Nail Gun Massacre (1985)

1985
Directed by Bill Leslie and Terry Lofton
Starring Ron Queen, Beau Leland, Michelle Meyer and Rocky Patterson

I've mentioned this flick a few times in passing here on the blog, but never launched into the full-fledged review for one simple purpose.  No amount of typing can possibly do this movie justice.  You might have seen some bad movies before, but almost nothing that I've seen before or since has managed to achieve the sheer levels of ineptitude that Nail Gun Massacre aspires to be.  For that reason only, this is a movie that everyone should see before they die.

Watching this movie today actually makes me a little sad, because they don't make movies like this anymore.  Most modern horror films tend to shoot for "passable at best, mind-numbingly boring at worst" as a benchmark, and that's a damn shame, because movies along the order of Nail Gun Massacre are infinitely fun to watch.  We don't get train wrecks of this caliber hitting the Netflix queue, and I doubt we'll ever get anything remotely like it again.  And no folks, I don't count the SyFy original pictures and their ilk, because those things are so soul-free that they might qualify as some sort of nightmarish bizarro-James Brown clone.  Horrible metaphor alert, launch.

All I've got to say is that if you're a fan of literal titles, this is the movie for you.  It delivers the goods when it comes to nail guns and then some.  The movie starts with a dingily-shot gang rape scene at a construction site and never looks back, promptly launching into a series of murder scenes involving the various perpetrators of said crime.  People, for years, I never dreamed that it was possible for a movie to have more disposable stock characters than Friday the 13th Part V: A New Beginning, but this has it beat by a long shot.  Even more amazingly, it came out the SAME YEAR.  Freaky.  Our star character, if you want to call him that, is the local doctor (Patterson), who along with the Sheriff (Queen) put together a very Keystone Cops-esque effort to stop the murderer.  No, you will not remember the faces or names of anybody that eats the nails in this movie, but it doesn't matter.  Because the beauty of Nail Gun Massacre lies in the things they do.

For starters, there's plenty of female nudity to be had.  Unfortunately, it's also accompanied by plenty of male nudity, usually with large, hairy-backed men who look like they would likely own any prison that they ventured into.  And then there is the star character himself...the killer.  The various murder segments that make up the film all star this dude, a leather-jacket-wearing psycho wearing a motorcycle helmet and utilizing a voice that sounds like a cross between Cookie Monster and the Black Scorpion.  Every time he's onscreen, it prompts nothing short of hilarity that make a group viewing of the film nothing short of Eddie Murphy early years spectacular.  Combined with the finest score that a ten dollar Casio keyboard could grant and we're talking Richard Pryor quality.

What else is there to know?  Not much.  This really is just your standard revenge movie with a heavy slathering of slasher.  The identity of the killer isn't even really that much a mystery; once we know the background of the woman who was raped in the prologue, tracing the breadcrumbs together is fairly straightforward.  It all just kind of comes together in the third act after the movie gives us essentially 70 minutes of "introduce characters and then promptly kill them off, likely just after doing something annoying" followed by the exposition and the big mystery reveal.  And...that's all folks.  There's no depth, no scares, and no real joy to be had in Nail Gun Massacre.  But then again, why would you expect it?

I suppose I should wrap this review up into a nice little bow.  I've said in the past that people watch horror movies for different reasons.  Generally, I watch them because I enjoy being scared.  This one won't scare you in the least bit, nor will its characters compel you to follow their story.  If you get the impression that this movie is bad from this review, I've done my job, because this is some bad movie.  Still, you can't appreciate just HOW bad until you take it in, its gamut of bad qualities running a gauntlet so long and tough that it somehow becomes watchable as a test of endurance and a test of just how loud you can laugh in the company of others. 

1/2 * out of ****.  This is an EXCELLENT movie for some MST3K-style riffing, but by yourself...yikes.  Stay away.  Stay FAR away.