The Toolbox Murders (1978)

[CJ_01976]

Originally Posted by abattoir17

I always have high hopes for Tobe Hooper

I can't believe you just said that.

[Dobe Dobe]

Originally Posted by CJ_01976

I can't believe you just said that.

...........

[nothingshrtofgod]

third horror movie i ever saw man!

genius! i love it! it must have been crazy when it first started

[BloodBath&Beyond]

Originally Posted by nothingshrtofgod

third horror movie i ever saw man!

genius! i love it! it must have been crazy when it first started

The producers of the film wanted to make a film like TCM, yet somehow the final result is very different. Much more sleazier and less classy... (, tcm=classy? what did I just say...)

The film ended up as one of the Video Nasties, and I think it was the poster-film for horror film bashing on television and in the papers.

[BloodBath&Beyond]

I just found this really good review- both informative and hilarious.

CLASSICS OF CINEMA
THE TOOLBOX MURDERS (1978 )

On account of The Duke believes his work to be very much a public
service type affair, I feel it my duty to offer this here advice;
Any and all country records you might own, especially lonesome, my-
baby-done-me-wrong numbers like, I dunno, Wichita Lineman by Glenn
Campbell or Hammer Smashed Face by Cannibal Corpse, need to be
gathered up right about now and flung the hell out the window into
some oncoming traffic.

If you were maybe thinking of putting on some Charley Pride or maybe
a Porter Wagoner duet with Dolly Parton, and then, who knows, maybe
you wanna run a bath and have some sexes with yourself, then what
you need to do is re-evaluate the situation right the hell now.

Like Bob Dylan said; You gotta change your way of thinking,
motherfucker.

The reason for this dramatic announcement has to do with Dennis
Donnelly’s 1978 flick The Toolbox Murders. Seems that the most
ignorantly suicidal thing a fella (or more specifically, a woman)
can be doing of an evening is putting on a record filled with
mournful country music.

Dig this shit right here;

According to The Toolbox Murders, the airing of some country ditties
can only lead to this type a chaos; Claw hammer to the skull, death
by daft looking drill, prolonged chasing about the place involving
nailguns, interruption of masturbatory sexing. Plenty more of these
types a catastrophes.

Who would even ever dream of throwing on some Bill Monroe, father of
bluegrass, in light of this turn of events?

In case you didn’t know, what The Toolbox Murders involves is a
fella goes about the place wearing a ski-mask and smashing heads
left and right with various DIY implements. Maybe you thought
hammers were intended for benign shit like putting some nails a
little bit further into a bit of wood, but no, turns out hammers are
best put to use as an aid for smashing folks heads.

Via some Travis Bickle-inspired driving around at the beginning, we
are treated to a radio preacher yacking on about “Sin!” and
“Damnation!” and “If a piece of the body offends you, cut it off!”
and other loving, tolerant musings. To be honest, that kinda shit is
the last thing a fella needs to hear when he’s got a ski mask and a
toolbox in the back seat, especially if he’s already a bit up the
motherfucking left with regards matters of “filth” and “sluts” and
such. The hell this preacher cares, though. He just wants to keep on
yacking. “Hellfire” this and “sinful” that.

Before anyone has time to even give a flying fuck, folks are being
slaughtered in remarkably brutal, crunchy fashion. Not that there
are many slaughter techniques that sit especially wide of the fence
marked “brutal” in the first place, although the BBFC would have us
all believe that a claw-hammer to the head is nowhere near as messy
and unpleasant as we might once have envisioned.

As is their occasional wont, the British Board Of Film
Classification have gone ahead and gotten as maniacal as the
reprobate in the ski-mask and thanks to their gallant attempts with
the old scissors and glue, the act of, for example, beating someone
across the forehead with the most anti-social of forehead beaters
seems to be a rather tidy affair. Certainly not as nasty as you
possible psychopaths had imagined. Hardly a drop spilled, it turns
out. It’s all so painless and trivial.

To be fair, I’m not entirely convinced that only the censors are to
blame for the mutilated nature of the PAL Region 0 DVD. It’s all too
probable that the distributors just submitted whatever shoddy hacked-
asunder print of the thing they could burn to a DVD without much
fuss.

I mean the BBFC passed Irreversible uncut, for Gods sakes, although
lets not get too demented about the senses; Irreversible was
subtitled, after all, and therefore highly unlikely to be viewed by
anyone other than studied, learned, intellectual types who wouldn’t
dream of raping or murdering a soul outside of the boardroom.

But I digress like a filthy fucking chimp.

Producer Tony Dido, who also produced the recent Tobe Hooper remake,
was apparently inspired to make the flick after seeing, fittingly
enough, Tobe Hooper’s Texas Chain Saw Massacre. It wasn’t so much
that the film rattled his nuts senseless, but more the fact that,
even three years after it’s initial run, it was still packing
theatres from here to Pluto. What he did was get a bunch a folks to
sit down with the flick about a bunch a hippies get chainsawed up by
a big cross-dresser, and then come up with something equally
zeitgeist-molesting. To this end, Neva Freidenn, Robert Easter and
Ann Kindberg scribbled up the whole debauched tale, and the script
was flung in the direction of Dennis Donnelly, who had most recently
directed some episodes of The Amazing Spider-Man.

