It’s been a long time since Tobe Hooper made Texas Chainsaw Massacre and sadly he hasn’t managed to come close to turning out anything approaching the sheer energy and innovation of his genre-defining classic since. Unfortunately The Toolbox Murders doesn’t either. A film should be judged by its own merits however, not by the impossibly high standard of an incomparable classic of the genre. By its own standards, happily, this is by no means a bad piece of entertainment.

More a re-imagining (why does it feel so wrong to use that word?) than a remake of the 1978 original of the same name, this movie does its best to be a classic style traditional horror movie. This means that tongues are kept well away from cheeks and there is none of that self referential “humour” that seems to plague most modern horror films but stopped being amusing shortly after the first Scream instalment. No, the horror is taken seriously here and a good thing that is too.

The plot meanders around fairly innocuously for most of the film while various characters are brutally dispatched by the mysterious masked killer. Several sub-plots are set up but pretty much forgotten about once the carnage escalates. There is some gumph about the building being an old Hollywood hangout and how it is connected to the occult via mystic symbols on the walls and floors. This seems to have some relevance to the motivation and nature of the killer but it is a little difficult to discern what that is exactly. There is also a plot strand about an old man who has lived in the building for decades and seems to know what’s going on but he never really gets round to letting anyone else know, which is a shame because with just a bit more meat to it this film could be pretty damn good.

There is certainly a lot to like in The Toolbox Murders. Angela Bettis again shines and the photography is effectively grimy and oppressive. The killings are the real star of this show however and with each one being perpetrated with a different tool, they retain enough variety and nastiness to keep even the most jaded viewer interested. There is just something about tools that is inherently threatening and this is exploited to great effect in several memorable scenes. The claw hammer covered in chunks of skull and hair and the huge and horrible circular saw Bettis is threatened with are just two examples, there are many more.

The Toolbox Murders is good solid horror filmmaking in the classic style of 70’s horror that Hooper was such a huge part of. The problem is that many of the flaws of this era of filmmaking are re-produced along with it and these are what really prevent this film from being something truly special.

Rating: 7/10

Review By Matt Compton