Look out! He's got a knife!

Long thought dead, back rearing his head

Back in 1977, a movie producer called Tony Didio noticed that The Texas Chain Saw Massacre was still making money three years after its initial release. Didio was not a fan of horror movies, but he was a big fan of making money so he sent a couple of writers to see it with instructions to write something like it. They did so in a somewhat unusual fashion; instead of copying the story and setting, they copied the structure and modus operandi. Thus both 'Saw and their imitation involved a killer who uses tools to kill various people in the first half of the movie, and who kidnaps and torments a single person in the second half.

Flash forward to 2003, and 'Saw get a big-budget remake courtesy of producer Michael Bay. Didio notices this, and decides the time is right to remake his own mini-masterpiece, and goes so far as to hire the director the the original 'Saw, Tobe Hooper, to helm the remake of The Toolbox Murders.

The remake stars Angela Bettis (May) as a young woman who's just moved into a scungy old apartment building in Hollywood with her med student husband. The walls are as thin as cardboard, and weird characters like her neighbour Saffron and the creepy handyman Ned lurk everywhere. The only nice characters she meets are an old man played by Rance Howard (Ron's dad) and a neighbour played by Juliet Landau (Dru from Buffy). However, unbeknownst to the other tenants, someone has decided to play with a claw hammer, and a nail gun, and a power drill...

This is a pretty silly movie in most respects, and suffers from a dumb script. Luckily director Tobe Hooper has returned to form after a run of embarrassingly bad movies (The Mangler, Night Terrors, Crocodile) and delivers the kind of stylish low-budget horror we all loved in things like The Funhouse. It's not another 'Saw by any means, but noone expects him to come close to that again.

He's aided and abetted (and perhaps saved) by a stellar lead performance by Angela Bettis. She isn't as good as she was in May, but she isn't given the chance to be - the script isn't good enough. But she's clearly a talent to watch, rising above the awful dialogue and the shaky acting of her co-stars. This girl is going somewhere, mark my words. (And go see May right now.)

In the end of the day this is just a supernatural-tinged slasher movie with stylish direction and an unusually good lead performance. It's not as splattery nor as suspenseful as it could have been, though it has its moments with both. It doesn't bear much resemblance to the original Toolbox Murders, and that's a good thing. The ending's a fizzer though.

Posted by pearce at August 31, 2004 9:16 AM