Down Inside You're Dirty

The Rosetta shot: “The Toolbox Murders” (1978)

So, yeah. A naked, bruised woman with a nail gun held point-blank at her head by a black-gloved figure. That’s… blunt.

Look at that debased image. No, really. Look at it. Process it, roll it around in your mind. That is an actual shot from an actual movie that was actually released in general release. What does that say about the film that contains it?

For one thing, it says that the people who made this film do not want you to feel safe. Like it or not, The Toolbox Murders does not fuck around when it comes to being, you know, a horror movie. If the primary purpose of a horror film is to either A) frighten and scare, or B) disturb the senses, then the people who made this film decided to go straight for the throat and choose B. Toolbox is, above all, a truly nasty and unclean film, a movie where you can practically see the sickness oozing off the screen. The question is, is that necessarily a bad thing? If the intent is to make a film that leaves you feeling sucker-punched by the feeling that nothing is going to be okay any time soon, shouldn’t the makers commit to the idea? This film, if nothing else, is god-damned committed. The first act is nearly contextless unmitigated stalk-and-slaughter fodder, like a giallo with the plotty bits removed. The second act then slows down to fall into a half-hearted sort of investigative-plot routine, with the brother of an abducted teen working to find her and, ostensibly, the slasher of the first act. The slasher, incidentally, is deranged Puritanical apartment superintendent Cameron Mitchell at his most drunkenly, sweatily fervent. This bit hits all the expected marks, but you can tell that it’s there because it has to be. Then you get to the bleak, bleak third act, and suddenly the air of dutifulness makes a horrid, nihilistic sense.

The hell of it is, this isn’t poorly made. This is crafted by people who knew what they were doing and spent all their talent on visuals, dialogue and plot beats that serve only to repel and discomfit. During the first body-discovery scene, the filmmakers toy with expectations (and later revelations) by having Mitchell bobbing up and down, out of focus but recognizable, in the background while the cops on the scene discuss whoever could have done such a horrid thing. There’s a long sequence with Mitchell and the kidnapped girl, where Mitchell treats her with nothing but genial patriarchal concern - while sucking on a fucking lollipop, no less! - that ranks as one of the most skin-crawling things I’ve seen in a film.

Given the talent and skill on display, I suspect that the wallow in extreme violence and extreme imagery has less to do with callow shock and more with the expulsion of psychic damage (which sets it apart from pathetic “provocative” dreck like David DeFalco’s Chaos). Director Dennis Donnelly spent his entire career working in television working on things like “Simon & Simon,” “Hawaii Five-O” and “Hart to Hart.” This was his only feature film, and after viewing it you understand why. The Toolbox Murders is not a film you make if you’re trying to secure future career prospects. This is a film you make if you have something terrible and icky inside of you welling up, and you need to expel it and turn it into art. This is a film you make if you desperately need to deal with your own darkness so you can continue on with life.

Toolbox is not a great film. I can’t even really defend it as a good film - unlike, say, I Spit on Your Grave, there’s no real point here to the degradation aside from, possibly, personal catharsis. But it is undeniably effective. Its bluntness means to get under your skin, and it does.

It’s on his face, expensive taste.

I have to admit, this is one of my favorite reaction shots in all of cinema.



Look at him. He’s just so damn happy. I couldn’t look that happy if I ingested ten pounds of meth and pulled the corners of my lips up with clothes hangers.

And why, might you ask, is this bespectacled goofball so happy? Uschi Digard is across the room from him, and she’s not wearing clothes. If you don’t know what Uschi Digard looked like in the ’70s… well, she looked like this:



Gotta admit, I’d be pretty thrilled too. Still don’t think I could pull that face, though.

(Stills from Edward Montoro’s Getting Into Heaven.)

From the Shelf/D2D update #87: The Babysitter (1969, Tom Laughlin as “Don Henderson”)

(Featured in 42nd Street #2.)

Acquired: Last week, from Amazon.

Seen before?: Nope.

The Babysitter is about a midlife crisis cured by humping. And not just any humping - humping a free-spirited 19-year-old blonde who is decidedly not your wife. Such wonderful things the movies teach us these days!

