Toolbox Murders (2004)

Because he has found a job as an emergency room resident in Los Angeles, Steven Barrows (Brent Roam) and his – now jobless – schoolteacher wife Nell (the always excellent Angela Bettis) move into the Lunsman Arms, one of those ratholes that still dream of their former glory.

Something’s not at all right with the building; it’s the kind of place where it seems downright logical the building manager tries to sell it as part of the place’s “historical charm” when Nell and Steve find a box of human teeth in their apartment’s wall. Living in a place with very thin walls, and a creepy atmosphere that’s also in a perpetual state of loud renovation, Nell’s going stir-crazy in her new stay-at-home life, clashing with Steven (who is never there, stressed out by his job when he is, and clearly pretty low on the empathy scale) and starts to grow a bit paranoid about her surroundings. Though it’s not really paranoia when some black-clad killer actually does go around murdering inhabitants of the place with tools, right? It only makes Nell’s attempts at convincing anyone of her increasingly dire fears all the more difficult.

The mid and late periods of Tobe Hooper’s career, hell, anything he did that did not include the words “Texas”, “Chainsaw” and “Massacre” and no number in its title, are usually not well-liked by most critics and audiences. Hooper’s filmography is full of films with difficult production histories, films that don’t do what anyone but the director seems to want them to do, and films that are just plain weird. What these films never are is uninteresting, and in my experience, watching a Hooper movie that really annoyed me the first or second time around a couple of years later, can reveal those to be more than just interesting.

Even something like this sort of remake of the execrable The Toolbox Murders, in this new form a weird slasher with occult elements, can open up interesting avenues. I barely made it through the film the first time I watched it years ago, but this second time was apparently the charm.

It’s very far from being a perfect film, but I rather suspect that has quite a bit to do with one of the production companies involved folding during production, causing Hooper to shut the shoot down, and having to salvage a film out of what he had already shot. Which makes the film we got downright impressive. Sure, there are continuity errors, plot holes and the pacing is just plain peculiar, but Hooper still manages to create a creepy, threatening mood of wrongness, and turns his Lunsford Arms into one of those strange, liminal places, a house that literally has a hidden, malevolent other house hidden inside of itself. Often, Hooper reaches a vibe of creeping, illogical dread that makes this feel like a companion piece to Fulci’s House by the Cemetery (to which it is also thematically related); and like with the Fulci film, I believe the anti-logic of some of the film and its strange structure are important to create this feeling, even though they break all the rules of “good filmmaking”.


Apart from hitting exactly the kind of mood I like in my horror films, Toolbox Murders also recommends itself at least to me by its interest in all the things a good Los Angeles based horror movie should include: the intersection of occult history with the tawdry, hopeless side of showbiz (and one can’t help but think Hooper knew rather a lot about the latter), architecture that looks really bizarre and outright alien to this German from Lower Saxony, and a sense of societal indifference and poverty that subtly or not so subtly enables a lot of the bad things happening here. It’s a perfect amalgamation of quite a few of my interests, so it’s not much of a surprise I now have a decided soft spot for Hooper’s Toolbox Murders So what if it doesn’t exactly make sense?