DVD (VHS) of the Week: Sledgehammer
By Vadim Rizov You've heard this one before: eight friends go out to a deserted rural house to party down. Ten years earlier, an adulterous man and woman were murdered; their son was never found, the killer never identified. The lambs to the slaughter don't know it yet, but their Budweisers are about to be lubricated... with blood.
According to its DVD jacket copy, 1983's Sledgehammer boasts the distinction of being the first direct-to-video slasher shot on video. The resources on tap are evidently scant: the budget appears to have gone mostly to the impressively-gruesome killings, courtesy of honestly named f/x pros Blood & Guts. The synthesizers and sledgehammer-yielding tall, carpenter-looking killer come from Halloween and the kills are straight Tom Savini territory. The X factor is video: Sledgehammer is the real Trash Humpers.
Intervision's new DVD lovingly preserves every trace of the bottom-of-screen tracking weirdness and other VHS degradations; predictably, Sledgehammer is unintentionally evocative. The opening sets the tone: a fixed shot of a house, held for a ridiculous amount of time. Technical incompetence, a way of padding out the running time, or inadvertent surrealism? It's all three: a texture that might've once seemed inexcusably sludgy begins to hold its own fascination, unintentionally predicting the fixed-master-shot style of arthouse filmmaking. The murder that follows is by the book: just as it's time to get it on, the hammer comes crashing down.
Low-budget exploitation cheapies are normally time capsules by default, soaking up the housing, cheap diners and scuzzy people lurking wherever shooting is going on. Out in the countryside, no such luck: Sledgehammer is an oddly professional production in some ways, insulated from the outside world. The gang's driven to the house by a local yokel (Ray Lawrence), who promises to get the van's transmission back into shape; soon, he says, he'll have it "shifting gears faster than a good woman on her honeymoon night." Our hero by default is Chuck, played by Ted Prior, a former Playgirl model with the plasticine prettiness of a mannequin. The most engaging of the other characters is John (John Eastman), a burly lumberjack type with a beard that would be back in fashion by this point. John tolerates precisely zero nonsense: he tears beer cans in half with his bare hands, and his response to a ghost's promise ? "We want to drink your blood" ? is a crisp "Bullshit!"
The women are less clearly drawn: their perms are sharp, but their one-on-one time is mostly giggly sex talk. Their personalities are mostly defined by not being irresponsible men: all of the guys on collection here evade their relationship commitments with food fights, binge drinking and pranks. (There's an unexpectedly sharply observed moment when a woman, trying to get her man's attention, tries to reach for his chest, only to be cut off by his arm raising a beer can back up to his lips.)
The cast are semi-pros; it's behind the camera that things get interesting in unintended ways. Twelve minutes in, director David A. Prior offers up Chuck and girlfriend Joni (Linda McGill) walking in goofy love for a solid two minutes in slow-motion while treacly music plays. The choice is pragmatic (they needed to get the running time up to feature length), but the effect is oddly hypnotic: instead of offering up a bunch of cliched shots, we're invited to just watch two people cavort in NFL Films-time, charging banal gestures.
About an hour in, Sledgehammer starts generating odd frissons: the killer has the unnerving habit of disappearing through doorways, and all the empty rooms begin to take on a sinister ambient undercurrent that's erratic but surprisingly not that far off from Twin Peaks at certain moments. The gauzy video look blows out the rooms, creating weird light coronas; there's a particularly effective shot during a seance as the camera pans right-to-left across the assembled faces, with a candle at frame's edge rendering each facial expression (scared, goofy, non-acting) in sharp relief.
Sledgehammer isn't for everyone; I'm not even sure it's for me. But there's a weird air hanging over the movie, at the moments when messing around with crude video effects suddenly becomes just as scary as the filmmakers want. Alternated with all the sludge (effortlessly time-stamped in its sexual mores, not just the old Budweiser cans and hairstyles), the overall effect is unexpected: Sledgehammer becomes an interesting movie, rather than (just) bargain-basement exploitation trash to hoot at. You don't need to see too many of these kinds of films to get the idea, but as a sample, Sledgehammer is a worthy movie that comes out better than its makers intended.
Posted by cphillips at May 10, 2011 1:24 PM
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