The Toolbox Murders, in fact, is the only film Dennis Donnelly ever
directed, book-ending this grimy opus with numerous jobs for the
telly-shows. I mean come on, 14 episodes of Charlie’s Angels would
drive any man to start flinging power-tools about the place.

It’s a shame though. Toolbox Murders is really a rather accomplished
number.

Anyhow, what happens is that some youngster of some kind gets
involved in it all, on account of the motherfucker in the ski-mask
done kidnapped his sister. Why the hell did he do that, we’re all
wondering? Why not just poke some screwdrivers or daft looking
drills into her, like he did just ten seconds ago, back when that
woman was getting all over-familiar with her hoo-hah in the bathtub?
What the hell use does he have for a hostage?

Maybe he’s trying to get the attention of Harrison Ford or Dennis
Quaid, or those other folks who always end up having to deal with
these types a fucked up situations. Maybe even Danny Glover, who’s
too old for this shit.

After about 30 minutes, when the whole kidnap thing kicks into gear,
Toolbox Murders makes a rather jarring leap from claustrophobic,
blackly satirical, intensely atmospheric grindhouse horror into a
much more mannered “The mind of the killer what did the killing and
fucks about with the hammers” affair. That seedy first act, inspired
as much by Taxi Driver or Driller Killer as it was by, say, Psycho,
gets cast aside like some filthy hoo-hah exploring decadent, giving
way to a prolonged second act which seems heavily indebted to the
damn-well masterful Boston Strangler.

Rearing its filthy ski-mask hidden fizog less than a decade after
The Summer Of Love, it’s easy to see The Toolbox Murders as a
barbaric, misogynist response to those hippy types with their nudity
and their crack ganja and their kissing and sexing on the streets,
causing God-fearing pedestrians to slip all over the damn place.

What it actually has to yack about, though, The Duke would venture,
is how hypocritical those old traditional, reactionary ideas really
are; a fella on a hell-bent crusade to wipe out evil indulging in a
far more deplorable type of evil himself. A fella who finds himself
sickened by sexuality, especially female sexuality, and yet there he
is, chasing half naked ladies about the place and thrusting phallic
instruments into the most sensitive areas of their bodies.

It talks about the fear of change, the inability to cope with the
passage of time. I mean, come the hell on, the whole flick hinges on
the idea that a fella has to try and recreate something time has
cruelly snatched from him.

A lot of this stuff seems terribly quaint nowadays, but remember,
man, this was way back in 78. In fact, this arrived a full five
months before Carpenter’s Halloween. In light of this, that first
act seems even more influential.

Dig this, too – Toolbox Murders, whilst certainly illustrating the
depravity of the nutcase in question, and going to great lengths for
to give us a sense of how abhorrent his actions are, still asks us,
if not to sympathise with the killer, then at least accept that the
fella is, by any reasonable standards, fucked in the mentals. He’s
inspired not only by some perverted interpretation of the Old
Testament, but also by his own crippling guilt, and an all-consuming
grief that penetrates his skull probably deeper than even those
swirly-drill things are fit to plunge.

It’s nothing incredibly earth-shattering, but it does add a layer of
humanity that you ain’t gonna find in, say, Friday 13th – The Final
Chapter, even though that flick right there is the motherfucking
pinnacle of the Jason’s. Toolbox Murders offers an argument a little
deeper than shit about mentally ill criminals are faceless monsters
fit only to be burned in a motherfucking cowshed and hit with
hatchets.

So what it is, is that The Toolbox Murders is a flick of two very
distinct halves, and whilst the former is perhaps the more
impressive, the intellectual workings of the latter see it elevated
rather triumphantly.

Anyway, they couldn’t just fill an hour and a half with random,
depressing carnage. Folks would be liable to think they’d flicked on
the CNN or some shit by accident.

Thanks folks.

Drop The Duke A Line
http://www.mondoirlando.com/toolbox_murders.html
^ This site looks really good too.

[abattoir17]

Originally Posted by CJ_01976

I can't believe you just said that.

I know. It's sad but true. Hooper was so good early on then he just fell apart. I keep hoping that one day he'll recapture that old Chainsaw magic. I can dream, can't I?

[Slasher Freak]

I have never seen this but I need to see it. I like the remake.

[CJ_01976]

Originally Posted by abattoir17

I keep hoping that one day he'll recapture that old Chainsaw magic.

Right, and monkeys fly out of my butt.

I can dream, can't I?

It's a waste of your time here. If he could salvage his career then he would have done so long ago.

[Dobe Dobe]

Originally Posted by CJ_01976

If he could salvage his career then he would have done so long ago.

Yeah...like in the early 80's.

[goose101]

I know I can't bealive how poopy his movies have been after Chainsaw