🎶 its a surrealistic summer 🎶

watched this with commentary and tobe mentions he got the title font from HalloweenFonts dot com

a ferocious late slasher from tobe hooper where young aspiring actresses' and workers are brutalized by a monstrous manifestation of hollywood's seedy history of industry exploitation and serial murder. viscous death is not only in the crumbling, rotting, grime-covered motel architecture, it's in the damn blueprints. has some very nasty gore, a sickly atmosphere, occult spells, some surrealist italian horror sequencing and an incredible hotel set which behind its filthy cracked, peeling walls hides a subterranean horror movie lair that combines the horrifyingly textured, homemade Texas Chainsaw torture chambers with golden age hollywood memorabilia. a new favourite 2000s horror movie and should be considered a top-tier hooper.

sickly yellow occult sludge which like the best slashers is about the sudden irruption of a sliver of cosmic malignity into the mundane that was only ever hidden just below the surface & like architecture over time is a node for the slow accumulation of the weight & density of capitalist atrocity that is normally borne out in a slow eke & a gradual yellowing again of spirit & disintegration of facades into smoking in the subterranean key office because that accumulated weight eventually collapses in on itself and the resulting black hole consumes everything in the vicinity & like The Shape the phantom disappears again because he is an everywhere atmosphere that is given brief form in the oneiric nexus of collapse that suddenly clarifies the yellow fog that was the capitalist eke of soul and now we can see The Shape again in outline even after his body disappears haunting like a mirage or fractured dream half remembered.

the history of brute power is plastered to the very walls, newspapers lining a moldering catacomb which is equally a shrine to the parasitic, quasi-sexual jouissance and vitality the demonic bourgeois of hollywood (in alliance with the military-industrial complex) derives from the pain and death of the poor. grimy, staged, and theatrical: this is a performance, through and through, although the irony of one of hooper's more workmanlike (if certainly not journeyman) efforts being named after its macabre, gothic perversion of an ordinary object is charming. construction workers, tenants, repairmen, those with kindness and empathy are fed into the rancid gullet of this monster, and from their blood it lives forever. double feature w/ Mulholland Drive?

The architecture starts falling apart, I can feel myself fading away... these walls are cardboard because it's only about perception, what we can see and what we can't see, that's why Hooper shoots everything with a removed ambience - this entire film feels like the building feels... we are all a part of history, this is the best filmic depiction of Marxist writing on landscape

some form of anomaly, the terrors are from inside your walls, rotting and festering their way from the decrepit architecture and into your mind and eventually your body, we are all destined to be torn apart. hooper making this a brilliant watch is a testament to how fucking great he was, if anyone else had this budget, cast and screenplay, it’d probably fucking suck, and this movie snaps on multiple levels. miss you tobe you wacky genius bastard, hope you and wes are chilling in heaven, tormenting your fictional characters while manically laughing about some bullshit.

I'll be watching a lot of Tobe Hooper films this week. I kinda love this movie... it’s my preferred Toolbox Murders.

angela bettis 🖤🖤🖤

A truly visually angular movie, constantly full of lines that divide the frame and guide the eyes down hallways, staircases, ladders, etc., in an overwhelming rush that pushes an intense claustrophobia into your chest with a pressure that refuses to relent; Hooper takes the rabid discomfort and nausea of the final act of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre and stretches it thin to make this unrelenting treatise on grief and disconnection from your environment, turning a rotting building into a representation of the constantly decaying sense of well being that the death of a loved one brings as it swallows your hopes for a brighter future and pollutes your memories of the past. Really intense and really great.

"Toolbox Murders" is to the Bush era what "Texas Chain Saw Massacre" is to the Vietnam era. It is a damn shame that everything of Hooper's post-80s period is just written off, because this is really incredible work.

Precisei ver em 480p no youtube só achei la

Filmagem característica do inicio dos anos 2000 no terror que eu acho esquisita, ideia interessante do terror no prédio envolvendo vários moradores de diferentes apartamentos, porém não achei tão divertido de assistir e a história não me prendeu muito

Me sobra un poco la parte mágica de la historia pero se deja ver.

love the idea of a suppressed, ugly history of one place materializing and brutalizing its inhabitants- therefore continuing the endless cycle of terror (as the ending suggests) but tbh it could have been done in a much more interesting and inspired way, idk i guess i'm not that much into 00s hooper
at least it's fun and the lead is great!

Das Remake des gleichnamigen Films von 1978 spielt in einem historischen Hotel in Hollywood, in dem seit Beginn der Renovierungsarbeiten eine Mordserie ihre Runden zieht. Die Waffen: Alles mögliche, was in einem Werkzeugkasten zu finden ist. Jedoch bekommt keiner der Nachbarn etwas davon mit. Nur eine neue Mieterin ahnt etwas Böses hinter dem Verschwinden ihrer Nachbarn und macht sich daran, das Geheimnis zu lüften.
Nach dem kultigen TEXAS CHAINSAW MASSACRE 2 von 1986 hat Regisseur Tobe Hooper leider nicht mehr viel wirklich sehenswertes zustande gebracht. Auch TOOLBOX MURDERS ändert nichts an diesem Trend. Die nötige Brutalität eines solchen Stoffes kommt ein wenig zu kurz (oder bin ich so abgestumpft?), und nach Originalität oder Spannung sucht man vergebens. Dennoch macht der Film irgendwie Spass, was wohl hauptsächlich an der Spielfreude der Darsteller liegt. Vor allem machen Angela Bettis (MAY) und Juliet Landau (BUFFY) dabei eine gute Figur.

* Review vor einer gefühlten Ewigkeit verfasst für den monatlich erschienenen Videodrom-Verleihnewsletter

An entertaining film, but not a necessarily good one

Woah now! I just figured this HAD to be terrible but it's not. At all. It's not a remake or re-imagining, it made me think what if Inferno was made by the director of Texas Chainsaw Massacre. Tense, some solid jump scares and punishing gore (censored and overfiltered, watch the uncut bits on the DVD!). A great bit of 00s horror that isn't trying to be PG-13,

Mudarse es malo.