Census Bloodbath: Nailed It

Year:
1985
Director:
Bill Leslie & Terry Lofton
Cast:
Rocky Patterson, Ron Queen, Michelle Meyer
Run Time:
1 hour 25 minutes

Plot: The Nail Gun Massacre follows a killer wearing camo fatigues and a motorcycle helmet targeting a group of men who were involved in a violent sexual assault at a Texas construction site. The town's sheriff (Ron Queen) and doctor (Rocky Patterson) are not quite hot on the killer's trail. Let's say they're room temperature on the killer's trail.

Analysis: We've finally made it. The Nail Gun Massacre is our last slasher movie of 1985! I wasn't sure if we'd be ending the year with a bang or a whimper, but it turns out that the movie is kind of both simultaneously.

The Nail Gun Massacre is... peculiar. As the only feature ever made by Dukes of Hazzard stuntman Terry Lofton, the Texas-based slasher is very clearly a labor of love. However, the stuntperson-to-director pipeline that brought us the John Wick movies clearly hadn't been constructed yet in the mid-1980s, because this movie is slapdash as all get out.

Essentially every aspect of the filmmaking goes wrong at some point or another, often multiple times in a single scene. The camera can never quite find the right place to view the action from, the cast seems not only untrained but completely unfamiliar with the concept of acting, and the dialogue is almost always completely drowned out in the mix.

That last one may not be a terrible thing, because the script ain't all that good, either. Plot elements float in and out and are sometimes swapped at random (a trio that is clearly a mother and her two sons is at one point referred to as a group of friends), and the screenplay swirls woozily around a few recurring characters without ever committing to actually making any of them a proper protagonist. In fact, it was looking for a while like the aforementioned two sons would become the main characters, but they vanish from the movie completely about 30 minutes before it ends.

However, the movie's ineptitude actually does it a major service. The fact that the plot keeps shifting at random leaves you without solid ground to stand on. There are no rules to The Nail Gun Massacre, and you never know exactly what's going to happen next or which characters are going to live or die. 

That unpredictability, combined with the film's inches-thick layer of sleaziness, the cast being attractive but in a normal civilian type of way, and the fact that the unpolished nature of the footage lends it an almost documentarian verisimilitude, makes it genuinely dangerous. Your awareness of the camera and the people behind it gives it a home movie feel, like you're watching real people actually have sex and die onscreen. 

In fact, there's a sex scene that's so sleazily presented from every possible angle that it seems almost like it must be real, to the point that there is an apocryphal story that the male actor's girlfriend broke up with him after seeing the movie, even though he is gyrating his hips in a way that would probably snap his penis in half if he was actually mid-coitus. 

There are times when this unsophisticated realism is a demerit, such as the sexual assault scene that opens The Nail Gun Massacre (as in the first frame of the movie is a sexual assault, before the credits even roll). However, for the most part, it effectively makes you feel like you're being grabbed by the hair and dragged inexorably through a hillbilly nightmare.

This vibe is boosted by the two elements of the movie that are actually quite good. First, the kills are pretty decent. In addition to the nail prosthetics and stage blood looking pretty solid (give or take a wobbly rubber moment or two), a fair amount of the kills are cleverly staged. While their primary instinct (a good one) is to lean in on hand trauma, there are a lot of grace notes that make the kills feel different and freshly violent, even though the killer's M.O. basically never changes and the violence doesn't always make biological sense (one girl gets her hand nailed to her open mouth - did the nail hit her uvula, or what?).

Speaking of the killer, the Night School motorcycle helmet is a decent look, though I could have done without the constant, laconically delivered Freddy Krueger quips that are so exaggeratedly voice modulated that they're almost indecipherable.

However, the killer's voice leads us into the second element of The Nail Gun Massacre that works more often than it doesn't: the soundscape. In any dialogue-free moments, Whitey Thomas' surprisingly girthy synth score blends with Vocoder-ized evil laughs and pained moans that bathe the imagery onscreen with an enormously unsettling, surreal blanket of sheer noise that is reminiscent of The Texas Chain Saw Massacre in a way that isn't merely ripping it off.

While The Nail Gun Massacre is many things (including, for a brief and bizarre moment in the final confrontation, a Dukes of Hazzard rip-off), it is also a rape-revenge movie, after a fashion. It's too incoherent to really have subtext (it's never quite clear if the victim, Linda, is the killer or not, though the final few shots imply she might be), but there is something effectively subversive about the choice of a nail gun as a weapon meaning that the men being targeted are violently penetrated multiple times before they die.

All in all, I think The Nail Gun Massacre is neither a bad movie nor a good movie. It's too slippery to be put in a box like that. But whether the good elements are intentional or not, whether it's effectively disorienting or just slapdash and grimy, I found it to be a hypnotic, transfixing movie to sit through. And I suppose that's a recommend, especially when the movie is taken in the context of 1985, which has given us dud after dud after dud.

Killer: Bubba Jenkins (Beau Leland), but I'm still inclined to believe it's actually Linda Jenkins (Michelle Meyer)

Final Girl: N/A, but kind of Doc (Rocky Patterson)

Best Kill: I am most partial to Mark's death, because he gets nailed while chainsawing a tree and the still-functioning chainsaw slices off his hand as he falls, adding insult to injury.

Sign of the Times: A young man wearing a M*A*S*H is told that he is being "bogus."

Scariest Moment: The opening sexual assault scene had me worrying that this movie was going to be infinitely more unpleasant than it turned out to be.

Weirdest Moment: A group of friends has a picnic where they talk about eating both sandwiches and hot dogs, but all they seem to have brought with them is Ritz crackers and beer.

Champion Dialogue: “Do you remember when you could sit outside and not worry about the mosquitoes and the killers?"

Body Count: 16

1. Leroy Johnson has his hand nailed to his forehead.
2. Brad is nailed in the stomach and the dick.
3. Mark is nailed in the back and accidentally chainsaws his own hand off.
4. Hitchhiker is nailed in the chest, through the hands, and (the killing blow) in the shoulder.
5. Woman is nailed offscreen.
6. Hal is nailed in the back of the head.
7. Ann is nailed in the hand and boobs.
8. Ben is nailed to a tree via the hands.
9. Rick's Friend is nailed in the face.
10. Rick is nailed.
11. Jethro is nailed.
12. Jethro's Date is nailed in the boob and the neck.
13. Dad is nailed and falls stomach-first onto a grill.
14. Curly Haired Woman is nailed.
15. Blonde Woman is nailed.
16. Bubba falls from a great height.

TL;DR: The Nail Gun Massacre is a poorly made movie, but its ineptitude gives it a verisimilitude that makes its nastiness really sting.

Rating: 5/10

Word Count: 1308