Dennis Donnelly‘s feature film debut (after he’d directed a handful of television episodes, including Adam-12 (1968-1975), Marcus Welby, M.D. (1969-1976) and The Man from Atlantis (1977-1978)) is one of the most infuriatingly schizophrenic films the horror genre has ever known. It begins as a series of brutal murders (one in particular unpleasant enough to cause the film to briefly languish on one of the “video nasty” lists in the UK) before turning on the proverbial sixpence to become a muted psycho-thriller instead.

A man out driving late at night has a flashback to a traffic accident that killed a young woman. Seemingly triggered by the memory, he dons a stripy ski mask and murders Mrs Andrews (Faith McSwain) at an apartment complex, killing her with a power drill from his toolbox. He kills two other women with hammers and screwdrivers before the police arrive to interview the complex’ owner, Vance Kingsley (Cameron Mitchell). The following night, the killer murders a young woman in a bathtub using a nailgun and abducts Laurie Ballard (Pamelyn Ferdin), a teenage resident of the block. Her brother Joey (Nicholas Beauvy) sets out to find her, teaming up with Vance’s nephew, Kent (Wesley Eure), unaware that the killer is his uncle, still mourning the death of his daughter Kathy in that opening car crash and now, driven by religious mania, Kingsley is hopping that Laurie will come to replace Kathy.

The Toolbox Murders was the twisted brainchild of producer Tony DiDio who noted the continuing success of Tobe Hooper’s The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (1974) and decided that he wanted a piece of the action. Kingsley’s battery of murder tools is the clearest tip of the hat to Hooper’s vastly superior film, but scriptwriters Ann Kindberg, Robert Easter and Nive Friedenn run out of ways to deploy them surprisingly quickly. The parade of killings in the first act doesn’t leave much room for niceties like plot or characterisation (the first 15 minutes or so are virtually wordless) and it’s just a compendium of tool-based killings that tell us nothing about either killer or victims. The title lays out the film’s stall and it wastes little time in getting down to business with a power drill murder but plays all its card far too soon.

After that first reel, the film lurches off in a completely different direction and never quite finds its way back top the original road again. The film suddenly grinds to a halt after Kingsley abducts Laurie and we’re left with what looks and feels like a lengthy stream-of-consciousness improvisation from Mitchell. Or maybe the script really is that awful, rambling and barely coherent. What makes the film so notorious is largely done and dusted by this time and it settles down to a routine, if unpleasant for different reasons, psychological drama that often feels not unlike the small screen work that Donnelly would return to afterwards (The Toolbox Murders remains his only feature film).

It takes a turn for the nasty again at the ridiculous climax, full of out of the blue twists and turns and sudden character changes (Kent turns out to be as awful as his uncle). It fades out with a card telling us that what we’ve just watched actually happened. Nonsense of course, though journalist Linda Gross of the Los Angeles Times claimed that the script took inspiration from “a news story about a man in Minnesota who committed ritualistic sex murders.” Gross neglected to mention which case she was referring to.

The murder of future porn star Kelly Nichol (credited here as Marianne Walter, a variation on her real name Mary Anne Walters – she retained it for her later career as a make-up artist in the porn industry) who would make her adult debut two years later in Ultra Flesh (1980), became The Toolbox Murders‘ “signature” scene, an eccentrically edited on that inevitably got wheeled out in virtually all of those compilation tapes that proliferated briefly in the early 80s. It’s as sleazy as the film gets, a leering sequence in which Nichols, plays Dee Ann DeVore, a woman about who, like everyone else in the films, we know next to nothing – she’s just a woman masturbating to orgasm in a bathtub so is fair game for Kingsley’s misogynistic, religion-fuelled rampage. Kingsley holds the nail gun erect at crotch height as he advances on his victim, so there’s little confusion over what Donnelly was getting at, though perhaps importantly he is seen literally firing his bolt too soon.

The Toolbox Murders was pilloried by the critics when it first opened, many of them concerned with the film’s unpleasant misogynistic streak – Gross called it “degenerate, unmotivated and pornographic trash,” Richard Labonté of The Ottawa Citizen dismissed it as “insignificant” and Brian Hunter of the Belfast Telegraph complained that it “dredges up memories of the gratuitously violent Texas Chainsaw Massacre [sic] ,” calling it a “bloodthirsty effort, which exploits what is awkwardly called ‘incredibly gory multiple murders.” In the States, it could be found on double bills in various locations with many different films, among them David Cronenberg’s Rabid (1976), Ulli Lommel’s The Boogey Man (1980), Evan Lee’s Meatcleaver Massacre (1977) and even John Carpenter’s Halloween (1978), and in the UK it was paired with Lucio Fulci’s Zombi 2/Zombie Flesh Eaters/Zombie (1979).

With films like The Toolbox Murders it’s hard to know if the misogyny is coming from the character on screen or the people behind the cameras (it’s sometimes very easy to mix up the two) but in a way it doesn’t really matter. The film simply is worth wasting too much time on analysing. Nevertheless, in the years since, The Toolbox Murders has accrued he almost inevitable cult following and in 2003 it was remade, dropping the definite article, in 2004 by none other than Tobe Hooper whose The Texas Chain Saw Massacre had inspired the whole tawdry effort in the first place.

Crew

Directed by: Dennis Donnelly; Cal-Am Productions presents a Tony DiDio production; Produced by: Tony DiDio; Associate Producers: Kenneth A. Yates, Jack Kindberg; Screenplay by: Nive Friedenn, Robin Easter, Ann Kindberg; Director of Photography: Gary Graver; Film Editor: Nunzio Darpino; Music Composed & Conducted by: George Deaton; Production Designer: D.J. Bruno

Cast

Cameron Mitchell (Ben Kingsley); Pamelyn Ferdin (Laurie Ballard); Wesley Eure (Kent Kingsley); Nicolas Beauvy (Joey Ballard); Tim Donnelly (Detective Jamison); Aneta Corsaut (Joanne Ballard); Faith McSwain (Mrs Andrews); Marciee Drake (Debbie); Evelyn Guerrero (Maria); Victoria Perry (woman in apartment); Robert Bartlett (man in apartment); Betty Cole (middle aged woman); John Hawker (middle aged man); Don Diamond (Sgt Cameron); Alisa Powell (girlfriend); Marianne Walter [real name: Kelly Nichols] (Dee Ann); Robert Forward (screamer man); Kathleen O’Malley (screamer woman); Gil Galvano (man); James Nolan (bartender); George Deaton (preacher)

For more details on this title, visit the main EOFFTV site.