Sarcasm aside, this black-and-white piece of cheesecake from the man who would be Billy Jack has more going for it than first blush would reveal. George Carey is credible in the lead role of George Maxwell, whose life is turned upside down by, respectively, pixieish babysitter Candy Wilson and sultry blackmailer Julie Freeman (who just wants Maxwell to acquit her biker boyfriend of murder). Carey articulates Maxwell’s frustration at the arc of his life (mostly his sex life) with more aplomb that I expected from a cheap potboiler such as this. Patricia Wymer isn’t nearly as effective as Candy - she’s a terrible actress, and you can see her thinking about every word she has to utter - but she’s certainly a lovely-looking young lady, and her lack of inhibition is nothing to sneeze at.

The script, too, is stronger than it seems at first. The dialogue is oft-dopey - in the film’s goofiest scene, Maxwell and Wilson initially bond over tacos, with the older man expressing admiration and wonder for the younger generation’s openness to new experiences, leaving me to wonder how sheltered this guy is if he lives in Southern California and doesn’t know what a goddamn taco is - but the plot takes some unexpected turns and generally seems to be trying its best to keep us on our toes while we mark times between nude scenes. Candy may ultimately be a grindhouse version of a Manic Pixie Dream Girl, but she ends up being an unusually active iteration of the type. She leaves Maxwell better than she found him because that’s what she’s supposed to do; her selflessness, however, does not extend to Julie.

Also, this film contains gratuitous lesbianism and gratuitous biker rape. Not that everything about this film isn’t gratuitous.

Up next: Probably a childhood thing…

A riddle so strong.

So I’m an occasional patron of a nearby gentleman’s club. (Why? I like titties. Don’t judge me.) Most of the songs played in this place are what you’d expect - pop, hip-hop, hair metal, anything with a good groove to it. Saturday evening, though… there was a song that, shall we say, stuck out. Far be it from me to impugn on a girl’s choice of dance music, and granted the song has a pretty heavy cock-rock vibe to it. But still… a song wherein the lead singer talks about his own funeral, off an album written entirely about the heroin addiction that eventually killed him? Doesn’t scream lap dance to me.

If you don’t know already what song I’m talking about… well, here:



Could have been worse, I guess. Could have been “Down in a Hole.”

Still, though, I await the day when they hire a girl hip enough to dance to this:

From the Shelf: Amarcord (1973, Federico Fellini)

Acquired: May of 2007, from Amazon.

Seen before?: No.

A flashback crafted as only Fellini could. Loosely structured around a handful of characters, notably towheaded teen Titta and temptress-in-red Gradisca, this details a year in the life of an Italian village. Mussolini is in power, yet while Fascism is a part of the lives of the citizens (and there’s a terrific setpiece involving a Fascist parade and an enormous bust of Mussolini), it doesn’t seem to have a large effect on their day-to-day existence, maybe because they’re too busy living their lives or maybe because it’s a comment on what we choose to remember when we look back on past times. We remember that which stands out, and for, say, a young man deeply in the throes of puberty, whether or not the woman down the street was a loyal Fascist would occupy less space in your mental storehouse than the time the local tobacconist shoved your face into her massive breasts.

Its status as an explicit memory piece gives a certain weight to the Fellini gallery of grotesques. If these people are extravagant caricatures, if they walk around with leers carved on their faces like statues, it’s because they’re frozen in a certain time by the narrative and narrator(s). Did Volpina, the local prostitute, spend her every waking minute hunting men and carrying a look on her face that spoke of deep, insatiable hungers? Probably not, but that’s the image that gets burned in precisely because it’s so indelible. The mundane fades while the outsized and the unusual holds fast; to understand what this film does and why is, potentially, to understand the whole of Fellini’s work. It’s a film of moments, of incidents and beautiful images and great galloping desires splattered across an immense canvas. There’s room in here for the ridiculous and the serene, the extravagant and the understated, the terrifying and the joyful and the tragic (sometimes all at once, because such is life). There are parts and pieces here - the epic snowstorm near the film’s end and the peacock that happens along, the thick and unyielding fog in autumn - that get as close to Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s intoxicating magic realism as nobody else in cinema has. Reflect on what a Fellini-directed adaptation of Love in the Time of Cholera would look like. Then reflect on the fact that the adaptation that actually exists was made by Mike Newell. Then reflect on why that should make any sane person weep bitterly.

Up next: Boris, he’s my prime mate…

From the Shelf: All Men Are Apes! (1965, Joseph P. Mawra)

Acquired: February 2008, from Something Weird Video.

