Back in 1974 Tobe Hooper was the Next Big Thing for creating THE Texas CHAINSAW MASSACRE. Then he was King of the World when he directed POLTERGEIST.<br /><br />This was followed by a series of disasters of Old Testament proportion's. LIFE FORCE, a quickly forgotten (but very nicely done) remake of INVADERS FROM MARS and a really bad CHAINSAW sequel.<br /><br />After doing lots of work for TV he hit rock bottom. If you think it hurts seeing a cool guy like Peter Jackson do big budget crap like KING KONG, it's even worse when a cool guy like Hooper does no budget crap like CROCODILE.<br /><br />But with THE TOOLBOX MURDERS Hooper is back at the top of his form.<br /><br />Like POLTERGEIST, this deals with the theme of The Bad Place. In POLTERGEIST it was a subdivision built on an Indian burial ground.<br /><br />THE TOOLBOX MURDERS is set in an elegant old hotel (actually the Ambassador Hotel on Wilshire Boulevard) which has seen better days and is being cut up into apartments. The hotel had been built in the Golden Age of Hollywood; it has a mysterious history that the main characters learn about to their peril.<br /><br />The movie's great strength comes from the collection of excellent actors that Hooper has assembled here. Angela Bettis, the leading lady, ought to be a big star. Correction, make that a huge star. Her performance is the heart and soul of the picture. She plays a would be schoolteacher who moves into the strange old building while her husband completes his medical residency. She's troubled by the strange noises she hears in the building, and the strange events that cause her to dial 911 and then find that there's no real emergency. This does nothing for her credibility with the police.<br /><br />She makes two good friends in the building. Rance Howard (yes, Ron's dad) plays a retired actor who may know more about the building than is good for him. Juliet Landau plays a neighbor who mysteriously vanishes. When a secondary character speaks of having lost a large amount of weight, you know the person shouldn't start reading any long novels.<br /><br />This causes the heroine to go into full Nancy Drew mode. She ties her hair back in a sensible ponytail and begins to explore the building, acting on mysterious clues that have been given her by the old actor. She learns that there are secret passages in the building, unaccounted space big enough to hide a whole townhouse within the walls of the apartment complex.<br /><br />There is violence. There is blood. But, like Hooper's CHAINSAW MASSACRE, some of the goriest footage is projected by the viewer's brain. Hooper stated that in going through old papers from CHAINSAW's production he found that they only purchased 1.5 ounces of stage blood, while the remake probably bought it in gallon tanks. Quick cutting and effective use of light and shadow let his CHAINSAW have the grossest possible gore effects almost entirely coming from the viewer's imagination. Toward the end, though, the blood and gore in THE TOOLBOX MURDERS gets more overt and that costs the film the other two stars.<br /><br />Watch this one twice. Once for the movie itself. Then watch it again for the director's commentary. It makes you appreciate just how good this movie is, and teaches valuable lessons on how clever artists create solid work without massive budgets.<br /><br />By the way, this is a "remake"- note the quotation marks- of a movie with the same name. Different setting. Different decade. Different story. Different characters. Different dynamics between them. Completely different type of villain. Other than that it's a pretty faithful remake. Not.<br /><br />I can't close this without a nod to the awesomely beautiful Sherri Moon. She plays Daisy Rain, a would be actress who plays what I call the Janet Leigh character: remember the very first time you saw PSYCHO and then boom the whole story dynamic shifted?<br /><br />I'll grant you, there are some things about the story that are hard to deal with in the context of the real world, a lot of Why didn't and Why couldn't questions about bodies and body parts that are stacked like Lincoln logs in a secret part of the building. Corpses have been accumulating since the early days of talking movies, but nobody in the area notices the smell? I can answer all those questions in one statement: Because this is a thrill ride of a movie, not a documentary on The Discovery Channel, that's why.<br /><br />I'm looking forward to seeing MORTURARY. There was a Canadian film by that title many, many years ago but I don't know that there's supposed to be any connection.<br /><br />By the way, both Hooper and Angela Bettis are from Texas, both from Austin. Being a Texan myself, I see that as a good thing.<br /><br />I turn sixty next month, so I figure I'll have another twenty years of movie-going left in me. I will live long enough to see Angela Bettis become a big star. I will. I will.<br /><br />A footnote: The outtakes are far bloodier than the movie itself, and were probably cut to ensure the R-rating as opposed to an NC-17. For my two cents worth, I'd suggest that you skip them. That's my story and I'm sticking to it.