Nail Gun Massacre

Plot

At a small construction site, six men pin down a woman (later identified as Linda Jenkins) and gang rape her.

Nearly five months later, another woman is hanging clothes on a line on the front lawn of her house in the middle of the woods. Inside the house, the womans husband (one of the group who gang-raped Linda in the opening scene) walks out of a bathroom, calling her name out because he does not have a clean shirt. A person wearing camouflage clothing and a black motorcycle helmet covered in electric tape loads a nail gun. The person walks around the woman hanging laundry in the front yard, to the back door and enters the house. When the construction worker hears the noise and confronts the figure standing in the back doorway and yells "who the hell are you?" the figure nails the man several times. A minute later, the wife goes into the house with her baby, sees her dead husband on the floor with several nails in his face and chest, screams, and runs out the front door into the woods. The killer hides behind a tree and quietly leaves when the woman is out of sight.

After another month passes, Mark, another one of the construction workers who gang raped Linda, gets up out of bed and goes off with his friend Brad to cut some wood. They leave their truck by the side of the road and walk into the nearby woods with a chainsaw. The killer pulls up behind their parked truck, driving a gold-painted hearse. Brad goes off to "take a leak" when he accidentally urinates on the killers boots which results in him being shot with nails in the crotch and stomach. As Mark is revving up the chainsaw, the killer sneaks up behind him and nails him in the back of the neck. Mark falls and accidentally cuts off his own hand with the chainsaw. In the towns general store, Maxine tells Tom and John that someone is letting her stay in a house for free, and the elderly shopkeeper says that three dead bodies were found in the area. When Doc, the town doctor and coroner, arrives at the scene of the crime, the sheriff shows him the bodies of Mark and Brad. The doctor mentions that now three bodies have been found on Old Lady Baileys property. The sheriff asks the wife of the first murder victim if her husband was a carpenter before he died, and he leaves to call the "meat wagon".

On the road driving his hearse, the killer stops to pick up a hitchhiker, then suddenly nails him in the stomach, forcing the hitchhiker to jump out of the moving hearse. The killer stops and nails the hitchhiker to the road. Meanwhile, the sheriff and Doc are called to the towns hardware store were a young woman was found nailed behind the store. Minutes later, they are called to the road outside of town where a truck driver discovered the dead hitchhiker nailed to the concrete in the middle of the road. Maxine, John, and Tom are eating at a local diner where Maxine mentions Old Bailey letting them have the house because someone had been killed. That evening, John looks outside the house after hearing a noise, but sees nothing. The next day, John and Tom load the truck with lumber from the local lumber store and Linda runs out and yells at them for forgetting their receipt. After John and Tom leave, Hal and Ben, with their girlfriends Ann and Trish, arrive at the lumber yard and asks the owner, Bubba, if he is hiring. He tells them about a place where they are fixing a house and the rowdy group leaves. After they leave, Linda asks Bubba if the two men who just left were construction workers.

The group goes to the old house, and since no one is at home, they sit on a blanket for a picnic. Hal and Ann go for a walk in the woods and end up having sex while standing up beside a tree where they are both attacked and nailed to the tree by the killer. Trish begins to worry why Hal and Ann havent returned and Ben goes off to look for them. He sees the killer who orders him to put his hands around the tree, where he is nailed to it and left alone. Afterwards, John finds a very upset Trish who had heard shots from the woods. He tells her that there are hunters nearby and leads her away. Later, the sheriff arrives to sees John and Tom who have discovered the three dead bodies of Hal, Ben, and Ann. A little later, John and Tom unload their truck and Maxine suggests that the noise their heard the other night might have been the killer. Tom asks John where his nail gun is, but John cannot find it.

The next day, two carpenters are working on a house when they playfully shoot at each other with nail guns. When they go back into the partially constructed house, the killer is there and shoots one of them in the head. The other carpenter puts his hands up and yells that he didnt do anything. The killer, speaking through a distorted electronic voice, tells the second carpenter to think back six months ago. The carpenter says, "It wasnt me who raped you." The killer nail guns the carpenter dead. The next day, a man and a woman get something to eat at a nearby ice cream stand and then drive off in their car for some alone time. While they are making out on the hood of their car, the killer appears and nails them both. A short distance away in suburban house, a man looking through a newspaper tells his daughter that hes going to check on the steaks cooking on the grill. Outside in the back yard, the killer, having cleverly hidden in the swimming pool, splashes out and nails the man, who falls and lands on the grill. The girl finds her father cooking with the steaks and screams while the killer flees.

Now with 13 murders, Doc calls a Dallas hospital and tells a fellow doctor the situation and asks for a profile on the killer. The sheriff and Doc talk to the young daughter, and she says that her father had been reading about his friends being killed. The sheriff tells Doc that six of the dead people worked at a construction site six months ago where Linda, now established to be Bubbas sister, had been gang raped after delivering supplies. But apparently because of lack of evidence, the six rapists walked away on a legal technicality. At the diner, Doc says that he talked to Linda after the incident and she gave no indication that she would murder anyone. Doc then goes to check on the Dallas reports.

That evening, two women walking in the nearby woods are attacked by the killer and nailed as well. The next morning, Doc calls Linda and asks to speak to Bubba, but she hangs up on him. Doc drives over to the lumber yard and demands that Linda tell him the truth about what is going on. He asks where Bubba is and Linda says that hes out driving his hearse. Doc and Linda drive along the road and find the hearse and give chase. Soon, the sheriff intervenes which leads to a textile factory. The killer gets out and runs, forcing the sheriff and Doc to run after him. They chase the killer through the factory and outside on the limestone mounds where the killer climbs up a crane, but slips and falls to his death. Linda walks up to the dead killer and removes his helmet revealing him to be Bubba. Doc tells the sheriff that the killings are over. Linda takes the helmet and she and Doc walk away hand in hand.

Cast

Reception

A 1/4 was awarded by TV Guide, while Zack Parsons of Something Awful gave the film a -47/-50, and wrote, "While Nail Gun Massacre fails utterly at everything it attempts, it does succeed in one important place where its not even making an effort: Nail Gun Massacre is a great funny-bad movie". Similarly, Digital Retributions Devon Bertsch stated, "Nail Gun Massacre is one of the so-bad-its-good champions" and "Nail Gun Massacre is a pinnacle of 80s horror cinema. Clearly the whole thing was made by people not familiar with the filmmaking process. It is an absolute must see. They dont make em like this anymore. In fact, they only ever made em like this once, and it was enough".

DVD Talks Adam Tyner gave the film a grade of 1½ out of 5, and concluded, "Yknow, if I watch something and have a genuinely good time with it, even if its for all the wrong reasons, I cant really consider it a bad movie. Its not quite the Troll 2 of slasher movies, but I had more fun with Nail Gun Massacre... laughing and screaming at my TV... than any other movie Ive watched in a very long time". In a review for DVD Verdict, Paul Corupe heavily criticized the film, writing, "A sleazy slasher from the anything goes VHS heyday of the early 1980s. Put on by Texas entrepreneur Terry Lofton. There are moments of unintentionally hilarious reprieve on display throughout the film.