"The Toolbox Murders" is a late-'70s slasher flick that I watched some years ago and could remember nothing about. That's probably not a good sign.
I will say one thing for it: it's sleazier than most. Three girls disrobe in the opening twenty minutes. The last one gets fully naked and stays that way for a decent stretch. We also watch her masturbate in a bathtub.
The killer has a pretty lame mask. Hell, Michael Myers' was just a painted William Shatner mask they got at a joke shop, and it became iconic. The one in this movie is just a woollen ski mask.
The movie does have a decent gimmick, though, which is alluded to in the title. Yes, the killer uses a toolset to dispatch his victims, first a claw hammer, then a nailgun - which is used much more convincingly than the one in "The Nailgun Massacre", even if they forgot to tell the actress playing the victim to look scared while he uses it.
But get this: for the third victim, the killer just smothers her with his hands! Was the toolbox too heavy or something?
The protagonist seems to be a guy who looks like a third-rate Luke Skywalker clone whose 15-year-old sister is kidnapped, presumably by the killer. He doesn't appear too worried. He teams up with a guy who looks a bit like John Stamos, but less charismatic. They decide to do some snooping of their own to find the kidnapped girl, and discover a vibrator in the masturbating woman's house, as if to underline what a sex freak she was (?).
The movie then makes the regrettable decision of revealing the killer's identity to us. Some slasher movies do this, granted, but here it seemed unnecessary. We get a long, boring scene with the unmasked killer and the kidnapped girl.
He seems to talk about the masturbating woman from before. Apparently he's some kind of religious crazy who wants to punish women for doing "unnatural" things, like masturbating. How did he even know she did that?
And if the movie is just going to show us the killer's identity, what was the point of the mask, which certainly wouldn't have helped his homicidal efforts? The only people who see him get killed. Anyone else would have been immediately suspicious seeing a man with a mask running around. If not for that, probably nobody would have even noticed him.
There's also a "twist" at the end which is so out-of-nowhere that you just feel cheated. A "good" character turns evil. Why? They don't even bother giving you a shot of him making the revelation of what's supposed to be the turning point. And what a turnaround. It just feels stupid and tacked on.
Then there's a laughable text-edit ending that tells you the movie was based on a true story and what happened to the characters in real life or some such garbage. Sometimes when a movie is supposed to be "based on a true story" I actually look it up to see if that's really the case. This time, I don't think I'll bother.
