks to the dialogue and the 2 and a half minute long food fight they have at dinner (so wasteful!). Thankfully though, the acting itself isn’t too bad. Sure, their actions can be pretty stupid much of the time (Why do you keep running upstairs?! Use the front door, you moron!). But that was the script, not them. For the most part they’re pretty tolerable for a horror film.


And I got to watch the kid bitchslap Ted! I didn’t know how much I needed that in my life!

So, for a supernatural slasher, SLEDGEHAMMER ♪~ isn’t all that good. The slasher parts themselves are pretty decent for this type of “do it yourself” project. But I think even with the couple of good deaths it does have, that even a lot of hardcore slasher fans might still struggle to appreciate this one. It’s just going to be too rough for most people. The kind of rough that you really have to already have an appreciation for. But hey, it was their first film, so that’s to be expected. And it’s better than some other “first films” I’ve watched (I’m looking at you, Day of the Reaper), so at least it’s got that in its favor. But I think it’s safe to say that unless you’re the most dedicated of slasher fans, you can probably safely skip this one without regret.

SLEDGE- Okay, I’m done – hammer is available on a variety of streaming services.

Sledgehammer is also available on DVD.

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