Widely considered to be the first ‘entirely E2E process ran SOV movie’ 1983’s ‘Sledgehammer’ is, for some, an endurance test to see how long an audience member will be willing to sit through wide shots of a house or a stairwell that serve no purpose, but are called back on repeatedly across the 85(ish) minute runtime.

Its kind of a novel idea really; director David A Prior had an apartment that was free for a couple of months, he’d heard about domestic home video camera technology and decided he could probably make some money out of shooting a horror movie on the DL for cheap at the vacant apartment.

It’s not a particularly complex plotline, a group of friends decide to rent out a cabin in a woodland area for a couple of nights to have a big old party, each of the group is bringing a bit of a backstory with them, that slowly gets eeked out of them across the runtime. Little do the gang know, but several years prior; a couple were blugeoned to death and the couples child vanished without a trace.

Now many years on, a mysterious ghostly man in a mask stalks the cabin with a sledgehammer, ready to pick off anyone who gets in his way.

I personally have some quite good memories with this film, It first came my way during a particularly good summer via ‘The Last Drive in with Joe Bob Briggs’ and While there is a LOT of things I cant defend this film for, from a purely biased and self interested standpoint, I always enjoy watching this movie, its got a very strange woozy atmosphere to it that makes it feel like a living dream for most of the runtime. That does however include the drawbacks as much as the benefits.

The scripts plot is fiiiiiine, a little on the basic side, but hey; killer ghost stalks some folks in a cabin for 80 minutes doesnt have to be hamlet, and if the ‘Friday the 13th’ movies can get away with doing similar for *at least* 8 of there 12 movies, I can hardly complain here.

The script pacing is pretty decent, it does feel like theres a few acts that have been hacked out of this thing in the first act that would have better set up our main characters, because this film kind of drops them onto us, doesnt really do much to bed them in; and the history of the killer is kind of left to the opening 10 minutes of the movie or so and not much else. As far as the plot on paper goes, it’s a zippy little page turner with plenty of suspence, but the translation from script to screen is disasterous to say the least.

what should be tension building atmospheric shots just hang…hang for an eternity, way past the point of any natural kind of cut, making the whole thing feel INCREDIBLY awkward for most of the runtime. Its a clear issue of whoever cut this thing not knowing what the hell they were doing, but the end results totally mangle the script pacing and render the film with an almost alien quality for lack of a better descriptive.

It really feels like aliens made this film, edited it and then handed it back to us for distribution, almost every aspect of the production just feels…odd.

The tone of the film jumps between a hardcore slasher flick and the a kind of ‘horror comedy’ that some characters in a proper movie may have running on a TV in the background. Non of the characters dialogue feels like anything normal humans would say, and the delivery the actors give is stunted, strange and pretty otherworldly.

The shots all have this ‘vasaline on the lens’ quality that makes everything feel overly soft and hazy, which is compounded by the VHS presentation to the point that it almost feels like this is being viewed from another dimension.

The edits are hard, blunt and innacurate, it throws the pacing and can be frankly painful to see as someone who’s worked in editing. So lord knows what people who havent cut something together would make of this.

There is a fairly decent use of coloured lighting in this, with some very styalized moments of blue and red. But the majority of the film sits in this strange beige and cream monstrocity, that just wouldnt be seen in any other production that wasnt being shot in the early 80s, on the cheap, in an apartment that was being stripped down.

The cast come across as largely all likeable, but theres no directional guidence seemingly to help them figure out what they’re supposed to be doing, as such their energy seems to come out in bursts at THE strangest moments with no rhyme or reason, and with it comes some frantic flailing and organized chaos. If they’re not randomly going insane, they’re being incredibly irritating, but in a way that I personally find fascinating. Like…they say script writing and story telling is marketing experiences. if this is what David A Priors experience of talking to people is, may god have mercy on his soul.

but the killer blow this film has has GOT to be its score, the recent ‘Intervision’ release of this suggests turning the bass and volume up on your equipment for the best results, and they are NOT kidding, with a bass line that’ll rattle the earth core, this thing is synth heavy drone sound for nearly the full runtime, and through a decent pair of Anker headphones, when that bass dropped, I basically saw through time. its nuts. Very effective ,very unique and very fitting for this film. It really helps pull all the awkward, hamfisted weirdness together into a package that I really am quite smitten with.

Despite the issues raised above, ‘Sledgehammer’ to me? is EXACTLY what I want when I check out SOV cinema that isnt trying to compete with studio flicks. Its fuzzy, incoherent, unsettling, strange and crafted with the subtlety of a dump truck. If you were trying to convince someone that SOV cinema was able to rival bigger budgeted productions, you would NOT be showing them ‘Sledgehammer’ but if you are quite well versed in SOV as a genre, this things a christmas gift. You’ll laugh, you’ll wince, you’ll wonder what the hell is going on. and it’ll be all over before you’re even able to settle your feelings on it.

And I love it for that.

source https://letterboxd.com/tytdreviews/film/sledgehammer/