Angling for ‘Mom of the Year’, a woman locks her son in a
closet so she can go make out with some guy in her living room. This doesn’t
sit well with the kid at all, he escapes the closet and proceeds to murder
them both with the titular sledgehammer. Ten years later, a bunch of rowdy doofuses show
up with their long suffering girlfriends to ostensibly fix the house… or party…
honestly, I’m still not sure. Either way, it isn't long before the the kid,
now a full grown giant, ghost giant, giant ghost kid, starts stabbing and
smushing everyone in slow-motion.
Sledgehammer is an odd film in just about every
conceivable way. Notable for not only being one of the first horror films to be shot on
commercial video equipment, it also launched the careers of Action
International Pictures superstars, David and Ted Prior (director and star
respectively). Sledgehammer is crudely made, slow, and occasionally tedious, but at the same time there is
an obvious effort to light, edit, and score it like a ‘legitimate’ film. There’s
no laziness here, just an inexperienced crew and primitive (yet cost effective)
equipment.
More interestingly, the washed-out look of early
video, the sparseness of the house interior, and the baffling editing, manage to cut through the flat dialogue and amateur acting to touch on a note of weird
horror. The interior of the house seems
to shift and move, the murderous giant/ghost/kid is never given an origin, or really any kind of motive, leaving him
a mysterious presence. There are numerous gore effects that make up in slop what they lack in technical expertise. I don't want to give the impression that this is a secret art house masterpiece,
it’s a schlocky horror movie through and through. Since that was probably their goal in the first place, it's surprisingly successful in that regard.
The acting is uniformly pretty terrible, but the writing
certainly doesn't help. Having Chuck (Ted Prior) and his goon squad getting
into food fights, pouring beer on women, and generally bro-ing it up
for almost half of the film is painful to watch. You really begin to question how any of
these guys managed to keep a girlfriend around for longer than three minutes.
There are number of lingering external shots of the house
that seem to go on forever. It really isn't until the climax that the movie
shows some life, but I suspect this is well beyond the endurance of most viewers. That’s
unfortunate because, it’s during the climax that the use of slow-motion and
over lighting gives the whole finale a feverish nightmare feeling. The steady synthesizer drone adds to the queasy weirdness just as much as it distracts from the non-horror scenes.
I think the box art actually sums up the movie extremely
well, it’s lurid and amateurish, but there’s something that keeps making
you want to take a look at it. Sledgehammer is in no conceivable way a good
film, but if you are willing to overlook many of its shortcomings, it can rise
above its limitations to become an interesting one.
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