A ski-masked maniac kills apartment complex tenants with the contents of a toolbox.
Blue Underground has done an amazing job of restoring old classic horror films over the years, including titles such as “Dead & Buried,” “Two Evil Eyes,” “The New York Ripper,” “Maniac,” and “The House by the Cemetery,” to name but a few but many of these movies were made by male filmmakers who could be perceived as misogynist because of the large amount of violence leveled against their female protagonists. This was especially true of Lucio Fulci, particularly with his 1982 slasher flick, “The New York Ripper,” where he had no qualms in showing a vast array of sexual violence and perverted, deeply misogynistic murders.
The same could be said of Dennis Donnelly’s “The Toolbox Murders.” Most films follow the three-act structure, the Setup, the Confrontation, and the Resolution, but here, Donnelly decides he doesn’t need said design and tosses it out the window in favor of non-stop bloodshed, all of it directed against women. The movie opens up in an apartment complex in the San Fernando Valley in 1978 where a masked man quietly enters several different apartments and proceeds to kill their female occupants. The next day he enters another apartment, killing the female tenant, and then kidnaps a young girl, fifteen-year-old Laurie Ballard (Pamelyn Ferdin), who happens to live at the same complex with her brother and mother. The apparent lack of motive leaves the police scratching their heads as to who committed the murders, who kidnapped Laurie, and why.
The opening of the film is focused on the masked killer slaughtering his first three victims for no rhyme or reason. He doesn’t just hit them over the head and kill them quickly, he rummages through his toolbox and takes out all manner of accouterments, from hammers to screwdrivers to electric drills to nail guns, and appears to enjoy the mental torture his soon-to-be victims experience in the moments before their deaths. He then kidnaps young Laurie Ballard because she reminds him of his deceased daughter who died in a car accident not too long ago, and takes her back to his house where he dresses her in his daughter’s clothes and ties her to her bed. The rest of the narrative revolves around Laurie’s brother, Joey (Nicholas Beauvy) trying to track down the killer and save his sister.
In an intertitle at the very end of the movie, it states that everything that was depicted throughout the film was based on real events that occurred in the summer of 1967 in the San Fernando Valley, and while I can’t imagine what the real Laurie Ballard must have endured, watching this tasteless, vile interpretation of her life shouldn’t have been one of them. Dennis Donnelly, best known for directing episodes of “Adam-12,” “Marcus Welby, M.D.,” “Emergency!,” and “Man from Atlantis,” was apparently intrigued by the script when he first read it but never went on to direct any other feature films in his professional career. He continued to direct for TV and maybe that’s a good thing as the general public wasn’t subjected to any more of his abhorrent, repugnant narratives.
While Cameron Mitchell brings some gravitas to his role as the demented killer, unfortunately, it is not enough to save this dreck. We are never told why the killer mercilessly butchers his victims, all female, but in a scene towards the end, as he is talking to Laurie who is tied to the bed, he states that she is a good girl because she is studying hard for school and the other girls were heathens who liked to sleep around yet when we are introduced to each of them, they are in their apartments alone, taking a bath or listening to music or drinking a glass of wine. If the whole point of the killings were to paint them as fallen women, then seeing them interact with a partner, or multiple partners, would have gotten that point across but as it stands, it was just an excuse for a maniac to revel in his sick and twisted fantasies.
The acting, overall, is atrocious. In one scene, a victim runs into her bedroom from the killer in her living room, and sits on her bed, panicked, until he follows her in and kills her. She doesn’t try to lock the door on the way in although she had plenty of time to do so, no, she just sits on the bed, looking distraught, hoping that might dissuade the killer. In another scene, a victim manages to lock herself in her bathroom and while the killer drills a hole in the door, she continues to stare at the ever-expanding orifice, all the while screaming, not trying to escape through the window next to her. Characters perform totally outlandish undertakings just so the killer can catch up with them and bump them off. The movie makes no sense whatsoever and makes no apologizes for it. In the end, “The Toolbox Murders” amounts to nothing more than a male chauvinistic, woman-hating perspective, one that immediately disenchants from its inception and continues to alienate the viewer until the final credits roll, undoubtedly the best part of the entire film.
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