Sledgehammer (1983)

Directed by David A. Prior [Other horror films: Killer Workout (1987), Night Wars (1988), The Lost Platoon (1990), Night Trap (1993), Mutant Species (1995), Zombie Wars (2007), Night Claws (2012)]

I’m a simple man, and I didn’t have too many expectations going into Sledgehammer. I knew it’d be cheap – I’m no stranger to SOV horror – and as long as it had a guy killing people with a sledgehammer, I’d be happy.

Well, I’m not sure if I am happy, but there certainly was a man killing people with a sledgehammer. It was often in excruciatingly slow motion, but so was a good third of the film, so maybe that’s not a problem. Okay, it is a problem – I’ve never seen this much slow motion in one movie, and I sort of wonder if they had used the technique more sparingly, whether the movie be more around the 50-minute range as opposed to 85 minutes.

Of course, Sledgehammer is a bit of a classic, at least as far as shot-on-video horror goes, as it’s among the first ones made. And you can tell it’s rough – one of the stars, Ted Prior, is the brother of director David A. Prior (responsible for later films such as The Lost Platoon, Killer Workout, and Night Trap), and if IMDb trivia is to be believed, most of this movie was filmed in his apartment. If you’re watching this film, you probably went in knowing a lot of this, so it shouldn’t come off as too much a shock.

As such, a lot of the movie is tedious in ways that some SOV films tend to be. Luckily it’s nowhere near as bad as Blood Cult or Heavy Metal Massacre, but boy, all of those slow-motion portions are painful, and there’s so damn many. The kills aren’t terrible – ironically, one of the best ones might be a knife going through someone’s throat – but save for the opening scene (which, if you missed, is played again later during a retelling of the horrors of the house), there’s not really any great sledgehammer action. There is a terribly unappealing food fight, though.

If you’re familiar with SOV horror, you’ll probably know that performances aren’t often the highlight, and that holds true for this movie also. If I had to give a shoutout, it’d be to John Eastman, who at least looked different (that mustache was the bomb). Ted Prior didn’t really seem to have that much character, and while I wanted to root for Linda McGill (who was also in a film called Shape-Up for Sensational Sex, which sounds classy), it wasn’t an easy task.

Most people who come into Sledgehammer know full well what the movie is. It’s sort of fun at times – I actually rather like the heavy synth score that permeates the film – and it has that 80’s SOV nostalgic value, but it’s not a film I could see myself watching again anytime soon, and I’d really only recommend it to the horror fans who have likely already seen it.

5/10