Best movie ever!

A movie that not only functions as a solid scarefest but a razor-sharp satire.

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

A great movie, one of the best of this year. There was a bit of confusion at one point in the plot, but nothing serious.

This late 70s exploitation slasher film begins brilliantly with a series of murders done by a man dressed in black with a ski mask, using tools from a toolbox to kill his victims in different ways.The first part of this film alone goes well with other slasher films of the 70s and 80s but unfortunately half way through the film, you find out who the killer is and most of the time after that you pretty much have him talking to a girl that he kidnapped and tied up on a bed. It all gets pretty slow from there.Claims to be based on a true story, probably trying to cash in on the more famous slasher film The Texas Chainsaw Massacre.Not bad for what it is, could of been more interesting at the second half of the film but it's forgiven for the first half which is brilliant for it's type of film.

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.

Having stated in other reviews I've done that I'm a big fan of slashers and a collector of horror movies, it was pretty obvious, The Toolbox Murders was on my to-review list. I finally got around to watching this movie earlier this year. It had been on my list to watch for a while, but I just didn't get around to it due to whatever reasons, and one of them was, most movies with over blown hype don't live up to expectations. The others were I was just too busy with watching other horror movies I hadn't got watching, but here I am finally after watching it. Whilst The Toolbox Murders certainly didn't live up to its UK "video nasty" status, it was none the less an enjoyable slasher for those who can give it the patience and time it requires. The story unfolds with a series of grisly but relatively not so graphic murders around an apartment block committed by a rather large man in a ski mask. This takes up the first portion of the movie which is around 25 minutes to 30 minutes. The music in the film, is pretty awesome, and that alone has earned it a few extra stars it might not have got had it not of been for the music featured in the movie. I absolutely love the first song played to the first murder scene in the film - it is awesome. Anyway, pretty much after the series of grisly murders which takes place, the movie is slowed down to a crawl in a detective based story to find out what, why and who is doing all these murders. The storyline is not, at best, that great and the movie certainly takes its toll on pace and editing - the latter I believe they didn't do too much of. The acting isn't too bad, but neither is it too good, it's just more or less standard here. As the movie progresses it becomes apparent who the serial killer is, and we get to find out some interesting dialog in the 'bedroom scene' about why he has killed all the people he did, and he tries to justify what he did. The scene itself is interesting to watch, and is probably the best bit of dialog in the whole movie. There's somewhat of a happy ending too.The Toolbox Murders is just one of these movies where if one little thing had of been left out, it wouldn't have been really worth the watch. In this case, it most certainly goes to the music during the first 40 minutes of the movie, which seems to make the film feel more smoothly. It'll definitely take dedicated fans of the slasher/"video nasty" genre to appreciate it, and to give time to allow the movie to slowly pace along after the first 20 minutes or so. If you can bare with it, and appreciate it, The Toolbox Murders will leave you somewhat entertained. Don't believe all the hype though about how violent or shocking it is, by today's standards the movie is not that explicitly violent. It seems rather tame.I can't say I didn't enjoy it or I did enjoy it - it falls somewhere in between and I'll probably give The Toolbox Murders a few more viewings before leaving it in the DVD rack for a while. If it had not of featured the music it does have, it'd probably get a 5 from me, but because the music tremendously makes this movie, I've given it a low-end 7.There's two DVD releases that I know of, and they're the Blue Underground release in the US, and a VIPCO DVD release in the UK. The Blue Underground release has a lot of extra features, is remastered, and is uncut. The VIPCO 2000 UK DVD release is a bare-bones-less-then-average DVD quality release, and is cut by over 1 minute which removes the scene of the girl getting shot in the back and head with the nail gun, and the entire scene where she's in the bedroom pleading with the killer. So I think it's obvious which DVD release to go for. Though, by today's standards, the movie should pass for an '18' in the UK uncut with ease.As I said, it requires patience and understanding to enjoy the movie.

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.