"The Nail Gun Massacre" is everything it sounds like—a psychopath is roaming the backwoods of Texas with a souped-up nail gun, turning men and women into human pincushions. Could it be related to a brutal rape that occurred some six months prior? An obvious riff in title on "The Texas Chain Saw Massacre" and boasting an opening rape scene unabashedly culled from "I Spit on Your Grave," "The Nail Gun Massacre" is an unabashedly derivative mid-80s riff on slasher conventions, pulled together on a shoestring budget.
As bad as it sounds, I feel that this film has gotten a lot of heat from web critics who aren't really taking it on its own terms—this is not Bergman, Tarkovsky, or Kubrick—it isn't high art. It's a film whose singular distinguishing element is that its killer's weapon of choice is a nail gun. My point being, "The Nail Gun Massacre" doesn't claim to be anything other than what it is, and most horror audiences (especially those who have a taste for these older exploitation films) should know this.
That aside, the film is not a technical masterpiece by any stretch of the imagination. The murder scenes are surprisingly better than one would expect given the shoestring budget, and never cease to be elaborate or grotesque. A pulsing synth score accompanies most of the scenes, and is admittedly a bit overbearing, while the killer hurls goofy one-liners at the victims in an inexplicable robot voice. The acting overall is bad, but passable by eighties slasher standards. Most of the men are buffoons, and the women prancing around naked. In spite of those caveats though, the film does capture the quiet backwoods of Texas rather effectively, and it is an extremely atmospheric film given all of its shortcomings. The photography of the woods captures a strange foreboding that, whether intentional or just a happy accident, is far more nuanced than anything else about the film.
All in all, "The Nail Gun Massacre" is, at least as far as eighties slashers go, not nearly as bad of a film as some may lead you to believe. It's schlocky, gratuitous, and at times badly acted, but isn't that what we love these films for? It at least has the distinguishing feature of a nail gun- obsessed killer, and it also excels at capturing the dreariness of sleepy backwoods Texas, which is more than one would necessarily expect. 5/10.
