One of the “video nasties”, The Toolbox Murders is a very fractured film in a way that doesn’t completely work. It starts out as a very stripped down slasher. In the first 15 minutes there’s three home invasions and three dead women. The killer using a different tool from his toolbox to kill each of them.
Even though the deaths at the start of the film, start to feel a bit repetitive, there’s actually something disturbing to the idea of a masked man seemingly targeting random woman and having no motive whatsoever. And I think that’s probably due to today’s violent climate. Unbridled violence just hits differently today.
Then the movie had to go off and have a plot. And that was it’s biggest mistake. As one girl gets kidnapped by the murderer and we slog through the middle as the kidnapped girl’s brother tries to find her.
But I will say the interesting thing here is that at around the 45 minute mark, the movie just up and shows you who the killer is… it’s Cameron Mitchell, because of course it is the only semi noticeable name in the cast. He spends the last half of the movie hamming up the screen justifying his character’s actions.
I think what the writers were going for was a Texas Chainsaw Massacre style of exploitation. But it lacks that true bizarreness and horror of the dinner scene in Chainsaw. And it’s interesting to point out that this script was co-written by Ann Kindberg. So it’s hard to call the murders at the start of the movie misogynistic, at least to a degree.
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