To mix similes, Sledgehammer moves like a snail through molasses rolling down a glacier. In other words, it’s slow. On purpose. And not in a “not much is happening here” way, but a “the director is using the slow-motion effect so much, we should check to see if he fell asleep” way.

That said, as the film played, my fascination with it grew to an obsession by the time it hit the last of its 87 minutes. Sledgehammer is remembered as one of the most successful of the shot-on-VHS slashers, and not just by virtue of being among the first. For all its ineptness, the seven-day wonder is oddly compelling and, against all odds, as hypnotic as it is illogical.

A boy is locked in a closet by his mother so that she and her no-good boyfriend can screw around in the living room. As they engage in foreplay, the grade-school youth somehow escapes, acquires the titular tool, and bashes in their heads. Fast-forward 10 years, and a group of throughly unappealing 20-somethings arrives at the same out-of-the-way cabin for a party weekend. You know what happens next, yet you’ll want to see it happen, anyway … provided you can stand the likes of seemingly interminable establishing shots.

What debuting director David A. Prior (Killer Workout) manages to do with so little may be accidental, but not entirely. His actors (headed by brother Ted Prior, Surf Nazis Must Die) are beyond help, and the script is as woefully lunkheaded — how else to explain the food-fight sequence, the chubby jock who licks people, the John Oates doppelgänger spurring the sexual advances of what passes for a hot blonde? However, the mood created by a creepy mask, a John Carpenter-esque synth score and dreamlike imagery lift the crude, homegrown effort from mere crap to at least really interesting crap. —Rod Lott

Buy it at Amazon.

Whether Blood Cult was the first movie made expressly for the home-video market as it claims does not matter. What does is that the Tulsa, Oklahoma-lensed picture is the perfect example for what shot-on-video projects do wrong and right — mostly wrong, starting with enough padding to rival a Tempur-Pedic mattress.

For example, a college student is horrified to find two chopped-off fingers in her cafeteria salad, and the scene fits into the plot. But what we don’t need is what director Christopher Lewis (son of actress Loretta Young) gives us beforehand: the coed being welcomed by the cafeteria worker; the two engaging in idle chit-chat; the coed selecting the broccoli and meat patty; the worker placing said meat patty on a tray; the coed selecting a diet Coke; the coed approaching the register; the cashier asking for $2.90; the cashier giving her a dime in change; the coed approaching the salad bar; the coed stirring the cottage cheese; the coed opting not to take any cottage cheese; the coed instead choosing your regular garden salad.

It’s all done to fill out a standard story of a black-gloved killer who carves up sorority girls with a glisteningly sharp cleaver and takes limbs as souvenirs. Investigating is Sheriff Wilbois (Charles Ellis, who returned for the following year’s sequel, Revenge), a rotund, elderly fella who looks like a TV pitchman for suspect Medicare supplements, and talks to himself a lot about the clues he finds. We call this “exposition.”

For shooting on Betacam with a $27,000 budget, Lewis achieves some interesting angles and tricks, but lacks in the other areas that carry equal weight, from credible performances to establishing tension. For the latter, witnessing the sheriff chow down on food from Arby’s while on stakeout does not count. Still, Blood Cult certainly is watchable — and not just for being a footnote in film history within the chapter titled “VHS Revolution and the Mom-and-Pop Video Store” — although saddled with the weakness that marks so many SOV efforts: a genuine love of movies that shows through, but not necessarily the know-how to pull one off. —Rod Lott

Buy it at Amazon.