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| From http://www.critcononline.com/images/nail%20gun%20massacre%20vhs%20front3.jpg |
Do you remember when you could sit outside and not worry about the
mosquitoes and the killers?
Dirs. Bill Leslie and Terry
Lofton
USA
The story for a film like this is
not the real interest, nor the kills themselves as a slasher movie as well.
It's seeing everything of a rural middle America in the mid eighties that's
somehow got captured on film, beneath a (frankly) rambling and (more frankly)
bad movie, and how it is also reinterpreted on screen. That one actress is
wearing a skinny sky blue neck scarf and that baseball caps with the words
"T.A.M.E.D." existed for purchase. That grilled cheese and a drink
costs $1.19 in this world or that the emergency services won't pick up the body
of a murder victim at night in the woods because it's too dark to see. The film
around it adds to this even if you cannot deny how ludicrous the whole thing
is. One expects, even if its chaste and cheesy, a film which opens with a gang
rape to actually go forward as a consistently toned and serious story. Instead
you get electronically aided, two-for-the-price-of-one puns from the killer, nail
gun duels, and gratuitous nudity that with the opening scene makes this very
exploitative. The result is worthless if you cannot extract anything from this
sort of cinema, but the sense of ordinary people trying to make a film, and the
environment recorded onscreen and the stumbling, tasteless tone does come off
as compelling if you can just sit back and imagine the background of making it.
The opening incident leads to a mysterious individual, clad in camouflage and a
black motorcycle helmet, driving a gold hearse (?!) and armed with an industrial
strength nail gun, killing both the men involved in the incident and just about
anyone else that stands in eyesight to them.
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| From http://www.horrordvds.com/reviews/n-z/nailgun/nailgun_shot3l.jpg |
The film thankfully avoids, aside
from one or two moments, the habit that makes a lot of this sort of
"so-bad-its-good" cinema just bad, of being scenes and dialogue that
drag you along so predictably regardless of how funny the film may be to some. With
The Nail Gun Massacre, the closet
thing to protagonists, the town sheriff and doctor, are completely useless and
leave dead bodies around the town because, from the film's perspective, they're
the only people there to take the murder cases and people are dying nonstop and
preventing them from dealing with the previous ones before. Instead it feels
like viewing a series of vignettes about ordinary lives that just happen to end
with the person recreating makeshift version of Pinhead from the Hellraiser series with their own
bodies. We see that even when he takes her to the cheapest place for a
"fancy" meal like a skinflint, and has to contend with an old
girlfriend working there, a scuzzy guy can still seduce a very busty girl only
to have a nail gun wielding onlooker watching them, like a pervert, on the
bonnet of his car. That it's possible to
be floating at the side of a swimming pool in front of someone and still be
completely invisible to them. That the scene of two male workers firing nail
guns at each other in a mock gun fight may have been on a real life incident
which inspired the film and would have raised health and safety issues even
back then. Everyone on screen, even if they are bad actors, are clearly normal
everyday people who would be viewing these sorts of films after they were made
- homely girls with hairstyles from a different dimension, everyday Joes and
one of the directors' grandmother, nervous onscreen and clearly reading her
script in front of the camera, captured on film through a schlocky American
horror movie. It's far from great even in terms of this sort of cinema; the
best have some virtues to them, no matter how small, and squash any sense of
predictability to them. The Nail Gun
Massacre is merely a rambling take on the slasher film, amusing for those
with the right mindset (and willingness to pass its amateur moments of sleaze)
for this type of cinema, but far from its heights. Its more fascinating to view
films like this one from the perspective that the man who, in woodland sex
scene, has his bared, hairy arse in front on camera, was and may still be
someone's next door neighbour somewhere in Texas where the film was made. Far
from someone we should ridicule, even if we laugh at the film, we should be
proud of him, the actresses, the grandmother, everyone onscreen, for being
immortalised in a film that, even if it's not for the original intended reasons,
is still encouraging people like me from another country to track the thing
down to view it. Praise that naked man and everything else here.
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| From http://www.horrordvds.com/reviews/n-z/nailgun/nailgun_shot6l.jpg |
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