HUNG JURY (1994) **

A small time criminal murders a woman.  He’s found guilty by a jury of his peers and is sentenced to be hanged.  Just before he is executed, he vows revenge on everyone who sentenced him.  Thirty years later, a killer begins brutally murdering women.  Meanwhile, a group of strangers travels to an island for a murder mystery weekend.  As it turns out, they are the children of the jury who passed sentence on the killer, and someone soon takes to bumping them off one by one. 

Hung Jury features such W.A.V.E. stock situations as wet T-shirts, actresses clearly reading from their script, women suffering from a prolonged death in a swimming pool, women tied up and gagged, actors flubbing lines, and hot actresses with nasally South Jersey accents.  Even for fans of this sort of thing (me included), a little of this goes a long way.  The problem with Hung Jury is that it’s just way too long for its own good.  Even big budget movies have trouble sustaining a one-hundred-and-fourteen-minute running time.  It’s that much harder for a no-budget Shot on Video enterprise to hold the audience’s attention for that long.  

Often times it feels like an assembly cut where the editor took every scrap of footage they had and edited all together, but for some reason, they forgot to cut it down.  (In fact, it sometimes feels like two films that have been spliced together.)  Scenes run on too long, and many shots are held longer than necessary.  There’s no sense of pacing as scenes just aimlessly play out.  It doesn’t help that there are also way too many subplots, which further eats up screen time. 

The good news is the body count is huge and the killer disposes of his victims in a variety of different ways.  There’s stabbing, strangulation, death by bondage, electrocution, axing, speargun skewering, crucifixion, and (of course) hanging.  My favorite bit was when a bodybuilder was beaten to death with the severed arm of her lover. 

Some of our favorite W.A.V.E. starlets appear, albeit briefly.  Clancy McCauley is the first victim and Tina Krause shows up as a model.  (It’s fun seeing her modeling various outfits from other W.A.V.E. productions.)  Too bad the rest of the cast are kind of forgettable. 

This is also one of those chaste W.A.V.E. movies.  Several times it comes so close to showing nudity before backing down.  (You can see the towel covering an actress in one scene.)  It’s like having women bound and gagged, drowning, and being hacked up is fine, but God forbid you show a nipple or two.  (Unless they’re barely visible from underneath a wet T-shirt that is.) 

Had director Gary Whitson added in some skin, this might’ve skated by with ** ½.  Had editor Sal Longo whittled the running time down to the bare essentials, the jury may have handed down a favorable verdict.  As it is, I can only pronounce it guilty of running on way too long.