Bonehead-XL "The Toolbox Murders" is, in many ways, the definitive seventies exploitation movie. (Or "grindhouse movie," if you prefer.) It is sleazy, gory, uncomfortable, campy, boring, melodramatic, effortless, completely unpolished, tonally uneven, and only could have been made in the seventies. It is clear that the film's origins rose out of some skid row producer somewhere looking at the numbers "Texas Chainsaw Massacre" made and thinking, "If that's what you can do with just a chainsaw, let's throw the whole toolbox at them!" It even claims to be based on a true story! The movie's opening twenty minutes is the stuff of slasher/gorefest legend and, rightfully, earned the movie a spot on the UK's Video Nasty list. A man enters an apartment complex, at first appearing to be a normal repairman. Soon, he brandishes an electric drill, with a truly scary looking drill bit, and chases the girl around the room. At one point, the killer dons a ski mask, but at an askew angle, distorting the human face even further. A large chested girl in a thin white t-shirt, clearly not wearing a bra, steps into the shower accidentally, wetting her chest, before disrobing further. She gets murdered with a claw hammer. (With the claw end. Because no slasher movie killer ever uses the blunt side of a hammer.) Another girl wanders in, sees the massive rings of blood on the linoleum floor, and is quickly killed with a screwdriver. The film pauses briefly introduces its main heroine, played by kid-star cutie Pamelyn Ferdin, and kidnaps her before launching into its most memorable moment. A sultry redhead, with earrings in and in full make-up, played by future porn starlet Kelly Nichols, slips into the bath, a painfully sappy pop-duet playing on the radio. Her hands slowly sneak under the bubbles, an enthusiastic masturbation session beginning. (This sequence prompted my viewing partner to say, quote: "Grindhouse movies are great.") Completely preoccupied by her self-administration, the radio playing loudly, the killer sneaks into her apartment unencumbered. As she reaches screaming orgasm, the man in the mask enters the bathroom, humming along to the music, aiming an old fashion nail gun at her. In what Stephen King called his favorite death scene in a horror movie, the girl runs around the apartment completely nude, barely avoiding the flying nails. After, unsuccessfully, attempting to bribe the man with sexual favors (Obviously), she is finally nailed. It's not enough to kill her though. The injured woman stumbles against a poster of herself hanging on the wall. The super-cheesy love song crescendos on the radio. The man shoots her in the head with the nail gun. Blood and brain matter splatter over the narcissistic poster. The scenes cuts away as blood drips down into her pubes. This is slasher movie pop-art.Similar to how the only thing people talk, or remember, about "Trilogy of Terror" is the Zuni Fetish Doll, the opening cascade of misogynistic gore is all anyone remembers about "The Toolbox Murder." It's far to say the fame peaks early. The rest of the movie is devoted to Ferdin's brother and the landlord's son investigating the kid sister's kidnapping. The Scooby-Doo teen sleuthing stuff is dull. The movie reveals fairly early that the landlord, B-movie stalwart Cameron Mitchell, is the killer, in a great reveal of the toolbox. He has the girl tied up in his bedroom. While there's not much to the scenes of Mitchell going on about his dead daughter and how corrupt and impure the world is, it is a joy to see him ham it up. Mitchell goes full-crazy, jumping around, lips quivering, very convincingly playing the kind of traumatized, delusional moralizer that you'd expect to go on a power tools themed murder spree. The plot twist at the start of the third act comes out of nowhere but it also revitalizes the movie. Because you can't have a true sleaze-murder flick without a little rape, a hugely uncomfortable sexual assault happens. (Thankfully, it's mostly off-screen.) The story wraps up kind of unsatisfactory while the film tries to convince us it really is based on a true story, no really, seriously guys, we swear.I could probably go into a long diatribe about why we enjoy films like this, what that says about our culture, my specific generation of young people, etc. I won't do that for brevity's sake. If you're looking for an introduction into the sleazy, sometimes disturbing world of grindhouse cinema, I don't think I could find a better one then "The Toolbox Murders." Buy it on Blu-Ray! It features one of my all time favorite taglines: "Bit by bit… He carved a nightmare!" Someday, I'm going to start a horror-themed metal band and make a song based around that one.

InjunNose For me, watching "The Toolbox Murders" is a maddening experience. How can you *not* be vexed by a film that gets off to a solid (if unspectacular) start, approaches brilliance, fizzles into dullness, tepidly attempts to redeem itself, and finally screeches to a halt in laughably awful fashion? I like the fact that director Dennis Donnelly employs a nontraditional storytelling formula (at least for the horror film) here; it makes "The Toolbox Murders" oddly compelling, if not consistently interesting. I also like the setting: there's something about the slightly run-down apartment complex that makes the lives of the victims seem so sordid and hopeless. The horror to which the viewer is subjected in this movie is distinctly American--it is the horror of a nation that saw the '60s come to a grisly end with the rampages of the Zodiac Killer and the Manson Family, a nation struggling with the hangover from the previous decade that Son of Sam represents. This ghastly emptiness is underscored in the film's one near-great moment, when Cameron Mitchell kills adult film star Kelly Nichols with a nail gun. I don't think I've ever heard a song used to such potent and fascinating effect in a film as George Deaton's 'Pretty Lady' in this scene. Unfortunately, it's all downhill from there. The movie shifts from the deadly seriousness of the murders and Pamelyn Ferdin's abduction to Nicolas Beauvy and Wesley Eure awkwardly exploring the apartments where the killings occurred, and this portion of the film bears more resemblance to an episode of "ABC Afterschool Specials" than anything else (which I'm sure was not Donnelly's intention). There's a slight improvement when Mitchell delivers a lengthy monologue to the bound and gagged Ferdin, but the material isn't written well enough to impart any truly special quality to the scene; it passes muster only because Mitchell handles his lines so deftly. The bottom drops out of the film altogether during its final ten or fifteen minutes, when things cease to make any sense. Why is Eure's character as crazy as his uncle (Mitchell)? Is it something genetic, or is the viewer just supposed to assume that the death of Mitchell's young daughter--Eure's cousin and secret lover--drove them *both* off the deep end? And why does Eure set Beauvy on fire, citing his responsibility to protect his uncle, only to taunt and kill Mitchell just minutes later? What was probably intended to frighten the audience ("Look, the whole family's insaaaaane!!!") and make them wince in shocked disbelief is an abysmal failure. If you're in a good mood, you'll snicker at the ridiculous conclusion. If not, you'll wonder bitterly why the director and screenwriters botched a film that had such potential. The considerable strength of "The Toolbox Murders" lies in its early scenes; after that, it really becomes a different movie, and not a particularly good one. But every horror aficionado should see it, if for no other reason than to be convinced that a graphic murder scene involving a nude woman can be handled tastefully, and with depth. The stark opening and closing theme (synthesizer overlaid with piano and strings) is very effective, too.

