hereatgraceland
From a horror stand-point...this movie was terrible. As a message on saying NO to Drugs, this movie hits the nail on the head. I remember being moved after watching Leonardo DiCaprio in "Basketball Diaries" and I can honestly say this movie did the same. It proves that nobody is out-of-reach from drugs. It started with a young man who had a very good job, was respected by his peers, nice car, lots of money and the drugs took everything away from him until the final outcome. I'm being honest saying the producers should remove all the garbage scenes involving the jack hammer, re-arrange a few things, cut some, add some and this would be an ideal movie to show in schools to teach kids drugs can totally destroy your life. I'm going to ignore some of the ridiculous garbage in this movie and from an anti-drug point of view...I'll give the movie a strong 7 !
jaywolfenstien
A "making of" featurette for Jackhammer Massacre would look like an episode of MacGyver in how director Joe Castro and a few side-kicks made a movie with a stick of gum, a few boxes, and a door bell ringer. That in itself is quite an impressive feat, and the final production value quite honestly does not show the laughable budget and resources (laughable by Troma standards no less.) Don't get me wrong, this movie does obviously look and feel low budget (really low budget) – it does not come across as a couple guys who borrowed the digital camcorder and shot at home using the props found in the glove-box, back seat, and trunk. And while praising the film, let me also add that the film has some good moments of gore (specifically, the gore not affiliated with the jackhammer.) Sadly, this praise does not mean this has yielded a good film.Jackhammer Massacre presumes that we care about Jack and his tragedy while it flashes back to his formerly successful life as a prick businessman destined to screw himself over with bad choices and become the psychotic prick killer. Jackhammer presumes wrong.While roughly a third of the running time is dedicated to the unsympathetic tragedy that is our killer Jack and his cartoony (not to mention comical) delusions, the victims show up just long enough to be killed. Or in other words Jack is treated as the main character, it develops him with a prepackaged uninteresting scenario of how his friend ODed and he became addicted . . . and the movie assumes we'll sympathize with everyone else because "they're walking into a death trap." Jackhammer assumes wrong.Ever hear the overstated remark "The hero is only as good as the villain he faces"? Jackhammer built up their villain but forgot the hero entirely, resulting in a narratively unbalanced film. It's not the fact that Jack's development is screwed that hurts the film – don't get me wrong, though, that alone cripples it – the real nail in the coffin is the fact there's really no one with any cinematic weight and screen presence to metaphorically oppose him. The head of the salvage crew gets a heroic introduction shot, and that's the extent of her character development.Jack's sister and her friend? The movie literally throws them away before the audience can gain any emotional investment in them. Jack's boss? We see his face long enough to memorize it before he bites the dust. The guy buying the shop and his assistant? They walk in, perform the horror gimmick of looking around and then die. The salvage crew? They live a little bit longer, but to say these characters are introduced would be a severe and misleading overstatement. A very precise tagline for the film would be "Show up and die." Outside, LA life goes on. Across the globe, the sun sets, and the world keeps on turning. And nobody cares about the handful of strangers we never met whom we'll never see again.Slasher films need to kill characters to be effective. Jackhammer kills cameo appearances.Then there was Jack's delusions, his dead buddy who returns from the grave to haunt him with phrases like "You let me die" spoken in a tone that sounds curiously similar to that smug and sarcastic Randal in Kevin Smith's Clerks. As a direct result, the scenes came across not as a delusion haunting a man to drive him insane, rather as a smart-ass ghost heckling the living for kicks. Granted a number of scenes in the film were intentionally comical (Jack's hallucination of running from the spotlight, for example), I don't sense Joe Castro intended the ghostly apparition to have that caliber of goofiness.While speaking on the comedy element, it never quite hits its mark. The presentation of the horror/comedy blend feels eerily similar to those unintentionally lame 80s rip offs of Friday the 13th made by incompetent hacks who fail to realize how idiotic a situation they've presented. And only through the overwhelmingly ludicrous scenarios and cutting does it become apparent that the Jackhammer Massacre has its tongue in its cheek . . . in places. In other places, like with the previously discussed tragedy of Jack and the heckling ghost of Overdosed past, does the film realize how ineffective that is? I have my doubts.With Jackhammer's various misfires, it's not surprising how tempting it becomes to target the things the film never cared about. For example, how impractical is it to kill with an 80lb jackhammer? Who is stupid enough to fall in a puddle of blood mixed with intestines and then peel off his soaked shirt as if he just had a coffee stain? How long is that extension cord? And of course, Jackhammer's obedience to the horror formula with a set of characters making out because they can.Jackhammer is a slasher, and thank God it knows it's a slasher; however, it's still apparent that it doesn't know how to be a good slasher, which is okay. It has a ton of brothers and sisters on the rental shelf next to it to keep it company.
