Life After Chainsaws

Somehow, Tobe Hooper got lost among the chainsaws in our previous outing, much like Dennis Hopper's shopping experience in Hooper's 1986 sequel to his 1974 masterpiece, "The Texas Chain Saw Massacre."

It was three years after Tobe Hooper made "The Texas Chain Saw Massacre" - his "sky rocket big enough that...they could see me in Los Angeles" - that he, in fact, found himself in Hollywood, toiling away at his follow-up feature film, 1976's "Eaten Alive." Ensconced in a sound stage on the lot of historic Raleigh Studios - one of the longest continually operating studios in the world, where Charlie Chaplin and Mary Pickford trod the boards a century ago and where "The Best Years of Our Lives" and "Gunsmoke" were filmed - Hooper, working from a script co-written by his "Chain Saw Massacre" collaborator, Kim Henkel, crafted an atmospheric chilling fable about the demented owner of a decrepit hotel situated in the backroads of eastern Texas who keeps a pet crocodile he claims is from the Nile penned up in the swampy water beside the building.

Cast as Judd, the hotel's troubled owner, a war veteran with a wooden leg who constantly babbles gibberish about uniforms and regulations, gristly character actor Neville Brand created one of modern cinema's most unforgettable monsters, toggling back and forth between sympathetically obliging to sadistically brutal to demonically gleeful.

Brand was a real-life veteran of the central European campaign of World War II and became a highly decorated combat hero. Attending drama school on the G.I. Bill, he found that his craggy face and raspy voice led to a number of movie and television roles as gangsters, convicts, prison guards, western outlaws, and assorted tough guys.

One of Neville Brand's most memorable roles was as
Al Capone in episodes of the TV series "The  Untouchables"
in the late 1950s and in the 1961 feature film "The George
Raft Story." His portrayal featured a broken-English,
pseudo-Italian dialect which the American-born Capone
never exhibited in real life.

In the mid-1960s, Brand was cast against type as, more or less, the oafish comic relief among a trio of Texas Rangers in the short-lived western series "Laredo." Peter Brown played the scheming ladies' man, William Smith was the muscular tracker raised by Indians, while Brand was the big-mouthed loose cannon, all under the tutelage of actor Philip Carey as the no-nonsense captain.

Kim Henkel said the plot for "Eaten Alive" was loosely based on the real-life exploits of Joe Ball, who owned a bar with a live alligator attraction during the 1930s in Elmendorf, Texas, near San Antonio. After running bootleg liquor during Prohibition, Ball had opened the bar called the Sociable Inn. A number of women disappeared, including barmaids, Ball's wife, and former girlfriends. Legend held that Ball disposed of the bodies by feeding them to his six pet gators. When two sheriff's deputies came to question him, he pulled a handgun and killed himself.

Joe Ball, "The Alligator Man," also came to be known as "The
Butcher of Elmendorf" and "The Bluebeard from South Texas."

While Tobe Hooper filmed "The Texas Chain Saw Massacre" predominantly outdoors on-location, for "Eaten Alive," he went 180 degrees in the opposite direction and shot entirely on sound stages, which included the construction of a Texas Victorian hotel with forced perspective in its swampy environs (pictured below).

You can almost smell the mildew ooze off the screen.

The mist-shrouded setting is bathed alternately in eerie reddish, green, or blue hues, creating, in the words of one reviewer, "the aura of a campfire slasher tale told by the Brothers Grimm...one set in permanent twilight." The A.V. Club called the movie "a tawdry and deranged Tennessee Williams item that appears to have been filmed inside a lava lamp."

Complementing the surreal, claustrophobic, and intentionally artificial environment is the discordant atonal music score (or non-musical score) provided by Wayne Bell and Tobe Hooper, made all the more disturbing by a playlist of obscure, deep-Texas country-and-western songs endlessly streaming from Judd's radio.

