We have now reached the shot-on-video portion of our yearly programming. I will now include my usual disclaimer: I unironically love movies that are shot on camcorders by a group of friends and neighbors. Whenever some Cecil B. Delulu talks his homely acquaintances into spending a weekend soaked in red food dye and Karo syrup, I find the result irresistible. I have given favorable reviews to Video Violence (and its even dumber sequel) and I’ve seen Blood Cult and The Ripper multiple times apiece (though I probably wouldn’t recommend ’em). I love SOV horror for precisely the reasons the average person hates it: It looks like shit and the acting is generally horrendous. Hell, almost everything is horrendous, from lighting, to sound, to special effects. But if you were the kind of person who found yourself strangely fascinated by the local access TV shows that used to come on late at night, you may enjoy SOV horror as well.
I hesitate to say it, but I don’t think Sledgehammer was shot on consumer grade camcorders. Then again, all video in 1983 looked like garbage so it’s hard to tell. To me it feels more like it was made by folks who had access to professional production gear through a university or something (the Wikipedia page currently lacks a “PRODUCTION” section and I don’t feel like doing much more research than that). At any rate, it’s not nearly as good looking as 1989’s Iced, which I featured last year, but I like this better. On the other hand, it was obviously cut on fairly state-of-the-art equipment at the time, including a title maker that looks exactly like the one that I cut my teeth on when I was a multimedia student nearly thirty years ago.
The movie opens in a secluded cabin where a woman locks her son in a closet so that she can have sex with her illicit lover. The couple have rented the cabin to cheat on their spouses. When the woman asks, “Do you think they figured it out yet?” The man says, “Who cares?” as he very awkwardly puts the moves on her. (Later there’s another sex scene in which a different actor pretty much just lies on his lover, presumably because they’re real life acquaintances and not trained actors.) A figure armed with a sledgehammer enters the room and bashes the man’s skull in. In case you missed any part of this sequence, it plays again, almost in its entirety, in a completely unnecessary flashback midway through the movie.
Ten years later, a group of middle aged actors playing teens rent the same cabin for a weekend of partying. (Maybe the performers aren’t quite middle aged, but it’s hard to tell because in the 80s… the concept of drinking water instead of alcohol had not yet been invented while most people generally started smoking at birth.) This is a pretty large group of potential victims for a movie like this, which typically only feature four or five performers and drags the kills out for a plodding pace. Sledgehammer manages to innovate by having all these characters and still plodding. At one point the movie cranks up the stock melancholic music as two lovers wander the outdoor scenery… you get the sense that the editor employs slow motion here just because A) his sick VHS editing station is capable of it and B) he wanted to stretch the footage out long enough to let the song end. Similarly, establishing shots last forever.
Look, that kind of amateurishness just goes with the territory. It doesn’t hurt the movie. It endears it.
Eventually the killer is cornered, at which point he reveals his motivation. I couldn’t understand a word he was saying so I turned on the subtitles. The subtitles said, “(MUMBLING)” because even they couldn’t figure it out. So much for the grand reveal. Also muddled is the gore, which isn’t great, but I’m grading on a curve here. At least they gave it a good effort. That’s all I was asking for, really.
By now you should know if this is your type of movie. If it’s not, that’s okay. I don’t like every subgenre, either. But it is my type of movie. And no, I can’t defend that. I won’t even try. It’s some admittedly ridiculous shit to enjoy.
