I've been thinking about the career of the late Tobe Hooper this month, in part prodded by Catherine Stebbins's yearly top ten project which had many nice things to say about Hooper's Spontaneous Combustion for her 1990 edition. The last of Hooper's films that I wrote about, apart from his Masters of Horror episodes, was his remake of Toolbox Murders at my old web site in 2005. Here's that review--somewhat revised--to kick off Halloween season. I haven't changed my mind on any of this upon re-watch, so there you go. I'll be visiting with more of Hooper's films as the season goes on.
Toolbox Murders. 2004. Directed by Tobe Hooper. Angela Bettis, Brent Roam, Brent Travis, Rance Howard, Juliet Landau,
Synopsis: Nell and Steven Barrows have taken advantage of a "remodelling" special to move into the Lusman Building, a crumbling Hollywood apartment building with a dark history. Pretty soon, they discover that not all is well at the Lusman. Some of their neighbors have been disappearing. Nell hates the place and would do anything to break her lease. She's quick to note that something is very wrong in the building, and gets a reputation as a kook when she calls the cops on a scene she misinterprets as bloody murder. But bloody murder IS happening around her, and as she investigates the building's sinister past, she gets drawn through the looking glass into a world of horror she could scarcely imagine...
The Man on the Moon: Have you ever complained about some service or other and compared it to landing a man on the moon? You know the phrase: "They can put a man on the moon, but the cable guy can't get to my house while I'm home..." You get the idea. I suspect that Tobe Hooper was all too familiar with this phenomenon. With him, though, it's a bit different. He spent his entire career dwelling in the shadow of his first film. Even today, he continues to be billed as "The Creator of The Texas Chain Saw Massacre." Hooper's first film is the horror genre's equivalent to landing a man on the moon. For him, critics continued to ask whether his subsequent films measured up to that standard, or, worse, whether or not that first film was a fluke in the first place. This is unfortunate. I suspect that there are a LOT of successful filmmakers whose careers wouldn't match up to a film like The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, and not just filmmakers working in the horror genre. Of course, Hooper himself did his reputation no favors over the last few decades of his career. Of the hot young turks who remade cinematic horror in the 1970s, Hooper's career fell the farthest. "Misfire" has been a charitable way to describe any of Hooper's later projects. Films like The Mangler and Night Terrors are conspicuous examples of a director shooting himself in the foot again and again. It's a pattern of failure that drove Hooper to the ghetto of made-for-cable and direct-to-video.
Keep all of this in mind when I note that Toolbox Murders, Hooper's 2004 remake-in-name-only of a minor slasher film, was a return to form of sorts. It's not at the same level as Texas Chain Saw (what is?), but it's certainly a better film than anything he'd made since the heady days of his tenure at Cannon Films. It's a better film, too, than most films that pass for horror at the multiplexes. Those films are usually gun-shy, afraid of losing the lucrative teen audience for horror films. They don't have the guts to transgress the boundaries of good taste for fear of restrictive ratings. Even at his lowest ebb, that has never been a problem for Hooper. Toolbox Murders has a mean streak a mile wide. Two scenes in particular--one involving a circular saw and the other involving a vise, some nails, and a can of lye--go well and truly beyond the pale of the R-rating. How they made the grade, I know not, but I'm grateful for it.
Toolbox Murders has, essentially, three acts. In the first act, Hooper sets up the story as a stock slasher film, with its masked killer dispatching his victims with various implements from his well stocked toolbox (natch). Parts of this seem particularly clumsy--intentionally clumsy, I'm guessing, from the blatant cut-away shots to the signature toolbox--but there's no denying the nastiness of the film's set-piece murders. In the second act, the film turns into a giallo mystery, with Angela Bettis's character assuming the role of out-of-her-depth amateur sleuth. The first two acts of the film edge the audience towards the precipice. In the third act, Hooper pushes them over. The killer, named "Coffin Baby" by the film's credits, is a memorable grotesque. He's a visual shock that is completely unexpected. The backstory, uncovered over the course of the film, suggests the sort of slasher film that might be written by one of Lovecraft's circle: say, Frank Belknap Long or Henry Kuttner (though surely not by Lovecraft himself). There's more ambition in this part of the film than I expected, though the execution at the very end of the movie leaves something to be desired (it cribs its ending wholesale from Halloween). The film's modest resources aren't up to that kind of ambition, but Hooper seemed to be. He seemed genuinely engaged by the composition of a film for the first time in nearly twenty years.
The thread that ultimately holds things together is Angela Bettis. Already a fixture of the genre after the remake of Carrie and her star-making turn in May, Bettis is a better actress than the genre often gets (or often deserves). She's not particularly likeable in this movie, but Hooper liked his characters unlikable. Bettis's gift is that she makes that unlikability comprehensible. We understand why she is the way she is. We'd be that way, too, were we in her place.
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