MovieGuy01 I watched the horror film, The Toolbox Murders the other night and i found it to be not to bad a film. It is about a man lunatic runs around an apartment complex, While he is there, the lunatic tries to kill all the tenants with the contents of a toolbox that he has with him. all of the people that he seems to pick on are women which he violently attacks. This film looked like it was done on a small budget, It was originally one of the 'Video Nasties' that was banned in 1982. I found this to be quite a good horror film by the end. I thought the film was quite disturbing at times, all thought it looks very dated by today's horror films 4/10

Scarecrow-88 Sick puppy from director Dennis Donnelly concerning how the car wreck demise of a young woman named Kathy causes her father and cousin to commit unspeakable acts towards innocent human beings. The father, Vance(Cameron Mitchell)is a simply deranged owner of the apartment complex for which he murders a set of beautiful tenants who represent "sinners" needed ridding of so that the world could be a better place. Laurie(Pamelyn Ferdin)shares an apartment with her mother, Jo Ann(Aneta Corsaut) and brother, Joey(Nicolas Beauvy)and Vance kidnaps her, holding the poor girl captive in his suburban home, commissioning his nephew Kent(Wesley Eure, of "Land of the Lost" fame!)to clean up his bloody messes! The police are baffled at the murders wondering just how the killer could operate so freely in dispatching them, moving within their rooms with only one forced entry. Joey, motivated by his sister's disappearance, opts to work as an amateur sleuth as he sees that Detective Jamison(Tim Donnelly)and the police have little to go on. Thanks to Kent, who seems to know more than he lets on(..while also displaying strange behavior when Joey speaks about the acts of violence and his calm demeanor around the crime scenes of the victims' rooms he's about to clean up), Joey suspects Vance once entering the sicko uncle's garage, finding the infamous toolbox, containing the devices used on those women during the nightly murder spree. But, Joey will not suspect someone else..Kent's not exactly operating with a full deck, either! We watch as frightened, and subdued, Laurie, tied to a bed frame, attempts futilely to coerce Vance into letting her go as he drifts into his own fantasies even believing she is his daughter incarnate. Kent, also, finds himself lost to the memories of Kathy, a kissing cousin with a history he is all too willing to share with good ole Uncle Vance, with shocking results.The film doesn't really create an air of mystery as to who committed the grisly, bloody murders at the beginning of the movie, and the reasons for doing so. The director opens inside the front seat showing gloved hands driving a car past the location of where a woman died as a result of a car crash. We then are *treated* to a series of murders(..perhaps not as notorious because of how the director pulls away the camera before the weapons really do their damage, but still repulsive acts of violence) with an assortment of weapons raging from a spinning drill driven into the back of an alcoholic who knows him and is surprised at his antics, a hammer slammed into the back of a victim's head after knocking her unconscious, a screwdriver stabbed into the stomach of a victim who stumbles upon the killer before he could leave, and a nail gun to the head of a model after her lengthly bath tub masturbation sequence. Unlike a lot of giallo thrillers and slashers(..which would follow a similar model as this film), the investigation of the murders is the weakest aspect of the film. The director instead, after bludgeoning the viewer with that wallop of a crime spree, decides to take us into the insanity of Vance, with actor Mitchell, a veteran from the old school Hollywood working in films like this for the money because of problems in his life, sucking a lollipop the first time we see him bringing din-din to Laurie. Mitchell just lets it hang out as the wacko holding so tight to the memory of his little girl and going on and on about the wicked sinners of the world with how he must cut them out like the Bible says. Eure, with those pretty boy looks and squeaky-clean image actually surprised me because he was such an innocent teenage idol on the LotL show. I could see how Joey would be startled at the true maniac that lies behind what appears to be just an ordinary young man looking for some extra dough handed out by Uncle Vance. Beauvy as Joey didn't really impress me, he's merely a plot device who makes a grave discovery whose fate is particularly memorable. Ferdin is a virginal sweetheart mostly tied to the bed hurting from the tightened bondage and worried for her life, a fawn trapped in the madness of a crazed predator(s). What I found most effective was the use of country music playing as Vance murders his victims, and the way the killer carries out his acts so cold-bloodedly, with calculated precision. This will certainly be unpleasant for the weak-hearted and easily offended.