Synopsis
Flesh tears - Bones shatter - The nightmare has begun
A young boy murders his mother and her lover with a hammer. Ten years later, a wave of teenage murders plagues the same area.
1983 Directed by David A. Prior
A young boy murders his mother and her lover with a hammer. Ten years later, a wave of teenage murders plagues the same area.
I COMMAND YOU TO RISE!
The opaque labyrinth massacre. Total Outsider art set in a white walled sledgehammer hell that felt far more nightmarish to me than any jagoff Satan movie jam—Some sort of washed out fever dream SOV supernatural slasher loaded with slow motion shots... like SERIOUSLY loaded... a guy balancing a beer can on a girls head, screaming mother close ups, super long takes of a farm, and the world’s longest door opening scene... mass quantities of slow mo interspersed between my ABSOLUTE FAVORITE movie food fight and continuous usage of the word jagoff by 30 year old bodybuilder teens.
It’s easy to talk about bad acting/low budgets or whatever, none of that means low effort—plus that food…
David A. Prior’s first SOV flick and it shows!
Sledgehammer the movie you wish someone would take a supernatural slo-mo sledgehammer and whack you over the head with, so you wouldn’t have to experience this monstrosity ever again! bad of the bad but also oddly charming when the blood is oozing and the killer is creeping down a hallway, but still manages to be the cinematic equivalent of a headache—sorry. So many drawn out slow motion sequences of the most random shit, that no one asked for; a simple door lock shaking got a great reaction out of my watch party. sometimes I just can’t handle low budget SOV garbage, but I can absolutely appreciate its influence over the years but thank GOD for shirtless Deadly Prey Ted Prior! ❤️🔥❤️🔥❤️🔥
waaaaay too sober for this.
The most unnerving moment in 'Sledgehammer' doesn’t even involve typical horror-movie horror of any kind. Just as the group of soon-to-be slasher victims arrive at the haunted cabin they will be staying in, there is an extended slow-motion shot of one of the couples walking across a field set to bright and cheery music. They embrace and laugh throughout their long journey across the short distance. At one point, the man tries and fails to balance a beer can on his girlfriend’s head. They seem to be without a care in the world. This moment is so goofy, innocent, and sugary that its mere presence within a movie called 'Sledgehammer' is enough to send bad vibes out to all your…
Heyooooo SOV marathon bitches!
I’ve been meaning to rewatch this since I first discovered it last year and I’m just going to go ahead and bump it up to 4 stars because it really is delightful.
This is an incredibly bizarre supernatural slasher and by “supernatural” I mean the killer fades in and out of the frame from time to time because it’s super cheap. It’s full of awkward slow motion shots and poorly synced music cues and those things are exactly why it’s so great because they make the whole thing very surreal and atmospheric. The location exterior is a semi-creepy farm house and even though the inside is clearly someone’s very outdated condo, Prior does something right because it feels…
Working my way thru a list of SOV horror on u tube and was thinking how weird it is I've never seen this classic. Well ok, someone does pronounce seance scene and there's a condiments fight...but that scene (seance) dudes in soft focus lighting and polo shirts shouldn't be this creepy. There's an eerie internal logic to this one that feels like a rumored rural story you tell during a weekend kicking back.
But then, there's 'we want you Jon! We want to drink your blood!' With no inflection or expression whatsoever, Jon says, 'Oh...shit.'
I'm just giving everything five stars unless it's super boring.
SLEDGEHAMMER is the first shot-on-video horror movie ever made for the home video market . . . and so much more. Ted Prior (DEADLY PREY) leads a cast of self-loathing party animals who face off against a dimension-leaping ghost with a fondness for homicide and wearing a flannel. By the end, guts, brains, and beers are splashed across every inch of the haunted condo walls. Directed by David Prior (KILLER WORKOUT), this is a feel-good collision of slow motion abuse, unintentional surrealist art, homoerotic pathos, and slasher video-barf. The old saying will always ring true: if you survive SLEDGEHAMMER, you’ll never, ever forget it. (Joseph A. Ziemba)
Is there anything more blissful than a hazy lofi feverdream nightcap?? A place to float along to barely grasping reality as you sink deeper into a state of low budget lunacy? Who am I even asking? Am I talking to myself? Hello? Whoa! Sledgehammer is a shot on video slasher slammer that represents that top tier of experimental fuzzed out cinema. Are you ready? Who me? Yep I am!
A bunch of hosers and their gal pals head to a cottage for the weekend. The same dang cottage where a brutal murder took place 15 years before! We are treated to some real fly on the wall experiences as we observe some very realistic home video style partying and shenanigans.…
Slegehammer hits a level of insane trash-art few SOV joints can ever hope to reach. David Prior exhibits a weird type of auteurship in the slow reverse zoom long takes that make every frat joke and bludgeoning and grotesque food scarfing scene seem like some stoopid alien fever dream filmed through a layer of gauze. I especially like how 30-somethings with visible age lines and beer guts play horny teens whose only interests are "getting wasted" and getting laid.
And some of the lines that come out of these "co-eds" mouths! Sledgehammer really does feel like it was made by extraterrestrials who observed humans for one minute and decided to make a movie about them. Particularly of note, the extended…
SOVkend 🔨📼
I was way too harsh on this historic piece of trash-horror upon my first viewing. This is a hypnotic, no-fi, haunted-house-slasher masterwork. A surreal, slo-mo, nightmare-logic victory of mangled flesh, warm beer and shattered bones. Boarderline liminal space analog horror.
Hey don't mind us, just a bunch of beered-up bros and babes having a totally rockin' house party in the middle of nowhere. A house where a little boy did some brutal sledgehammering years before because his mommy locked him in the Carrie closet while she was busy sexing up her new lover. No biggie. And oh yeah, it's exactly TEN years to the gruesome day, so OF COURSE we're gonna hold a super spooky seance (ascene?), because c'mon, what could possibly go wrong?
SLEDGEHAMMER GHOST TIME!
Man, this one was WILD! An ear-shattering synth onslaught, a trippy white-walled void caught somewhere between dream and reality, a ghostly killer with his creepy mask, FOOD FIGHT(!), shirtless romantic walks accompanied by…
The Last Drive-In with Joe Bob Briggs - Season 3 - Episode 8 - Film 1
A deadbeat cheating mother locks her young son in a closet while she has sex with the man she is cheating with. The two are murdered by a mysterious person with a sledgehammer. When the police arrive the adults are dead and the boy is missing. Ten years later a group of people are staying at the now infamous house overnight. They hold a séance and resurrect the ghost of the child in adult form. Before long they are being picked off one by one by a masked ghost with a sledgehammer.
Sledgehammer has been on my private short watchlist for months and I…
Ah, yes, SOV horror designed to grind your skull into paste. Loved it.
This flick has two modes: hangout-haze & slasher-surrealism. Over the course of an origin story and subsequent victim set-up, we get a fairly convoluted supernatural slasher that is a bit drunk at the wheel if not gushing with decadent style. Yes. It's true. I absolutely loved every single sequence of slowed-down droned-out excess. I think it was the film's saving grace, other than that food fight.
When it fails the most, however, is when it tries to insert logic into something that only works as a dizzying nightmare. It should've stuck to being sequences bashed together with no rhyme or reason, ready to scoop the tendrils of your…