Set seemingly all in one night, the film keeps Neville Brand's maladjusted Judd busy, as he handily dispatches - with pitchfork and scythe - a runaway daughter-turned-prostitute-wannabe (played by Roberta Collins, a staple of women-in-prison drive-in flicks), an unhinged husband (portrayed by William Finley, perennial screen oddball best remembered as Winslow Leach, the titular "Phantom of the Paradise"), the wayward daughter's worried father (veteran Hollywood leading man Mel Ferrer, who was Audrey Hepburn's first husband), and a randy young buck named - well - Buck (an early role for Robert Englund, who would find fame in horror films on his own as Freddy Krueger of "Elm Street"), all of whom end up as pond fodder for the crocodile from the Nile. Oh, wait, did we mention Scuffy, the lovable pooch?

William Finley in a bad leisure suit enjoys one of his quieter moments
as a tightly wound tourist in "Eaten Alive."

The movie's timeline calls into consideration the actual eating habits of the African crocodile, which, unlike hot-blooded predators, can easily subsist on 2 to 15 pounds of meat daily...meaning that Judd's croc had one voracious, single-day appetite.

The cast also features Hollywood old-timers Stuart Whitman as the stalwart sheriff and Carolyn Jones, in her penultimate role as a deglamorized brothel madame. The film strikes a particularly disturbing note in the presence of seven-year-old Kyle Richards as a terrorized girl who hides under the hotel from the stalking Judd, while evading rats and the hungry crocodile.

Well, see, there was nothing to worry about. Little Kyle Richards
grew - er - up to become one of "The Real Wives of Beverly Hills."

Like  daughter, like mother. Cast as the screaming Kyle Richards' mom was Marilyn Burns, the much put-upon damsel-in-distress of Hooper's "The Texas Chain Saw Massacre," here enduring mauling, punching, and bondage at the hands of Brand's character. One thing that must be said about Burns (pictured below) is that she was a trouper.

In a 2013 interview, Robert Englund, an unabashed film buff and fan of Hollywood past, recalled his experience as "just a strange moment in time, and I can not reiterate enough to you: it was magical. It was one of the most wonderful sets, to this day, that I've ever walked onto." He said, "It is the most miraculous thing I've ever seen at this stage of my life...When we walked through those giant sound stage doors, we were in a magical place. It might have been a low-budget movie, but we knew it was going to be a great little low-budget movie."

Unfortunately, Tobe Hooper left the film before production ended, apparently as a result of interference from producer Mohammed (aka Mardi) Rustam. Up to this point, Rustam was probably best known as the producer of the 1971 potboiler "Dracula vs. Frankenstein," starring Lon Chaney Jr. ("The Wolf Man") and Russ Tamblyn (Riff in "West Side Story").

Commenting on the abrupt absence of Hooper, actor Robert Englund (pictured below, with Roberta Collins) remembered, "And we're all left there. By this time, we all love Tobe. He's articulate, he's intellectual, he's funny, he's smoking his Sherman cigarettes. We all feel we're in really good hands with Tobe Hooper. He's just a wonderful, iconoclastic talent. We all want to be around him. But he's gone."

"Name's Buck...I'm rarin' to f***!"

Some accounts say producer Rustam replaced Hooper as director. There were also rumors that the movie's cinematographer, Robert Caramico, took over the directing chores. Nonetheless, whoever replaced Hooper inevitably introduced gratuitous nudity to the proceedings.

Cameraman Robert Caramico and producer Mardi Rustam
line up a camera angle on starlet Janus Blythe's breasts.

The question of just how Judd came to be fitted with an artificial leg is never explained, whether it was a result of a war wound or perhaps a close call with his pet. One can't help but think of the crocodile who devoured Captain Hook's hand after it was severed in a duel with Peter Pan, especially as Judd, not unlike Hook, meets his ultimate demise in the jaws of the reptile, leaving only his wooden appendage afloat..

Janus Blythe poses for gag publicity photos with Neville Brand.

In 1979, Tobe Hooper received the plumb assignment of directing the miniseries "Salem's Lot." This was only the second adaptation of a Stephen King best seller, after director Brian De Palma's "Carrie." King recalled of "Salem's Lot,""Every director in Hollywood who's ever been involved with horror wanted to do it, but nobody could come up with a script" for a feature film.

