Sledgehammer (1983)

Dir. David A. Prior

Of Sledgehammer, Bleeding Skull’s Zack Carlson said that, “if you survive it, you’ll never forget it”. That’s not true. I first saw Sledgehammer a few years ago and remembered nothing of it, except that there’s a ridiculous food fight scene, and that the movie as a whole was quite enjoyable. After watching it again tonight as part of AGFA and Alamo Drafthouse’s digital Terror Tuesday, I was pleasantly surprised to find out that, for the most part, my memory did not fail me.

On paper, Sledgehammer is a pretty formulaic slasher; a group of twenty-somethings played by a group of thirty-somethings head out for a weekend of debauchery to a secluded house in the country where ten years earlier, a boy brutally murdered his mother and her lover. After a hefty serving of relationship melodrama and the aforementioned food fight, the group starts getting picked off one-by-one by a sledgehammer wielding maniac. Pretty rote stuff. Notable for being the first SOV horror flick produced specifically for the home video market, Sledgehammer gets by not on originality, top notch gore, interesting (or even likable) characters, so-bad-it’s-good dialogue or inspired cinematography. You may notice there’s no “but...” at the the end of the previous sentence, and that’s because I can’t really find a reason that Sledgehammer is watchable or even entertaining; it just somehow is.

There is a certain low budget 80s charm to the whole endeavor, complete with kitschy wardrobe and hairstyles, but that on its own can’t carry a feature length movie. Maybe it’s the droning synths. Maybe it’s the complete lack of set design. Maybe it’s seeing a little boy slap a muscular, fully grown man in the face and sending him across the room. All these elements together make for a uniquely surreal experience giving the movie something of a nightmare-caught-on-video quality. Not as much as a movie like Things (1989) or Ogroff (1983), but I think the threadbare bones of a plot on which all this weirdness is hung help keep Sledgehammer a little more accessible, so that by the time the killer starts dissolving in and out of frame (like film transition dissolve, not melt dissolve) or changes into a little boy and back into a hulking man again, we haven’t completely checked out yet.

The slow motion can get pretty punishing. It helps amp up the nightmare quality of the experience, but I think the movie might be about 10 minutes shorter if it were all regular speed. There’s a scene in the beginning that’s just a single slow motion shot of the lead couple walking in the yard set to vaguely lovey-dovey flute/guitar music. The camera pans with them as they walk towards...something? The house? This shot is almost two and a half minutes long. I have no idea what purpose it’s supposed to serve. We already know that they are a couple and ostensibly in love. Maybe there was supposed to be a montage that the filmmakers just never got around to shooting.

Watching Sledgehammer is kind of like having a prolonged nosebleed. I don’t mean that as a bad thing, just a matter of fact. At a certain point you start to get lightheaded, your brain might start to throb, and eventually you wonder if it’s ever going to end. And afterwards you’re going to hack up a glob of coagulated blood and mucus. So, yeah. Sledgehammer's kinda like that. But with synths. You should check it out!