A secured Los Angeles apartment building is beset by a series of grisly murders by a toolbox-carrying ski-masked killer. In between drilling, claw-hammering, and nail-gunning "sinful" women, he also takes time to stalk good girl Laurie (Pamela Ferdin). When he abducts her, her brother Joey (Nicholas Beauvy) and the building super's nephew Kent (Wesley Eure) play detectives. Little do they realize that Kent's uncle Vance (Cameron Mitchell) is holding Laurie and pretending she's his dead daughter (though the audience will have been several steps ahead of them from frame 1). Although charged as misogynistic at the time of its release, nowadays THE TOOLBOX MURDERS feels exactly like the TEXAS CHAINSAW MASSACRE cash-in that it is (the film predates the slasher cycle). The poor scripting - leavened only by Mitchell's dedicated performance and Ferdin's sympathetic portrayal - is so formulaic it borders on parody: the police - lead by the director's brother Tim Donnelly - pad the running time without contributing to either the exposition or the solution, the victims are clearly delineated from the good girl by displays of alcoholism, exhibitionism, and lesbianism, and while Mitchell throws himself into his performance neither he nor the script bother to try to make him seem normal even when interacting with the police (though Eure fills in for the scenes without Mitchell with his own brand of overacting). In any case, the film is monumentally superior to the supernaturally-themed abortion of a remake directed for-hire by Tobe Hooper. A sequel to the original is in pre-production.