Linbeymusol Wonderful character development!

Boobirt Stylish but barely mediocre overall

Ceticultsot Beautiful, moving film.

Phillipa Strong acting helps the film overcome an uncertain premise and create characters that hold our attention absolutely.

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.

willywants After getting involved with lots of drugs, poor Jack goes absolutely nuts and begins killing all who enter the warehouse where he works. A friend of mine suggested this film to me, saying; "Jackhammer Massacre is the scariest, goriest film I've ever seen." Those are his words exactly. From the title alone I knew this wouldn't be the epic horror picture my friend described, but WOW, this movie really, really…sucked. Every cliché in the book has been rolled up into ninety minutes of pure torture. It seems every 5 minutes or so some miscellaneous character, always jackhammer fodder, enters the warehouse, just to meet up with Jack and die a gruesome death. There's a very generous amount of gore, though the make-up effects themselves vary in quality from pretty decent to chintzy. The acting is flat and the characters; uninteresting, but that's to be expected. Director/Co-writer Joe Castro—One of the effects artists at SOTA effects, a company who's work in the past has usually been less-than-stellar—would have been much better off handling the gore rather than writing/directing, because he shows no sense of pacing. Maybe that, combined with the film's predictability, is what made in so hard to sit through.Tiny spoiler ahead!"Jackhammer Massacre" has good gore but nothing else going for it. Skip it unless you're desperate for entertainment, or if you think a character being killed off via a jackhammer up the anus is funny (I'll admit the scene was pretty funny). And no, I didn't kill the friend who recommended this to me, he redeemed himself by showing me "Shaun of the Dead". 2/10.

suspiria10 The Jackhammer Massacre (aka Jackhammer) follows the exploits of Jack the Junkie. Always high and looking to score Jack takes a leap off the deep end when a friend OD's. The first thirty minutes are basically him conning to get a score, boring. Back and forth he sways with the ethereal wind until one of his suppliers comes calling g for his cash. Oddly enough even as a full-time junkie Jack can find a job as a security guard at a warehouse with construction weapons, err tools. It seems Jack's paranoia really kicks in with a little help from his OD'd friend's ghost. Well hey this is where that jackhammer of the title rears its head and Jack goes to town thinking everyone's DEA.The first 30 are slow and boring, who wants to see someone continuously shooting up. I don't at least. An interesting arm infection is a highlight of the first reel, not even bare chests and breasts can help that. But when the slaughter begins you can at least start cracking the power cord jokes (a la MST3K) and giggle and snicker at the bad dialogue and horrible delivery.

MakoSucks I rented Jackhammer Massacre, after hearing the first half was good. I would give it a chance since i heard there were a few good gore scenes, and Rachel Rotten and Her only other partner in a sex scene, Rob Rotten were in this. I figured well if this movie is a total waste of time at least there's going to be a sex scene with a hot girl in this movie. God was I wrong. It starts in the middle of the story for some reason,In some kind of construction company warehouse, with Jack the junkie, the "Jason" of this "movie," getting pushed around by some pushers, and injected with some PCP/crack hypodermic in an attempt to kill Jack but instead its suggested that it makes him insanely stronger and insanely insane. Well Jack wakes up and kills one of them with.....A JACKHAMMER! Woah didn't see that coming.Now this first gore scene was possibly the third best effect in the movie. They pull this Jackhammering off with a fake jackhammer being jiggled around in the pushers mouth, while he spits out some blood, a cut to Jacks smiling face, back to the Jackhammer which is being shaken by Jack into a fake smashed head. That was pretty cheesy. It is so ridiculous it was funny. But after that its all downhill from there.The story goes back 3 years or so which shows how Jack becomes a junkie, where you see a topless Rachel Rotten, and thats it. I was sadly disappointed at this point, as the deciding factor for me renting this move, of a sex scene was non existent. I saw pics of her topless in this movie around the net, so I figured sex scene, but they just added in the boob shot, just so they can have a boob shot. they could of saved money and used an extra instead of a porn-star, and used that money for better effects, better actors, or a better script. Forward 1 year and then back to the jackhammer to the face scene. The rest of the movie, Id say 3 quarters of it takes place in that construction company building. Its more of a shack than a building. Anyways, Jack gets delusional and sees his friends ghost. he overdosed and Jack lets him die in the flashback scenes, so he wont get in trouble with the law. I read that this ghost pats Jack on the back every time he kills someone, which I thought was genius, but he just complains and commands Jack to kill. near the end of the movie some characters are introduced that you don't know crap about. They just come to the construction warehouse and they get killed. You are supposed to care about these people, but how can you when they just pop out of nowhere? So basically everyone gets killed except the girl of the group, and Jacks lesbian sister, who came to help jack, but got locked up in a closet after the ghost told Jack she was really "one of them". So during the "climax of the movie" Jack is about to kill the girl, his extension cord gets pulled out of the Jackhammer by somebody. Jack decides to "Choke the the bitch." his sister pops out and stabs jack in the back with the drill bit of the jackhammer. She then slaps him with the drill bit, and he falls of the building top, where the scene was taking place. The ghost tells Jack to get up after falling off a 3 story building. The 2 girls walk out of the building, and they see that jacks body is missing! OH NOS! camera does a close up of the girls faces, they scream. credits roll. That is an original, and unexpected ending.This movie is terrible in every aspect. The acting is terrible, the lines are read as if off from a cue card. The plot and story, are too broad that you have to use your imagination to fill in certain plot holes. The only slightly OK parts from this movie are the first jackhammer smash, a scene that suggests that Jack shoves his weapon up his lesbian sister's girlfriend's crack, which had no visual shot of this, but the idea was funny as hell. and a scene where Jack slams a guys face with the side of the jackhammer, and his brains pop out, but the way its pulled off is terrible. This movie has an OK concept which if elaborated upon, could of been a great movie. But it gets pulled off like a train wreck. Ignore this movie at all costs. You and your friends could get more entertainment out of making your own no budget movie than watching this load, which looks like it was make by a group of friends making a low budget movie.