Producer Richard Kobritz (who would go on to produce "Christine") decided a miniseries would better suit the 400-page novel and hired TV and film writer Paul Monash (who produced "Carrie") to create a two-part teleplay. One major change Kobrtiz brought to King's tale was the visualization of the lead vampire, Kurt Barlow, changing the urbane, very human-appearing antiques merchant into a speechless, demonic monster, modeled after German actor Max Schreck's portrayal of Count Orlok in the classic 1922 silent "Nosferatu" (pictured below).

Mysterious facial burns scarred the lower third of Austrian-born
actor Reggie Nalder's face, cast as Kurt Barlow in "Salem's Lot." He
variously offered three different stories about the origin of the scars.

"We went back to the old German 'Nosferatu' concept where he is the essence of evil," Kobritz explained, "and not anything romantic or smarmy...the rouge-cheeked, widow-peaked Dracula. I wanted nothing suave or sexual...we've seen too much of it."

Filming on a budget of $4 million in the northern California town of historic, picturesque Ferndale, Tobe Hooper worked with a gifted cast that featured David Soul ("I sound like a writer," he said about his characterization, "a man who's at home with words"), Bonnie Bedelia, and Lance Kerwin, with reliable character actors Ed Flanders, Geoffrey Lewis, Kenneth McMillan, Fred Willard, George Dzundza, and Barbara Babcock, alongside seasoned old hands James Mason, Lew Ayres, Marie Windsor, and Elisha Cook Jr.

Geoffrey Lewis, as the town gravedigger, bids you, "Look at me!".

Next up for Tobe Hooper was 1981's "The Funhouse," an old-fashioned let's-spend-the-night-in-a-haunted-house thriller. Hooper claimed he always wanted to do a carnival movie, inspired by the1947 film noir "Nightmare Alley," which starred Tyrone Power as an unsavory, scheming carnival barker who ends up playing a sideshow geek.

Tyrone Power muscles in on strongman Mike Mazurki's squeeze,
Coleen Gray, in "Nightmare Alley."

Hooper was also intrigued by the notion of depicting a monster who initially wears a monster mask. Since "The Funhouse" was a Universal Pictures release, Tobe had no difficulty utilizing the Frankenstein Monster mask, since the studio owned the rights to the Boris Karloff-inspired image.

Special makeup effects artist Craig Reardon ("The Goonies,"
"How the Grinch Stole Christmas," "Oz the Great and Powerful")
created the wondrously freakish cleft-headed monstrosity in "The
Funhouse," enacted by mime performer Wayne Doba.

Hooper masterfully captures the atmosphere of a seedy carnival, aided in no small part by the performance of gifted character actor Kevin Conway (who was so outstanding as Sgt. Buster Kilrain in "Gettysburg") as the funhouse barker and father of the deformed creature. Interestingly, Conway told Hooper he would play the barker only if he got to portray the freak show barker and girlie show barker, as well, which provided some effectively eerie eye-play with actress Elizabeth Berridge, the sole-surviving female character.

This was only the second film for 19-year-old Elizabeth Berridge, who would appear to much critical acclaim three years later as Constanze Mozart in "Amadeus" (pictured below).

One of Elizabeth Berridge's later film roles was a cameo as wild west show sharpshooter Annie Oakley in 2004's "Hidalgo," starring Viggo Mortensen, but in 1981, she was content to pay her dues with the obligatory shower scene in "The Funhouse" for director Hooper..

Tobe Hooper followed "The Funhouse" with, by far, his most successful film, if not his most controversial, namely 1982's "Poltergeist," the by-now familiar ghost story about a newly constructed suburban dream neighborhood haunted by the cemetery it was built on. Steven Spielberg, who produced the picture and wrote the final script, had a clause in his contract that prohibited him from directing another movie while he was filming "E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial" for Universal Pictures. Hooper, who allegedly had worked with Spielberg during the earliest stages of "Poltergeist," was brought on board as the director.

