The Nail Gun Massacre

Awful slasher film directed by a pair of would-be directors and miserably acted by a bottom-of-the-barrel cast, “The Nail Gun Massacre” seems determined to prove the maxim that no matter how bad things are, they can still be made worse.

A couple lines of script, zero fresh ideas, and a few gallons of fake blood provide the basis for a plot that senselessly runs up the body count with killings carried out in such a disjointed muddle that it precludes any sort of logical narrative progression. A succession of random characters comes and goes for no particular reason. Among them, some fall victim to the maniac du jour, and others literally disappear into thin air. Meanwhile, we’ve got a dense sheriff and an unprofessional doctor spinning their wheels in an exasperatingly pathetic investigation.

There’s no lack of nudity and sex scenes, but they’re presented with such a maddening awkwardness that the result is uniquely antierotic. A story that could be told in fifteen minutes padded into a feature-length film translates into a surfeit of dead time. Too many scenes with practically nothing happening wears the viewer’s patience dangerously thin.

Here and there the film veers directly into the realm of trash, like when a startled carpenter accidentally urinates on the killer’s feet, which obviously doesn’t score him any points (“Well, you just pissed me off! … I bet this will stop that leak!“), or when a local yokel, facing a weapon pointed straight at him, lets out a “Put that thing down now… someone could get hurt!“).

Not even good (or bad?) enough for induction into the “so bad it’s good” club.