Toolbox Murders

In 1974, Tobe Hooper changed horror films forever with the release of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre. It's one of the most influential, significant, and most importantly horrifying horror films ever conceived. His career hasn't really amounted to much since then. There's the forgettable 1985 vampire riff Lifeforce, most famous for Mathilda May's nude scene. And he began directing Poltergeist before Spielberg kicked him out and took over the reigns. Ever since, he's worked in TV, made shorts for inclusion with anthologies, and watched over a big, dumb Hollywood remake of the film that made him famous.

Now he's trying to recapture some old glory with the release of The Toolbox Murders, a thoroughly dreadful and pointless remake of the 70's grindhouse classic of the same name. He takes the old film's silly plot and penchant for gory death-by-power-tools, but forgets about that whole fun or scary part. What a disappointment.



This movie has so much going for it, I'm surprised at how little it amounts to. Most of the fault lies with the lazy screenplay by Jace Anderson and Adam Gierasch. They're working in an incredibly familiar genre, the slasher film, which in and of itself doesn't bother me that much. Wes Craven's Scream basically killed off the genre, turning it in on itself and making it self-aware. Toolbox Murders certainly doesn't share that film's cynicism or wry sense of humor. It's about as straightforward as movies come, using narrative as a mere thread on which to hang a series of grisly but not very creative murder scenes.

Even worse, the movie can't even follow through on its meager set-up. The delightful Angela Bettis, who stars in the best horror movie thus far this decade, May, has nothing at all to do here as unemployed teacher Nell. She has just moved to Los Angeles along with her med student husband Steven (Brent Roam). He's chosen as their first LA apartment a small room in the nightmarishly creepy Lusman Arms, an unlikely Hollywood rathole seemingly so uninhabitable, you wonder why he signed on to the lease in the first place.

Things are obviously not right in the Lusman. For one thing, police are there cleaning up the messy results of an electrical accident even as Nell and Steven arrive. And things just go downhill from there. Nell meets the mysterious old man Chas (veteran character actor Rance Howard) who hints at some dark history of the Lusman. She hears her neighbors fighting violently and nearly dies when the elevator loses power, both on the first night of her stay.

And then people start being murdered by a man in a ski mask weilding a variety of tools, including a hammer, a nail gun and a power drill. That's about all that happens. A few explanations for the bizarre killings are flirted with before being abandoned. In one particularly puzzling subplot, Nell discovers that the founder of the Lusman believed in black magic, and intended the entire building to work "as a spell of some sort." The film does nothing with this concept whatsoever. It's as if Hooper and his writers just threw every half-baked idea they had into this script, hoping one concept would take off enough to satisfy an audience that really just wanted some gory effects.

The problem there is that the effects don't really add up to much, and there aren't nearly enough of them. For every reasonably executed murder scene, we're treated to roughly 20 minutes of dithering. Nell makes friends with a newly-thin neighbor (Julia Landau), who then disappears immediately. She uncovers a secret apartment hidden within the building's walls, but our only glimpse of the space is so dark, it's impossible to even make out what's being seen. And she attempts to solve the mystery of the occult symbols that appear on every floor, but never actually figures them out. Finally, the identity and backstory of the murderer doesn't link up to the rest of the film in any way. Doesn't even remotely try to.

So, that's why the story sucks. Unfortunately, Hooper's direction doesn't fare much better. Chainsaw Massacre had such a unique style, such a creative method of low-budget storytelling, it's unthinkable that Hooper manages to do so little with Toolbox Murders. As I mentioned before, the cinematography is so dark as to be frequently indiscernable. There's the use of darkness and shadows for atmosphere, and then there's just having the lights turned down too low. The direction itself is slack and uncreative for the most part. In truth, the film looks more like a UPN show than a feature film.

And, man, that finale. Hooper tries to get back into his Texas Chainsaw Massacre style, pitting a lone, frightened woman against a saw-wielding maniac in cramped quarters strewn with human body parts. But this time, the staging's incredibly awkward or silly (often, the protagonist turns away from the killer completely, as if there was something more important going on than her imminent grisly slaying), the lighting sucks, no one has any shred of personality, and the set looks more like a messy soundstage than the hideout of a homicidal maniac.