Jeanskynebu the audience applauded

Dotbankey A lot of fun.

AshUnow This is a small, humorous movie in some ways, but it has a huge heart. What a nice experience.

Tobias Burrows It's easily one of the freshest, sharpest and most enjoyable films of this year.

gavin6942 A ski-masked maniac kills apartment complex tenants with the contents of a toolbox.Blue Underground does a great job of bringing forgotten movies to the mainstream, and making them look good in the process. You might think a "video nasty" from the 1970s would not fare well today, but they make it work with a great audio commentary and interview. We get an inside look at a slasher that really predated the slasher movement.One can see why it got the title of "video nasty". There is a sexuality to it that is not necessarily appropriate, and then the idea of killing people with power tools? This similar idea was explored more humorously with "Slumber Party Massacre", but there is little humor here.

haildevilman Cam the Man Mitchell lives in this apartment building with a lot of young types. The majority of them are single, and very randy women. And most of them seem to be flight attendants. Perpetuating a stereotype here it seems.Cam ain't happy with the looseness of said ladies so he slowly (and I do mean slowly) invades their space and kills them. The title gives away the implements used so I would not be remiss mentioning the drill and nail-gun scenes. And I go anyone in the room double or nothing the producers of 'Nail Gun Massacre' got their idea here.Some of the actresses were porno vets either trying to do 'legit' films or hired due to their willingness to show it all and touch same. The lass killed by the aforementioned nail gun was masturbating in the bath at the time.Cam covers himself with a ski mask which makes his appearance almost trite these days. But while there were enough scares to make this decent....it did move a bit to slow and got repetitious by the third act. For Cam Mitchell and slasher prototype fans only.

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.

Michael_Elliott The Toolbox Murders (1978)** (out of 4) Notorious horror film has a couple young men trying to solve a grisly series of murders that have happened at the same apartment complex. A group of women were murdered by tools found in a toolbox so the men try to find out the person doing the crimes.THE TOOLBOX MURDERS was a surprise hit when it was released. It got praise from Stephen King who called it one of the scariest movies ever made. It also gained a bit of notoriety because of its violence towards women. This was still a few years before Friday THE 13TH but there's no question this film became a cult item and it remains that after all of these years. To me, this film should have been one of the greatest exploitation films ever made but a strange switch in its direction prevented that but more on that a bit later.What makes the film so memorable is the first thirty-minutes where we get a really bizarre Texas atmosphere mixed in with some graphic death scenes. What I enjoyed most about the film was the look of the killer. The killer is dressed in black just like you'd see in a giallo but then there's the ski mask, which gives him a very creepy look. I really thought the direction early on was terrific and especially how we would slowly see the killer standing among his victims. The death scenes are graphic at times with the most famous one being the bathtub/masturbation sequence with Kelly Nichols, which certainly packs a strange punch.What really kills the film is that it switches to a mystery/detective film and it falls apart. Everything in the final hour is just boring and contains way too many boring dialogue scenes. It's really too bad that the creepiness of the start wasn't continued throughout the rest of the picture. We do get Cameron Mitchell delivering a fairly weird performance but I'm sure this job was mainly just a paycheck.THE TOOLBOX MURDERS isn't a masterpiece and it's not the worthless piece of trash some call it. The film starts off so well that you can't help but be really disappointed towards the end.