LIFE-CHANGER: Tools and Boxes

THE TOOLBOX MURDERS (1978)
Director: Dennis Donnelly
Screenplay: Robert Easter, Neva Friedenn, Ann Kindberg
Cast: Cameron Mitchell, Pamelyn Ferdin, Kelly Nichols
DVD Studio: Blue Underground

The notorious reputation of 1978’s proto-slasher-flick The Toolbox Murders has always preceded it. Amusingly, The Toolbox Murders itself may not have all that much to do its own heavy place in the horror canon.

The movie’s lurid title alone coupled with its forcefully evocative poster would be (and probably was) enough to turn this odd showcase for method-actor-turned-crusty-TV-vet Cameron Mitchell into an early and enduring splatter landmark.

Stephen King helped too, by singling out the brutality of The Toolbox Murders in his 1981 horror meditation, Danse Macabre.

That’s where I first learned of the film – well, sort of. It was actually in a Danse Macabre excerpt that ran in TV Guide, which was as close as I could get to Stephen King back then.

Yes, playing into your every obvious preconception about repression, Youngman McBeardo grew up educated by Halifax Nuns at Our Lady Help of Christians Catholic school.

In addition, my Green Beret father conspired with my kindergarten teacher mother to keep unsavory materials beyond the reach of my obsessively desperate sensory organs. But my parents knew the deal. They simply aimed to delay the inevitable.

That inevitable arrived when my friend Paul got the first neighborhood VCR in Fall 1981.

The Betamax phenomenon, with its $500 entry fee, had bypassed working class Brooklyn, but one of my most glorious moments came when I wandered into a primitive video store on Long Island while visiting family friends.

For years, I’d torn out exploitation ads from the New York Post and Daily News, assembling them into hidden scrapbooks, fueling fantasies of a day when I could actually visit the theaters listed therein.

Now, it looked as though Betamax would bring that experience right to me. After I grew up and got rich.

Kentucky Fried Movie. The Wizard of Gore. Massacre at Central High. Emanuelle. Le Sex Shoppe. The Groove Tube. Death Race 2000. Drive-In Massacre. Student Bodies. The Lickerish Quartet. A Boy and His Dog. The Pom Pom Girls. The Harrad Experiment. Plus stuff I had never heard of, like Christopher Lee and Sybil Danning in Albino.

They had every movie I had ever wanted to see. Right there. To own!

As is well known, VCRs defeated Betamax by undercutting prices, and my pal Paul’s family – who even had, as we called it, “Home Box” – got in on the home video fun early.

The Toolbox Murders was our very first rental selection the very first day Paul’s mother was out of the house. We were 12.

The box cover was like a movie in itself with its black-masked menace brandishing power appliances and a discernibly naked lovely fretting in a bathtub. Could The Toolbox Murders – or anything – ever possibly deliver on the promise of that image?

The answer was “fuck” and “yes” and fast.

The Toolbox Murders opens with Pentecostal jibber-jabber coming out of a car radio, freaky enough for Catholic lads. Then the driver gets out, enters an apartment complex and – blammo! – he starts slaughtering naked women! Horribly! Awesomely! Unforgettably!

Their tits are out and one of them masturbates and there’s a hint she’s a lesbian and, somehow, I survived that knowledge without spontaneously ejaculating in my school pants on Paul’s floor.

Then The Toolbox Murderer pulls a hammer out of his signature box of tricks to swing down on the dead lesbo. But he turns it around so that the claw side is first! Holy shit. Holy fuck. Nothing is true. Everything is permitted. Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of law. Love is the law, love under will. Love and a claw-hammer.

And this is all before the industrial nail-gun action that Stephen King promised us.

The first thing you notice about the industrial nail-gun scene is the soundtrack. There’s a mellow, very ’70s AM-radio country song with a laid-back hombre crooning: “Pretty lay-dee, oh, pretty lay-dee.”

Then you see the pretty lady. It’s the redhead from the box cover, played by Kelly Nichols, an utterly beguiling hardcore porn star, although I didn’t know that at the time (boy, would that change). She strips, eases back in a bubble bath, and lets her fingers do some lap-level walking. And somehow I knew she was thinking about other naked women!

The Toolbox Murderer poops Pretty Lady’s solo party, though, as he scares her out of the tub and chases her from room to room. We see her full-frontally naked all the way (revealing that Kelly Nichols is not a natural redhead).

Out comes the industrial nail-gun and – Zing! Pfft! – that’s the end of Pretty Lady’s tune.

Quite literally, I had never seen anything like this.

And then Paul’s mother came home.

“Fuck! Shit!” Paul said, rushing to remove the tape. “If she asks what this movie is tell her it’s gross, bloody gore, with lots of murders and messiness. Don’t say anything about the nudity!”

We vamoosed before Paul’s mother even knew we were back from Confirmation practice.

I then immediately suffered an epiphany that occurs to all douche-wad and you’d have been hard-pressed to find wad a douchier than 7th grader me.

“So,” I mused to Paul, “it would be okay for us to be looking at violence and murder and mutilation, but it’s not okay for us to just look at the natural human body? That’s fucked up! That’s insane! That’s hypocritical! And pretentious!”

I copped the word “pretentious” from Siskel & Ebert but I had only a rough notion of what it meant.

Paul accepted this reality and went about his life peaceably. I remained stuck on that double standard for a few mortifying years, then came clean that I wanted to see sex and violence and that I loved them both more than anything, although the former a bit more than the latter, but nothing as much as when they were combined.

Since then, whenever I hear any huffing variation on “So it’s okay to stab a breast in a movie, but not to show one?”, I reach for my industrial nail-gun.

Eventually, I saw the rest of The Toolbox Murders and, aside from the surprise kidnapping and attempted rape of child star Pamelyn Ferdin, it’s a (relative) snooze.

But that opening 15 minutes indicated to me that there were no limits anymore, at least not in the realm of entertaining one’s self. Specifically, when the killer turns the hammer claw-first, I thought: “It’s on!”

The unspoken realization was that adults really did everything I suspected.

A notion sprung to life within me that New York City just past where I was allowed to ride my bike really was a Shangri-la of Sin where horror movies brought all your worst nightmares and even worse power fantasies to manageable and porno oozed off the screen into live nude orgies and, somehow, lesbians were real!

My decision to attend a Jesuit high school over the bridge, in Manhattan, just two subway stops south of Times Square, was made that day.

Our Lady Help of Christians, indeed.

*

LIFE CHANGERS is an occasional McBeardo.com feature that focuses on movies, music, personalities and other entities that, at a particular key moment, awakened one to greater possibilities in life. Bent, broken, whacked-out life, to be specific. Submit your own to: mcbeardo-at-mcbeardo-dot-com.

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