About 10 years ago, when I worked at a store that sold and rented videos (VHS, mind you), I made it a point to take home terrible horror movies on a regular basis. It was always fun to peruse the racks during slow shifts and see what kind of crap I could find. Generally a great form of amusement, it also made me feel like an expert on shit that no one really liked watching, which, I hoped, somehow made me cooler. Of course, not all the movies I rented were bad. It was on one of those slow nights, in fact, that I found a very worn copy of Lucio Fulci's
Zombie and pulled out the case liner, shocked and in awe of all the scenes of gore I found inside. But that's a different topic entirely, and that movie is most definitely not the topic of this entry. Oh, no.
I really don't remember the circumstances that led me to the worst movie ever made. I'm guessing it was a matter of seeing the box on the shelf night after night, being intrigued with the awkward, disproportionate cover art, and internally laughing about the rip-off title that compelled me to ultimately rent and watch it. What I do remember, with great certainty, was that after watching it for the first time (why watch it more than once, you might be wondering...I'll explain in due time), I was positive that it was the worst movie I'd ever seen—and it was maybe the worst film I'd ever see in my entire life, possibly even the worst ever made.
Well, 10 years later, here I am writing a blog entry about this awful piece of crap, and I'm still of the opinion that it's the most abominable bit of film-making in the world. Of course, I can't declare this to be fact, and I have no sort of backing evidence, but it's my gut feeling. I've seen lots of movies since this one made its way into my life, and plenty of them were awful...
but none were so vile.
So what's the godforsaken movie, you may be wondering (if you haven't gotten bored and given up reading yet, that is)? Why, it's 1985's
Nail Gun Massacre. I'm under the impression that it's intentionally terrible—how anything so god-awful couldn't be is beyond me—but that's still no excuse for this 85-minute deuce drop. Why even waste the money? It would have been better spent teaching animals how to drive cars, or funding an extensive Slayer/Stryper/Weird Al tour. And that's no exaggeration. (I honestly have no idea how much it cost the movie-makers to put this thing out, but judging by its quality, I'd say not more than a couple hundred bucks and a donkey...so the tour comment might be way out of line.)
Despite its name,
Nail Gun Massacre actually has a very plausible and thought-provoking plot line. Oh wait; I'm thinking of something else. No it doesn't. A beautiful young woman is barbarously raped by a group of degenerate construction workers. Shortly thereafter, people in the area begin turning up dead—nailed to the ground, to trees,
to each other. To the townspeople and law enforcement, the murders appear to be the work of a psychotic killer on the rampage...but why is he doing this? And why do all the victims appear to have been involved with the rape? These are the questions that the dumbasses in the hick town where
Nail Gun Massacre is set must ask themselves. If they can collectively find enough brain cells to ask a question at all.
Rape scenes are supposed to make you feel uncomfortable, and in that sense, this movie did something right. It was uncomfortable, and I felt violated by it, that's for sure...but mostly because of the dweeb in the green polka-dot hat grinding his skinny body against the "beautiful" girl like a soft core porn star (what an oxymoron), all the while making stupid faces and looking like he just hopped out of a Men At Work video. The "we-just-bought-this-synthesizer-dude-it-sounds-creepy" soundtrack doesn't help things either. Oh, and did you know that all construction workers in 1985 wore plaid shirts? I didn't, but I sure do now.
In the next scene, we really get to see the kind of people we'll be spending the majority of the movie watching: rednecks. A fat lady and her barefooted toddler do laundry outside in a fog that looks more like exhaust than anything, while on the inside the balding turd of a husband walks out of the crapper buttoning up his pants, getting furious when he finds Bertha hasn't laid out a clean shirt for him. And then, wouldn't you know it,
dun-dun-DUN! A shot of the (minuscule) camo-clad killer loading his weapon—
a deadly nail gun. And it's got a cord that attaches to the bright yellow scuba tank on his back. Um, huh? Look, if you're questioning the validity of the movie based on this fact, don't. I can assure you that many power tools require scuba tanks.
Back to the interior set. Baldie's still yelling up a storm, when in walks the killer. He closes the door with his foot. Oh, so smooth. The black motorcycle helmet he wears, patched with what looks like black duct tape, is really menacing. Baldie goes from confused to pissed to scared in a matter of words and seconds. "Sonofabitch," Baldie exclaims as our killer pulls out the nail gun, "I said put that thing down!" The killer hesitates only a second before nail-gunning Baldie's hand to his head. "Well, what do you think," duct-tape-head says pointlessly, in a false robotic voice, as Baldie falls to the ground. "Those are the worst headaches, the ones between the eyes." His robot voice raises in tone at the end of this statement as if it's a question, then he cackles maniacally (and for some reason it echoes in this little shack) before shooting Baldie up some more. Brutal. After a while, Bertha heads back into the house and then runs out screaming, poor little baby Lunkhead's brain probably turning to mush as it bounces up and down during the escape.
And on rolls the title, along with the filmmakers' names. So now you have someone to blame for your sudden, unrelenting rage.
Before I go any further, I want to explain myself. Now, this movie, just by reading my description, sounds bad, right? But not absolutely
terrible. The
terribleness you can only experience by watching
Nail Gun Massacre yourself. My review simply can't do it full justice. It's in the crappy setting of the movie. The shoddy camerawork. The piss-poor acting. The too-long pauses between dialogue and action. The horrible, poorly-put-together storyline. The kind of thing you really
need to see. Especially if you're into bad movies.
To be continued...
