The Great Unwatched: Nail Gun Massacre (1985)

Directors: Bill Leslie and Terry Lofton

Runtime: 90 minutes

I bought this one soon after I read Adam Rockoff's Going to Pieces: The Rise and Fall of the Slasher Film (an excellent book that I highly recommend). Rockoff's dedicated analysis made me realize that perhaps I'd given the slasher genre short shrift. For whatever reason, I didn't actually watch Nail Gun Massacre at the time I bought it, which is probably a good thing. It would have simply reaffirmed my earlier position that slashers are dross.

This is the kind of movie where you can hear the camera in the background, where the shooting script likely said, "push in on naked boobies," where somebody's grandma has to fill in as the shop clerk and read her lines off a script on the counter. This is the kind of movie where a random red herring is mentioned but never actually explained, where the killer's lame wisecracks are drowned out by the even lamer musical score, where the crime-solving authorities couldn't deduce their way out of an empty parking lot.

In short, this is the kind of movie where the vast majority of people involved never worked on another movie again, so at least there's something to be grateful for.

Worth the Purchase: It hurt more than a little.

Stats: 18/401 movies watched in fifteen days.
Currently Projected Completion Date: January 24, 2010
Completion Date Goal: February 25, 2010