Sledgehammer

This looks and feels like an accurate depiction of Midwest drinking. A group of friends get together to drink and couple up and damn David Prior makes them shoot a horror movie while they're at it. My favorite character was the guy who looked like John Oates because I threw every Hall & Oates line I knew at him and it never got old...for me.

Peter Gabriel is rolling in his grave. There's 15 minutes of nothing here stretched to 80 thanks to all the slow motion.

Sincere trash is unironically better cinema than high budget cynicism.

The characters are idiots, the dialog is inane, & the slow-motion is seriously abused - while it works in some the nightmarish kill scenes, there's also stuff like a happy couple taking a 5 minute slo-mo stroll. Stick it out though, ultimately this is entertaining crap. Plus, the hero looks like He-Man & can't seem to keep his shirt on for any length of time.

Way too much slow motion

This loses a lot of points due to the excessive amount of slow-motion shots. If this was about 15-minutes shorter, cutting out the slow motion and reused footage this would've made an effective little ghost/haunted house film. Most of the characters were reasonably likable and few made overly stupid decisions.

An experience of filmmaking by drunk neanderthals, and effectively conflates the viewership's 'spectating' with 'doing the anthropology'.

Love that it was one of the grandfathers of the SOV crave and it has that perfect aesthetic where it’s just so clearly friends fucking around and putting their ideas out there. Making a VHS slip that is way cooler than anything in the movie

This wasn't as bad as people made it out to be. I even enjoyed certain parts.

Savage Weekend makes this look pretty good, & it does have a couple of moments, but for the most part I was in awe of how bad it was. Blatantly a vehicle for David Prior's brother(?) Ted, who gets to be all kinds of shirtless for a good bit of the runtime, I'd guess there were 4 to 5 minutes of thought put into the story & characters. & boy does it show. Doesn't really feel like a movie anybody besides those involved were ever meant to see. I understand why it appeals to some, but I am not some.

Excruciatingly drawn out slow-motion shots. Unreasonably long static shots. Freeze-frame transitions. Droning synthesizer score. If these things don't sound great to you, then you probably won't enjoy the awesome terribleness of this early 80's shot-on-video slasher flick.

This is the kind of crap you have to be drunk to enjoy, and then only ironically

A few blows to the head with a sledgehammer and maybe you'll be able to sit through this movie.

Credited as the 1st SOV slasher. Too bad that it’s also one of the worst ones that I’ve seen. Prior's latter films like Deadly Prey and Killer Workout aren't good, but at least they are entertaining. His debut is more serious effort, but incompetently done: agonizingly long static shots, repeated material and use of slow-motion which makes you wonder if they just had to reach a certain length. Characters & killer are not interesting and the film lacks suspense. Plus point for the synth score.

I'm starting to love this kind of crap. It's pure trashy braindead madness that could've only come from the early days of 80's SOV tripe. Take a generic slasher-plot and churn it up in fuzzy tape-smeared goodness and add some utterly pointless slow motion and strange music and you've got a recipe for late night, half-asleep, unsettling viewing pleasure.