To mix similes, Sledgehammer moves like a snail through molasses rolling down a glacier. In other words, it’s slow. On purpose. And not in a “not much is happening here” way, but a “the director is using the slow-motion effect so much, we should check to see if he fell asleep” way.
That said, as the film played, my fascination with it grew to an obsession by the time it hit the last of its 87 minutes. Sledgehammer is remembered as one of the most successful of the shot-on-VHS slashers, and not just by virtue of being among the first. For all its ineptness, the seven-day wonder is oddly compelling and, against all odds, as hypnotic as it is illogical.
A boy is locked in a closet by his mother so that she and her no-good boyfriend can screw around in the living room. As they engage in foreplay, the grade-school youth somehow escapes, acquires the titular tool, and bashes in their heads. Fast-forward 10 years, and a group of throughly unappealing 20-somethings arrives at the same out-of-the-way cabin for a party weekend. You know what happens next, yet you’ll want to see it happen, anyway … provided you can stand the likes of seemingly interminable establishing shots.
What debuting director David A. Prior (Killer Workout) manages to do with so little may be accidental, but not entirely. His actors (headed by brother Ted Prior, Surf Nazis Must Die) are beyond help, and the script is as woefully lunkheaded — how else to explain the food-fight sequence, the chubby jock who licks people, the John Oates doppelgänger spurring the sexual advances of what passes for a hot blonde? However, the mood created by a creepy mask, a John Carpenter-esque synth score and dreamlike imagery lift the crude, homegrown effort from mere crap to at least really interesting crap. —Rod Lott