(1972)
Dir - Paul Bartel
Overall: MEH
The first full-length film from Paul Bartel, (the much celebrated cult movie Death Race 2000 would be his follow-up), Private Parts is silly and weird in both good and bad ways. The themes of sexual repression, voyeurism, and perversion never really pick up any steam and all of the horror-tinged, violent bits just seem to be there to give it a bloody body count for whatever reason. The characters are certainly humorous in their eccentricities, (Laurie Main who hosted Welcome to Pooh Corner is the most fun as a flamboyantly creepy, gay Reverend), but why they are all cooped up in a single hotel and why the owner herself is up to such a bizarre scheme in the first place is kind of just thrown into the mix to make the movie more strange. This may not be a bad thing depending if one finds the seedy, early 70s New York atmosphere appealing enough or the murder scenes satisfactory. Yet the script does pose its ideas in a kind of lazy way, coming to a head with a ridiculous ending that is bound to make most eyes roll. It would probably work better as a quirky fish-out-of-water comedy devoid of all of the lame slasher movie bits, but it is an interesting experiment nonetheless.
(1974)
Dir - Frederick R. Friedel
Overall: WOOF
It is quite telling that when writer/director Frederick R. Friedel was trying desperately to get his first movie made while pitching it to any producer who would humor him, he knew as much about the filmmaking process as a Neanderthal. The result Axe, (Lisa, Lisa), is roughly a mere sixty-seven minutes long, but if feels like six-hundred and seven. This is another perfect, horrendous combination of a "why would anyone want to watch that?" story with completely inept movie making from all the technical levels on down. Friedel, (who unsurprisingly exudes the same amount of on-screen charisma as one of the characters as he does expertise behind the lens), has a sentence-long story here at best. Because of this, he fills the screen time with anything, ANYTHING to get it just barely to an acceptable full-length. In the very first opening scene, characters sit around in a room waiting for someone and they wait, and wait, and wait, and what happens next is so unpleasant and nasty that it sets the template precisely for everything else that is to follow. That is Axe ladies and gentlemen; waiting around while watching the director not turn the camera off until something wretched happens that you did not want to see in the first place.
(1978)
Dir - Dennis Donnelly
Overall: MEH
Outside of the appearance of the generally ridiculous Cameron Mitchell as a cuckoo building owner who murders women for the flimsiest of reasons, The Toolbox Murders has nigh a single redeemable quality. The "based on a true story" tag has been used so many times to garnish interest that the words have lost all meaning and it ultimately matters not at all to the final proceedings. The murders are all unpleasant and then things get worse from there with another woman being kept prisoner for disturbing reasons and then once she is finally released, she gets rapped by her would-be rescuer anyway. Isn't that lovely? One can easily look past all of the deliberately exploitative elements since the film was made to cash-in on the wave of low-budget sleaze that was continually being produced in droves, so expecting anything remotely intellectual would be unfair. The real deficiency with the movie is with its piss-poor direction and pacing. Scenes like characters walking into a building, asking for keys, looking for keys, finding keys, saying "bye", walking back outside into a car, driving the car away, driving some more, driving up to their destination, parking and walking out of the car into another building, and well you get the idea. The film is so void of substance that much of the running time has to be padded with such completely irrelevant information, just leaving you with all of the nasty bits and Cameron Mitchell, (thankfully at least), overacting to the best of his abilities.
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