Sledgehammer (1983)
Not so much a slasher as a smoosher flick, Sledgehammer has the added distinction of being the first horror movie to be made and distributed entirely on video.
(Hey, wait! Where are you going? Come back here!)
Forget everything you know about the legions of direct-to-video dreck that followed, because this movie just happens to be one of the most indelibly weird movies of the era. True, it’s so weird that at a certain point I had to start hallucinating messages in it… but then again, maybe it’s only natural that a movie that changes gear midway through would inspire a review that does the same.
#1 by Ed on June 9, 2011 - 7:13 pm
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Interesting sounding movie. Good stuff, Will.
#2 by Mr. Rational on June 9, 2011 - 11:48 pm
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Well, except for those last couple paragraphs, great review. Thanks for letting me know about this one.
#3 by Braineater on June 10, 2011 - 7:12 am
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Yeah, I figured I was going to irritate a good number of people… but rarely does a movie write its own punch line as clearly as this one did.
#4 by The Rev. on June 10, 2011 - 7:50 am
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Why would they irritate anyone? I guess I’m not one of that “good number of people” since I didn’t find them irritating. Anyone care to elucidate?
#5 by Naomi on June 10, 2011 - 10:25 am
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Some people don’t like puns, and some people don’t like any discussion of sexual issues. If you voluntarily spend any amount of time with the cabal, odds are you don’t mind either.
#6 by Braineater on June 10, 2011 - 12:39 pm
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And some people would object to my using a dreadful shaggy dog punchline as an excuse to shoehorn in a mention of a political issue that irritates me.
#7 by Mr. Rational on June 10, 2011 - 8:48 pm
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Well, I seem to have left quite the threadjack in my wake. Genuinely sorry about that…usually, no one ever replies to my comments, so I though I would be safe just puttin’ in my two cents and movin’ on. Then again, given how my plans usually work out, I probably should have expected this. 🙂
Obviously, I have nothing but respect for Will as a critic. I mean, I bought “Massacre Time” and five Taboada horror films, sight unseen, based on his recommendation alone…and I often crib his justifications when defending the criminally underrated “Darkness,” just because he already said it better than I ever could. Here’s hoping that works out again.
#8 by Braineater on June 11, 2011 - 5:31 pm
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Well, you know, Mr. R., I went into the movie fully expecting to hate it. I thought it might inspire some good old-fashioned snark as the great granddaddy of shot-on-video crap. And it certainly isn’t a good movie, by any stretch of the imagination.
But there’s something addictive about it, even though it’s threadbare, disjointed and frequently downright stupid. After I’d watched it three times (once plain, and once with each commentary track), I took a look at one of the Special Features interviews: 2 cinema programmers talked about their experience scheduling a big-screen (video, obviously) showing of the movie, and what a strange effect it had on the viewers. By that pont, I knew exactly what they meant.
(Oh, and by the way — I hope you enjoyed the Taboadas.)
#9 by Mr. Rational on June 11, 2011 - 7:07 pm
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Enjoy them? I sing their praises every (rare) chance I get. I’ve even tried to give away a few copies of “Hasta el viento tiene miedo” and “El libro de piedra” on occasion, those being my particular favorites. Sadly, no one in my circle of friends except me is really interested in un-subtitled foreign-language horror films…especially once they find out they’re Mexican. Oh, well. Their loss.
#10 by jason farrell on June 10, 2011 - 8:44 am
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“Basically, Sledgehammer plays like a home movie of a bad dream”
So can I assume we’re in Lucio territory here?
#11 by Braineater on June 10, 2011 - 12:47 pm
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Not exactly. That would have been a beautifully-shot Cinemascope movie of a bad dream (I’m a huge fan of Sergio Salvati).
There is a home-made brain-bashing special effects shot in the opening that does call to mind similar things in the Maestro’s output… and the strange, senseless maze of empty hallways could charitably be said to suggest the collapse of space and time toward the end of The Beyond. That would be a bit of a stretch, though. I think the emphasis should go on “home movie”.
#12 by Read MacGuirtose on July 28, 2011 - 4:08 pm
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Actually, I am, alas, not one of your younger readers, but I had to Google Caldor. Turns out it’s not only a thing of the past, but very much a regional thing—according to Wikipedia, despite being at one point the fourth largest retailer in the United States, Caldor never expanded out of the East Coast, which is apparently why I, living in California, had never heard of them.