A masked man goes around killing people and only one young woman seems to be taking the disappearances seriously. 2004's Toolbox Murders feels like a throwback to slasher movies from twenty to thirty years earlier so it's appropriate that it's directed by one of the masters of that period, Tobe Hooper. It's certainly refreshing.
I found myself thinking of Ginger Rogers' criticism of Saturday Night Fever, that the young people think "they can dance with their faces." Where she and Fred Astaire showed their dancing prowess with full frame long takes, musicals of the '70s and '80s preferred to conjure energy with editing and composition. Similarly, one of the most memorable parts of Hooper's Texas Chainsaw Massacre was the first attack from Leatherface, when a shot that began of a woman standing at a door transforms when he rushes out to grab her. A typical modern slasher would feel compelled to cut quickly between Dutch angles. Somehow Hooper was better able to convey a sense of watching a real nutcase spring from the shadows and inflict gruesome injury.
Toobox Murders is a remake of a '70s movie not directed by Hooper though apparently it shares nothing much in common with its predecessor's plot. In this one, Angela Bettis plays Nell, a young, recently married woman who's moved into a haunted Hollywood apartment building with her husband. When odd absences start to occur, no-one believes her when she insists something weird is happening.
So it's a slasher film with elements of supernatural horror, though it may just be insanity believing it's supernatural. It's good and creepy anyway. Juliet Landau is also in the movie all too briefly.
Toolbox Murders is available on The Criterion Channel.
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