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TOOLBOX MURDERS (2004)
Hooper's back...and he sucks very slightly less! Tobe Hooper's been so far out to lunch for so long it's easy to see why the fans which have kept holding on to that ever-dwindling flame of hope for his redemption for this long would lustily embrace his remake of 1978's The Toolbox Murders, since it's so unexpected to see a movie from him these days that doesn't totally eat sweaty moose cock. One thing Toolbox Murders has going for it is where it's set, in an ugly, run-down apartment building that's all very Silent Hill. We are told it houses an ever-renewing series of aspiring actresses and actors who come to LA with big dreams and leave with crushed souls (if at all) and live there in between. Creepy apartments, creepy hallways, and that basement and laundry room are awesome. It's a great setting for some pretty standard slasher-flick goings-on, as all the pretty young things get hacked and nailed and sawed with whatever you'd use to work wood with, no matter how inappropriately time-consuming they are (a vice and quicklime are worked into a chase scene late in the movie). Who could possibly be doing these awful things? For the dipshits watching, the prime suspect must be the greasy longhair handyman who casts longing, lingering looks on soon-to-be-killed pretty blondes. If he'd actually turned out to be the villain, that could conceivably be called a surprise ending. Since he didn't, I feel a little insulted. For the rest of us, there's a minor character who serves the handy purpose of explaining the history of the building - since he knows everything, he seems like a more likely suspect and he's presented with such consistent harmlessness that I was thinking come on, this guy has GOT to be the baddie. Disappointingly, Toolbox Murders has an ending that can be compared to the original Friday The 13th or Saw - that is, the villain is revealed to be somebody who wasn't even a character previously. Why bother hiding his identity then, why jerk us around with these false suspects? The plot's as dumb, maybe dumber than you'd expect, even working in a bit of a "You are the chosen one!" nincompoopery later on. It turns out that there isn't a room 5 on any of the building's floors. One girl notices that and the building manager says without a trace of irony, "No one's ever noticed that before." This has been going on for years, decades even, but nobody notices when the corpses start smelling. When things get more overtly perilous later, nobody bothers calling the cops because our heroine (Angela Bettis) ruined it for them in an amusing but predictable scene early on where she calls the cops over some anguished screams from her neighbors and finds that they were just rehearsing. One girl gets nailed to the ceiling while still alive - fingers, hands, arms, feet, hair even - hundreds of nails pinning her up there. Am I missing the point if I pause to wonder what the point of this was? Aside from the implausibility of it (how much can be done here with one hand, since the other must have been used to nailgun her - no points for guessing that there's a scene where the nailgun is used as an impromptu pistol), it seems like a lot of work to make a girl miserable, or to hide a body from the police (good thing they didn't walk into the room and turn around, or look up, or look down at where she was dripping). But then, concealing bodies doesn't seem to be much of a concern for him since they must be stinking up the place something nasty, and he otherwise relies on the fortuitous timing of other people's distractions to keep them from noticing what's going on. Despite the great setting, Toolbox Murders isn't all that well-made. There's one scene where the obviously non-obvious suspect is speaking in a hallway, and his face is obscured from the camera by plastic sheeting. Instead of moving the camera a little or, here's a thought, using a more well-placed shot, we actually see the sheeting get pulled aside by some off-screen crew member so we can see the guy's face! It's like the ubiquitous porn shot where an unheard voice commands the girl to pull her hair out of the frame. Still, this has a lot of low-budget splattery charm - lots of gore (from victims who helpfully stand still for their fates) and even more in the deleted scenes, which are inexplicably only viewable as deleted scenes and aren't integrated into the movie. If you're renting this movie because it's Tobe Hooper making a movie about people getting killed with tools, you know what you're getting yourself into and you probably won't be disappointed. Yes, it's Hooper's best movie in a long time. No, it's not a must-see for anybody. (c) Brian J. Wright 2005 BACK TO THE T's BACK TO THE MAIN PAGE |