• Straight to Video
• Director: Joe Castro
• Written by: Daniel Benton, Joe Castro
• Running Time: 89 minutes
• Language: English
• MPAA Rating: R - Restricted
• Cast: Aaron Gaffey, Kyle Yaskin, Nadia Angelini, Trudy Kofahl, Jill Moore, Bart Burson, Desi O'Brian, Christopher Michaels, John Sarley, Joe Haggerty, Scott St. James, Staas Yudenko, Rachel Rotten, Rob Rotten, Nick Nyon, Kat Stephens, Alex Stone, Regina Nicole, Wali B. Suhail, David Ortega, Kitty, Ivy Villalobos, Sowilla Henry, Arden Kayce, Steven J. Escobar

Movies about drug addiction usually follow the same pattern: the initial sample, the compulsion, the sanguinity, the relinquishing, and then finally the descent into horror. Joe Castro’s eighth film "The Jackhammer Massacre" traces those familiar arches, but with a distinctive twist. Since Joe Castro earns his bread and butter making derivative exploitation movies, it’s easy to deduce the direction that the film would eventually head. Can you say, standard slasher film. Yes, of course, but not before a delivering very powerful and surprising first half.

"The Jackhammer Massacre" is a bleak and depressing film detailing how one man’s hopes and dreams are shattered by his addictions, and follows his eventual plunge into misery, desperation and, ultimately, madness.

Aaron Gaffey (2003's "The Revolting Dead") plays Jack Magnus, an enterprising young man with the world at his finger-tips. He’s smart, rich, good-looking, and motivated, and he seems, for the most part, pretty well-balanced, even likeable. This all changes following a tragic sequence where one of Jack’s friends, on an urban jaunt for some cheap cocaine, winds up inadvertently inhaling shards of glass, and dying in his arms. This trauma has a horrible enduring affect on Jack, who spends the next few years blaming himself for his friend‘s grisly death. His recreational drug usage eventually develops into a full blown addiction, as he seeks any means to escape his guilt and pain. Cut to three years later: Jack Magnus is no longer the man he was. He has instead become a human tragedy. He’s has lost everything; his car, his apartment and his job. He has developed into a lost and fractured being in human skin, dirty and repulsive, with a badly infected arm; he lives each day -- each second -- for his next fix. Having secured a job as a night watchman at a local depot, he’s managed to sustain his addiction… somewhat. That is until his dealers come looking for him at the warehouse over some missed payments.

A vicious assault on Jack ends with him being dealt an unconventional death blow by the dealers -- he’s injected with a powerful narcotic concoction. However, instead of it killing him, as intended, the narcotic cocktail jolts Jack back to consciousness, and into a state of frenzied anger. In order to protect himself and looking to gain some vengeance, Jack instinctively grabs at the first thing in sight. In this case, the weapon he reaches for is a jackhammer. He is overflowing with savage rage, and uses it to literally obliterate the head of the dealer, and his protégé.

Afterwards it becomes clear that Jack’s mental state, following the injection and double murder, has slipped from chemically flawed rationality to outright paranoid madness. When he starts seeing his long dead friend as a chilling vaporous apparition, you sense that Jack has abandoned any sense of lucidity. When his departed colleague convinces the delusional Jack that the warehouse is under surveillance, and that the Drug Enforcement Agency is mere seconds away from busting in on him, he concludes that he has to protect what is his, even if it means killing for it. Yes, Jack’s conscience-derived hallucinogenically-based friend is a plot device, but what a cool creepy plot device it is.

This, however, is where the film veers into the standard serial killer movie conventions, tinkering along as the Frankenstein-like Jack, backed by his ghostly enabler, plays hide and creep with some unwanted guests, methodically disposing of a young (and far too good looking) salvage crew one by one. When his sister (and her lesbian lover) arrives, Jack momentarily regains his sanity, or humanity, when he choses to not kill her. By opting to lock up his sister, rather than kill her, there is a glimmer of hope in his character. A crack in the veneer, if you will, as the once compassionate Jack manages to creep out of the now furious raging monster long enough to bestow some last-minute kindness on the only person who ever truly loved him. It’s fleeting, as Jack once again redirects the same ambition that once made him a successful businessman into his killing rampage. He’s a powerful violent force, complete with jackhammer, who has made it his purpose to liquidate all those who stumble onto his property.

The conclusion, with Jack’s sister factoring into his eventual demise, is downbeat and depressing, and not what one would expect from a serial killer movie. I didn’t rejoice at the thought of his death -- as I‘m accustomed to doing at the end of serial killer-themed movies. Instead, I felt sadness. I noted that Jack’s character wasn’t harvested from the same dank malevolent consortium that spawns all the other serial killers in movies. Jack wasn’t evil or malicious, or even mean-spirited. He didn’t rejoice in killing people, but saw it as an act of self-preservation. He was simply a humbled, lost and desperate soul spinning out of control in his own psychosis. Joe Castro and writer Daniel Benton (2004's "Near Death") went to great lengths to make Aaron Gaffey’s character as likeable and sympathetic as possible, and the real sadness of the film exists, not so much in the murders that Jack commits, often on crude cardboard-like characters, but in his continued downward spiral into Hell. That was the hardest thing to watch, in my opinion.

Made in just six days, Joe Castro (2002's "Gorilla Warfare: Battle of the Apes") dragged his cast and crew into some of the most run-down locations in Los Angeles, looking to infuse that sense of urban decay into his film. Castro and cinematographer Nick Saglimbeni impart much of Jack’s post-addictive existence with a cinema verity sense of realism. The camera tracks Jack as he retreats to cramped, dingy, dirty apartments and darkened alleys and warehouses in order to feed his habit. Even a visit to a scenic park culminates with Jack digging through a trash can for a half-eaten hamburger.

Castro is a visual director with a lengthy background in special effects going back a decade. His insistence on profound and shocking imagery is fairly constant throughout. From Jack’s protruding, bulbous, infected arm -- which he continues to inject into -- to his never-ending string of gruesome jackhammer murders, the film is over-loaded with gore and CG effects. Also, several gallons of fake blood are used to heighten nausea. For sure, this film has enough blood and guts (and sex) to keep any exploitation fan in high spirits.

Ultimately "The Jackhammer Massacre" is a very good film, with, mind you, some very glaring flaws. The latter part of the picture, the serial killer portion, is by-the-numbers and tends to lack the suspense that it requires to make it work. I guess that might be a major flaw, had the first part of the film not been so good. The minor characters, the victims, are very under-written, and the female protagonist, the heroine, is your standard clichéd leading lady. She is barely dressed, and runs up the stairs instead of out the door. Also, the jackhammer is hardly the first choice of killers. It’s bulky and heavy, and, in Jack’s case, it requires plenty of cord for it to work. Hardly believable by any stretch of the imagination.

On the other hand, a jackhammer is a loud powerful tool that is capable of plenty of carnage in the wrong hands. With a title like "Jackhammer Massacre", what else would one be looking for? This film deserves to be seen.