Since Spielberg was such a domineering presence on the set of  "Poltergeist," debate arose over who was really directing the film.

Exhibit A: Tobe Hooper, pop can in hand, is eclipsed by Steven
Spielberg's direction of James Karen and Craig T. Nelson.

Exhibit B: Tobe Hooper appears bemused as Steven
Spielberg steps between the cameras and himself.

Exhibit C: Tobe Hooper is nowhere in sight as Steven Spielberg
orchestrates a shot with James Karen and Richard T. Nelson.

Exhibit D: Well, now things have gotten completely out of hand
as Steven Spielberg tinkers unsupervised with props on the set.

Spielberg stirred the pot when he publicly asserted, "Tobe isn't...a take-charge sort of guy. If a question was asked and an answer wasn't forthcoming, I'd jump in and say what we could do. Tobe would nod in agreement, and that became the process of collaboration." Such comments prompted the Directors Guild of America to launch an investigation into whether or not Hooper's official credit as director was being denigrated by Spielberg's remarks claiming authorship.

Spielberg wasted no time in backpedaling, releasing an open letter to Tobe Hooper that appeared in The Hollywood Reporter in the week of the picture's release. Spielberg wrote, "Regrettably, some of the press has misunderstood the rather unique, creative relationship which you and I shared throughout the making of 'Poltergeist.' I enjoyed your openness in allowing me...a wide berth for creative involvement, just as I know you were happy with the freedom you had to direct 'Poltergeist' so wonderfully...as the director, you delivered the goods. You performed responsibly and professionally, and I wish you great success on your next project."

The film's co-producer, Frank Marshall, told the Los Angeles Times that "the creative force of the movie was Steven. Tobe was the director and was on the set every day." Assistant cinematographer John R. Leonetti stated, "But really, Steven directed it." As if adding insult to injury, when both "Poltergeist" and "E.T." were released within a week of each other in June of 1982, ads touted "The Summer of Spielberg."

In 1983, when Tobe Hooper was at the height of his powers and MTV was at its peak and actually played music videos, the director filmed the video for Billy Idol's "Dancing with Myself," which featured the British singer battling a zombie apocalypse (pictured below).

Despite Spielberg's "wish" for Hooper's great success on future projects, it was rare that Tobe came close to the popularity of "Poltergeist." The first of Hooper's new three-picture deal with Cannon Films was 1985's "Lifeforce," written, with Don Jakoby, by Dan O'Bannon (best known for scripting "Alien" and writing and directing "The Return of the Living Dead"). "Lifeforce" was a space alien-vampire hybrid that starts out promisingly with the discovery, in the coma of Halley's Comet, of a 150-mile long spacecraft (best described as resembling a giant artichoke spear) filled with thousands of floating desiccated corpses of bat-like beings and three naked humanoids in suspended animation.

The story proceeds to get sillier and sillier, as astronaut Steve Railsback tracks a shape-shifting vampiress through London (the picture was a British production) until, from out of left field, the English capital is overrun by a zombie apocalypse that can only be quelled by Railsback's cosmic copulation with the intergalactic bloodsucker.

Mathilda May, as the interstellar succubus,
enjoys an off-camera break with an extra.

Initially, Steve Railsback, whose breakout role came as Charles Manson in the 1976 miniseries "Helter Skelter" (pictured below), might seem an unlikely choice for a romantic lead, although he did carry himself well in the old Montgomery Clift part of bugler-boxer Private Robert E. Lee Prewitt in the 1979 television adaptation of "From Here to Eternity."

"Star Trek: The Next Generation's" Patrick Stewart, as the possessed
head of a psychiatric hospital, is about to receive his first screen kiss -
from obsessed man-on-a-mission Steve Railsback in "Lifeforce." 

Okay, admittedly, the onscreen presence of French actress Mathilda May as the life-draining alien who appears starkers for minutes on end was an unabashed ploy to attract male viewers, but the decision had to be a hard sell for TV broadcasts.