Lando_Hass
Yes, people, the summary above is true. If you took a crap and it came out disc shaped and you put it in your DVD player, you'd have The Jackhammer Massacre. I'm not kidding in the least, bruh. This movie is one of the worst pieces of crap I've ever seen, and I like a lot of crap movies. I don't like to bash movies because it makes me look like an idiot who probably couldn't make a better movie if my life depended on it, but I could film myself sleeping for two hours and it'd be more entertaining (and plausible) than this turd. Let me start off by commenting on the acting by giving a witty analogy: If someone told you to eat a burger filled with cat turds and then act as if you enjoy it, you'd eat it, and try to act like you enjoy it. Of course, you're acting would be horrible, but in comparison to this, it'd be more believable than anything you'd see in here. The movie is about a junkie, so naturally, the guy should be able to look like a junkie. Instead, it looks like the director messed up his clothes and told him to act like he drank about a dozen cups of coffee. Because that's what it looks like, it looks like the main actor is perked on coffee.The story. Let me tell you something witty and funny. The writer of this movie probably wrote this movie on a typewriter. If he did, which I like to believe, I commonly refer to the typewriters which bad movies are written from to be TRIPEwriters, HA-HA! Okay, back to the story. The story is about a man, named Jack (I smell irony and witty writing with that name!), who has a good job, a cool car, and lots of money. But, underneath the high paying job and cool car, Jack has an addiction…an addiction to DRUGS! One day, he and his buddy go to a rundown part of town to get high (this also happens literally five minutes into the movie; I guess these movie makers never heard of CHARACTER DEVELOPMENT!). They do get high, but Jack's friend overdoses and dies. Jack, being a narcissistic idiot, lets him die on the road. Then suddenly, from that one bad experience, he loses everything. Mind you, we never see him lose everything, we just assume that he has because again, he's wearing dirty clothes. But whatever. Now, after his downfall, he works as a security guard in a garage, and is still a junkie. He owes some bad people some money, so here's what they do: They go to him, kick the ever loving s*** out of him, and pull out a syringe of some kind of drug that's supposed to kill him. Now, even though this stuff if supposed to kill him (and was probably supposed to kill everyone they shot it into), one of the thugs says that he's heard some 'bad' stuff about the drug, that it can make you really strong. Yes, this makes sense. A drug that's been made to kill people has supposedly made people strong, even though it's made to kill them. How did the people who were injected even alive to exhibit these super powers if the drug's made to kill them? Exactly. Because this movie sucks. Jack is injected, he gets ridiculously powerful, and starts to kill everyone with a jackhammer. I smell an Oscar! Oh, wait, no, I smell a crap story, my bad.Someone who likes this movie can argue, "Well, this movie is supposed to show the horror of drugs, are you stupid, LOL(!)" I would have to agree with this statement. As much as I hate this movie, I do agree that it shows what comes from drug use. It's obvious that the people who made this were on some kind of drugs, and made this piece of misery. Now kids, if you're reading, when you do drugs, you make stupid movies like this, so don't do drugs!That's my two awesome cents on this movie. This movie's stupid, boring, and stupid. For a movie that's supposed to discourage drug use, it sure does make you wanna take something afterwards to forget that you ever saw it.Score: 1 out of 10. Wait, I take that back.0 out of 10.
