The Toolbox Murders

The once-great Tobe Hooper remade this little 1977 psycho potboiler a few years ago and his interpretation sucked. I always thought the original looked cool. Guy in a ski-mask, power tools being not used for their intended purposes, a blurb from Stephen King on the cover, probably written back when he was awesome and had a major drinking problem. I like how King calls it "one of the 10 scariest movies on video cassette." You get the feeling that there were only 20 horror movies on VHS when he wrote that.

The film's opening is great. There is about a half hour straight of nearly non-stop carnage. Easy-listening music is used wonderfully as young ladies are power-drilled, screwdrived and nail-gunned. The direction is kind of weird and artsy, sort of Giallo- American style.

(Minor Spoilers Ahead):
If you couldn't figure out by looking at the back of the DVD case that Cameron Mitchell is the killer, guess what? Cameron Mitchell is the killer. He kidnaps a 15 year old girl and ties her up, making believe that she is his deceased daughter. There are many genuinely scary and disturbing moments where Mitchell sings to her, feeds her and asks her what it was like to die.

It turns out that Cameron Mitchell's nephew is in on the whole thing and he has to kill some people as well to cover his uncle's tracks. The film's strongest sequence is the first third, it slows down considerably in the middle, and the ending is just okay. Overall it is a fun little piece of 70s shlock slasher horror, with extra points for intense creepiness. It is also about 10,000 times more fun that the 2003 remake.

And the Crap Goes On....

So I had just about worn out my 100 movie "Bloody Nightmares" box set, when a look on amazon revealed something terrifying and interesting. Pendulum Pictures and Mill Creek had released TWO more 50 movie box sets recently. I bid on them and unfortunately won both on ebay.... I dived into the first set to arrive in the mail, "Mortuary of Madness".
50 more terrible, mostly shot on home video horror movies. How long, o Lord, how long....


Kill Syndrome This youtube quality ripoff of "The Devil's Rejects" was the first flick I watched from the "Mortuary of Madness" box. I was going to try and watch all the movies in the box in sequential order, but so many of these are completely unwatchable. If one of these flicks winds up on this blog, even if I tear it to shreds, it was better than some of the other films in these sets. I'd say two out of every five of these movies are completely unwatchable. This movie concerns a demented family that kidnap people, then torture and kill them in a storage unit. They film their nefarious deeds then sell the tapes to a snuff dealer. The bad guys are creepy looking and gross, but the endless scenes of ugly girl victims screaming and being tortured are extremely boring. I watched most of the torture scenes in fast forward. Some of the already boring and long torture scenes are shown in slow motion, only drawing them out further. This movie manages to feel very long for its 50 minute running length, maybe because its boring as hell. The ending is beyond lame and leaves the possibility open for a sequel. Yay.



Dead Teenagers Yet another film from Brain Damage studios. I went to their website and was surprised to see that a huge amount of their films are included in these Mill Creek box sets. In this film, a student in the library finds a notebook with 4 horror tales written in it. He reads em, and we watch em. The first one is called "The Boo Men", and though it is decently shot and pretty well put together, it is way too short and ultimately makes no sense. The second one is called "Full Moonlighting", an okay little werewolf story. Again, this one could have benefitted by being a little longer.
The third is a pretty bland haunted house story called "Skeleton Keys". The fourth and best story is called "Suckers". This one takes place in a real movie theatre, so it must have had the biggest budget. Its about Brian, a nerdy guy who works at the theatre with a very funny black kid named Kevin. Kevin is played by Joe Bahar, a young guy that should stick with acting. He's effortlessly funny. Kevin and Brian find a creepy old film reel in the theatre and strange things start happening. This story is the best out of this anthology because the people in it are interesting. Overall this was a decent, watchable horror anthology. The guy who made it, Chris LaMartina, must be pretty cool, because he thanks Mike Watt in the end credits.

I watched two more of these things today, so this shall be continued soon....