In 1986, the writing team of Dan O'Bannon and Don Jakoby collaborated on Tobe Hooper's needless remake of "Invaders from Mars," the marvelously imaginative 1953 science-fiction fairy tale from a child's wide-eyed point of view, made by the multi-talented production designer-art director William Cameron Menzies.

Hunter Carson and mom Karen Black respond to a display of Martian
hardware in "Invaders from Mars." Carson's father was screenwriter
L.M. Kit Carson, who, with Sam Shepard, scripted "Paris, Texas,"
which featured Hunter. L.M. Kit Carson also wrote the screenplay for
Tobe Hooper's "The Texas Chainsaw Massacre Part 2."

Admittedly, the kid here, Hunter Carson (who was so memorable as the youngster in the 1984 road movie "Paris, Texas," with Harry Dean Stanton), handles his chores capably, as does Karen Black, Carson's real-life mother, cast as a school nurse who comes to believe the boy's conviction that his parents and other townspeople are being assimilated by alien interlopers, but otherwise, hammy performances by Timothy Bottoms, Laraine Newman, Louise Fletcher, and James Karen (the conniving real estate heel from "Poltergeist" who moved the headstones but not the graves) are way over-the-top.

Poor Louise Fletcher, a decade after winning the Best Actress Oscar
for "One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest," is reduced to eating live frogs
in "Invaders from Mars" as an alien-assimilated school teacher, with
nary an inkling as to why Martians would swallow living amphibians.

Don't get us wrong: Hooper's "Invaders from Mars" is, if nothing else, a dazzling treat for the eyes, with colorful, eye-popping set designs and deliriously inspired creatures, including the Supreme Intelligence, which resembles an oversized brain with eyes and gaping mouth, attached to a serpentine appendage (pictured below), and the ungainly, roly-poly Martian drones.

Tobe Hooper inspects a Martian drone. The marvelous
creatures were crafted by the storied Stan Winston Studio.

In an otherwise overacting, often histrionic cast, it's interesting to note that the possessed chief of police was played by Jimmy Hunt, who portrayed the original. wide-eyed kid in the 1953 version of "Invaders from Mars" (pictured below).

Oh, and the one thing intriguing about Tobe Hooper's Martians is their craving for copper as an energy source, decades before the real threat of copper theft reached epidemic proportions in the U.S.

In a thankless cameo as a well-meaning scientist, Bud Cort is
seconds away from being vaporized by a copper-fueled ray.

The third movie in Tobe Hooper's three-picture contract with Cannon Films was "The Texas Chainsaw Massacre Part 2," scripted by the above-mention L.M. Kit Carson, which was discussed at length in an earlier Moviehouse.

The sad state of business affairs for Hooper was that his three pictures incurred a loss of over 17 and a quarter million dollars for Cannon Films. Beginning in the late 1980s, Hooper started working in television, directing episodes of "Amazing Stories," "Freddy's Nightmares," "Tales from the Crypt," "Taken," and, among others, "Masters of Horror."

He returned to the big screen unceremoniously with 1990's "Spontaneous Combustion," co-writing a screenplay that was never sure if it was supposed to be a head-on science-fiction tale or a side-swiping spoof of the genre. The picture gave a rare leading role to Brad Dourif, an actor whose breakout role was the stammering, suicidal Billy Bibbit in "One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest" (pictured below).

Best known as the voice of the demonic doll in the "Chucky" horror flicks, Dourif had a string of weirdo characterizations, including the "Mentat" Piter De Vries in "Dune," Dennis Hopper's switchblade-wielding crony Raymond in "Blue Velvet," the greaser exterminator Tucker in "Graveyard Shift," and Grima Wormtongue in the "Lord of the Rings" films (pictured below).

"Spontaneous Combustion" casts Brad Dourif as the son of baby-boomers who were participants in an Atomic Age experiment and ended up becoming burnt toast as a result of spontaneous human combustion. As an adult, Dourif becomes a guinea pig in an annoyingly convoluted government-military complex-medical science-nuclear energy conspiracy, all of which leads to loose story threads, vanishing logic, and gaping plot holes.