Seen before?: The first 30 minutes or so, but not all the way through.

Or: Eroticism and Its Discontents.

Joseph Mawra, I’m now convinced, is one of the great unsung savants of exploitation cinema. His films are pitched right at the midway point between what the audience expects from the genre and what his crackpot muse tells him to craft, and he seems to be calling into question the very idea of the erotic (within the boundaries of his chosen field, that is). For one example, witness how quickly the Olga series unhinged itself, going from light bondage/whipping to topless women being threatened with acetylene torches; for another, check this daffy bit of cheesecake.

Apes tells a story, familiar to any student of exploitation, about the rise and fall of a lustful young woman. But, true to the misanthropy of the title, Mawra’s modus operandi is a breed apart from either finger-wagging or pecker-raising. All Men Are Apes! is a film about desire, about perversion and everyone’s particular peccadilloes. The signature setpiece here is a long, early bit set at a swinging party where all manner of offbeat sex stuff happens. In particular, there’s a sequence where a underwear-clad woman lays on plastic sheeting while men and women throw fruit at her. Now, is this sexy? The protagonist doesn’t think so (her voiceover sneers, “It was like a wake for the Jolly Green Giant”), but does it matter if we in the audience think so? I submit that it doesn’t - what’s important is that the characters in the film think so.

It’s this very particular and personal nature of a turn-on - any turn-on - that Mawra’s after; in a sense, he’s implicitly admitting that you can’t make fuck flicks for everyone, so why not make them for yourself and those like you, and why not make them fun in a whacked-out kind of way? If all men are apes, the key is to find the ape who fits your tastes, as our anti-heroine does by film’s end. Her transition from trashy Lolita stealing her mom’s pickups to top-end stripper to femme fatale is marked, at all times, by her need to be the controller in her relationships, which is why her dalliance with Syndicate hood Buddy goes so wildly awry. Her needs are not your needs are not my needs, but they sure make for an amusing time at the cinema.

Up next: A society in flux, a director in transition, a guy in a trenchcoat…

From the Shelf: Alice in Wonderland (1976, Bud Townsend)

Acquired: From Amazon, mid-2008 before all their copies dried up.

Seen before?: Just the XXX version, on April 27th 2009.

This musical-porn adaptation of the famed Carrol tale has two main assets, and it leans on its assets like a drunken man in a windstorm because, frankly, it needs to: Townsend’s Alice in Wonderland is a rickety thing, using the episodic nature of the source material as an excuse to throw structure out the window. It would seem like a perfect fit, really - pornography is a series of scenes strung together in a mock-up of a narrative. And yet that’s the film’s weakness, because who really deigns to watch porn films all the way through? They’re episodic for a reason.

But then, that’s really a problem with the genre in its entirety, so it’s unfair for me to lay that all at the feet of this particular work. At least this one is concentrating mainly on providing a fun time and not just a means to a self-induced orgasm, and it’s modestly successful in that aim. This Alice is absolutely a product of the ’70s - it’s a hugely sex-positive work that trades in a friendly, almost wholesome variety of titillation that evaporated from the genre once the VHS revolution kicked off and things got ridiculously gynecological. The narrative itself can be seen as a comment on lack of innocence not automatically meaning dirty and perverse, as the Alice here is a repressed young librarian who falls into a fuck-happy Wonderland and learns that, hey, sex is fun yo! The main issue I have with the film that isn’t endemic to its genre is that, as evinced by the two versions included on the DVD, this was initially shot as a hardcore feature. The hardcore version is inferior, as the graphic penetration stops the film cold every time, but the softcore version suffers from screwy, disjointed editing because of the missing hardcore material. The filmmakers have fun with it, to their credit (an excised blowjob sequence is replaced by a “Scene Missing” title card), but it’s a hell of a catch-22 all the same. The film probably would be stronger had it simply been intended as softcore the whole time.

Oh, yeah, the second asset? It ain’t the songs, which are lively yet unmemorable, nor is it the film’s hot jokes a-flyin’, which are very much informed by corny old vaudeville routines and schoolboy smutpuns. No, no, no… it’s this:



That’s Kristine DeBell, who plays Alice. Goddamn, she’s adorable. She’s also believable as someone both sweetly naive and open to being smutty. But mostly, she’s goddamned adorable.

Up next: Matriarchs unveiled…