Trash Menagerie

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 ...

aka The Presence Dir. Kevin S. Tenney Witchtrap is not a sequel to Witchboard (1986). And that’s a good thing. They’re more or less the same movie; a group of people get picked off one-by-one by an evil spirit and eventually the main girl gets possessed by said spirit. The evil spirits are even both played by the same dude and look pretty much identical. And while ‘ Board is arguably a better movie from a production standpoint, ‘ Trap is just so much more damn fun, thanks in large part to James W. Quinn, whom Witchboard , as its greatest sin, kills off in the first 20 minutes. There’s also no Zarabeth in Witchtrap , which is a huge plus.   The film begins with a Tony Clifton-looking entertainer type being chased around a house by swooping camera shots before getting thrown out a second story window to his death. This is a problem for Devon Lauder, who has inherited the house from his dead uncle Avery, but cannot sell the house to to a stipulation in his will. In or...