Too much of everything

Boring

Great movie. Not sure what people expected but I found it highly entertaining.

The tone of this movie is interesting -- the stakes are both dramatic and high, but it's balanced with a lot of fun, tongue and cheek dialogue.

Ted Prior was a Playgirl Playmate trying to get into acting, his brother David uhm, just owned a camera I guess, and so a fruitful collaboration started that has been going on for more than thirty years now. Their absolute masterpiece is probably 1987's "Deadly Prey", a complete and utter rip-off to "Rambo: First Blood" that is just irresistibly entertaining in all its wrongness. That one I can really recommend, but "Sledgehammer" is a whole other story. This thing is one of the most boring slasher films I have ever seen, it's clear the dynamic duo still had lots to learn when they made this. For example, David Prior hadn't figured out yet how to turn off the slo-mo effect on his camcorder. He uses slo-mo for the most random things. Some slo-mo in the grand finale, makes sense. Every single death scene in slow-motion, that's pushing it but fair enough. But why would you use it when the scene is just people walking around in a garden or sitting on a couch doing nothing? Is this young David Prior's creative force kicking in and not having a clue what it's doing? Not that the movie would be any good at a normal speed, but at least it would be lots shorter. Occasionally there is some almost-suspense (the clichéd slasher scene where one character tells the killer's legend isn't bad), the opening scene is also quite atmospheric, but as a whole "Sledgehammer" just doesn't bring much to the table to keep you entertained. It also doesn't help that you'll constantly have to yell "just get out of the house!" at the screen, my throat is still sore from yesterday. If this led the Priors on the road to "Deadly Prey" I appreciate it exists, but that's the nicest thing I can say about it.

"Sledgehammer" is another one of those forgotten 80's slashers and yes this one isn't less cheesy than the others and okay it's not perfect or great but what I found is that this movie was quite fun and has heart, which is very much rare these days.The beginning kept me interested where we have a small boy cruelly locked in a cupboard by his mother so she can carry on with her lover and then things get out of hand and the boy finds a sledgehammer and dispatches his mother and her lover. This yes was predictable but really set the tone for this movie and what's to come. Then fast forward 10 years and we get a group of 30 year old teenagers partying at that same house and well you know what's gonna happen next.Sledgehammer doesn't rank as one of the finest slasher movies from this period there are quite a lot of flaws, but despite that this movie is a lot of fun, the killer is very menacing and creepy and the kills are quite effective despite lacklustre effects. The setting itself was rather dull and tame, too much white and made this movie look dull and this movie holds the distinction for being the first shot on video slasher and it shows, like the shaky camera work and the supernatural angle just didn't work for me and the slow motion scenes were pretty annoying and overused. But despite these flaws "Sledgehammer" does deliver entertainment in some departments, the acting was pretty bad but I've seen a lot worse, they were still quite likable and the party scenes were quite fun and when the killer shows up ready to dispatch the cast, these scenes are quite tense as the killer does seem quite impossible to get away from as he's literally everywhere which was a definite highlight. All in all Sledgehammers is by no means memorable or a cult classic, but a competent effort dripped in pure cheese and definitely a guilty pleasure.

We all know the drill: A young boy murders his abusive mother and her smarmy lover with a sledgehammer just as they are ready to get down to business. Ten years later a gaggle of obnoxious teenagers crash at the house where the killings occurred and not surprisingly the graphic carnage begins anew. Man, does this gloriously ghastly shot-on-video micro-budget train wreck possess all the right wrong stuff to qualify as a real four star stinkeroonie: hopelessly all-thumbs (mis)direction, a droning and redundant hum'n'shiver synthesizer score, hilariously horrible acting from a lame no-name cast, ugly fuzzed cinematography complete with primitive fade outs, tacky freeze frames, and clumsy excessive overuse of strenuous slow motion, cheesy excessive gore, a meandering narrative that plods along at a gruelingly sluggish pace, the tried'n'true have sex and die cliché, zero tension or spooky atmosphere, annoying one-note characters, loads of needless filler (the ridiculous messy food fight set piece is especially extraneous), rusty tin-eared dialogue, dumb false scares, a downright surreal last third, and the inevitable "it ain't over yet!" sequel set-up non-ending. An uproariously atrocious howler

This is a homemade 80's slasher film that appears to have cost about 14 bucks to make and looks like it was shot on a VHS camcorder (I'm not kidding). It was shown at a theater in L.A. recently as part of a homemade horror video festival and I still can't get it out of my mind. The film begins with an abused child being locked in a closet while his mother has a drunken fling with a character referred to in the credits as the "Lover". Before the affair can commence a giant masked maniac armed with a sledgehammer beats them to a bloody pulp. A title card (old ass 80's camcorder text) tells us it's 10 years later and we are introduced to seven potential victims as they go for a weekend retreat in the home of the previous murders where they are systematically stalked and killed by the same sledge wielding madman. OK, I know it all sounds very derivative and there are much better, more professional cheap ass slashers out there, but this movie is "special" in a lot of ways. First off, the low production value and it's cheap, home video quality cinematography actually enhance the film a lot. That combined with a simple, yet effective, bass heavy synthesizer score, an amateur cast made up of muscle bound jocks and big hair bimbos, and a freakishly tall killer who wears a clear plastic mask and is genuinely creepy looking make this movie transcend into a weird kinda art piece. It's like if Pinter made a slasher movie at a friends house one weekend for beer money on his home video camera. There is also an unexplained paranormal bit where the killer can physically change back into the small child from the beginning so I assume the kid is the killer and he's a shape shifter. Huh!? This effect is handled with an old fashioned dissolve. There is a completely inappropriate food fight that is extended for so long it becomes almost disturbing on a sociological level. The killer is SO big he barely clears the hallway's ceiling as he chases a victim and he holds his sledgehammer in one hand the way most normal people hold a regular hammer. Freaky. This whole films visual style is unnerving and escalates it into something much more than what was probably intended. David Lynch meets The Slumber Party Massacre. If you can get a bootleg dub somewhere, get high and drunk with as many friends you can find and toss it on the old VCR. The 80's never seemed stranger.