It only takes Brad Dourif a few scenes before he goes bull goose
loony and unleashes his untapped gift as a human flame thrower.

Say what you will about the utter silliness of the proceedings (at one point, Brad's girlfriend blurts out, "It's OK, I know how you feel, my parents burned to death, too!"), "Spontaneous Combustion" included a couple of engaging cameos by diverse Hollywood icons. Andre DeToth, the one-eyed filmmaker who ironically directed the 1953 3-D horror film "House of Wax," starring Vincent Price, appears at the movie's onset as an eminent expert in spontaneous human combustion (pictured below).

Oh, for crying out loud, it's never explained in the script why
the skull that brainiac Andre DeToth extracts from the cranium
of the hapless A-test husband is so freaking tiny!

"Animal House" director John Landis portrays a Twinkie-chomping radio station engineer who ends up vomiting flames after ticking off phone-in caller Brad Dourif (pictured below).

Spin magazine noted, "No one makes bad movies as deliriously entertaining as Tobe Hooper, whose career continues its spectacular downward slide with 'Spontaneous Combustion.'" Filmed on a budget of $5.5 million, "Spontaneous Combustion" grossed a humiliating fifty thousand dollars.

Any other moviemaker might have thrown in the towel, but Tobe Hooper kept plugging away. In 1993, he went to Israel to shoot "Night Terrors," featuring "Elm Street's" Robert Englund as a descendant of the Marquis de Sade (pictured below).

"Body Bags" (1993) was originally intended as a Showtime series, executive produced by John Carpenter (best known as the director of "Halloween"), similar to HBO's "Tales from the Crypt." However, Showtime pulled the plug on the series, and the three stories filmed were released as an anthology horror picture, assembled within the darkly humorous hosting segments by John Carpenter (who directed two of the tales) in ghastly makeup by multiple Oscar winner Rick Baker as aa sardonic coroner (pictured below).

According to the film's press material, the buxom blonde in the
mortuary was "supplied by" Ron Jeremy, former adult movie star
nicknamed "The Hedgehog" during the golden age of adult cinema.

The closer of the trilogy, "Eye," finds Mark Hamill as a minor league baseball slugger who loses an eye in an auto accident. You're probably not in good hands when the surgeons for an experimental ocular transplant show up as John Agar, the star of "Revenge of the Creature," "Tarantula," and "The Mole People," and Roger Corman, director of "X: The Man with the X-ray Eyes" (pictured below).

Turns out Hamill's socket has been refitted with the orb from a necrophilic serial killer, which can only spell trouble for his heretofore idyllic marriage to a cover girl wife who looks a lot like Twiggy, mainly because she's played by Twiggy.

Speaking of Roger Corman, the ending for "Eye" in "Body Bags," directed by Tobe Hooper, takes its coda directly from the shocking conclusion  to Corman's 1963 cult favorite, "X: The Man with the X-ray Eyes," starring Ray Milland, with both works citing Matthew 18:9: "And if thine eye offend thee, pluck it out, and cast it from thee."

"Body Bags" ends on a gruesomely comic note as the wisecracking coroner himself (John Carpenter) is tended to by a pair of morgue lackeys, played by comedian Tom Arnold and Tobe Hooper (pictured below).

Robert Englund continued his close association with Tobe Hooper in a supporting role as the Snidely Whiplash-like owner of an archaic laundry service in 1995's "The Mangler." OK, for Pete's sake, "The Mangler," based on a ten-page story by Stephen King, is about the exorcism of a demonic industrial strength linen press that manages to uproot itself from its floor rivets. It just might be a contender for the worst film of a Stephen King story, short of "Graveyard Shift" and "Maximum Overdrive" (which King directed himself, when he was, in his own admission, "coked out of my mind").

As the crotchety taskmaster in "The Mangler,"
Robert Englund seems to be channeling
Peter Sellers' Dr. Strangelove.

You know you're in trouble when a film casts as its hero cop the actor who played the skin-flaying serial killer Buffalo Bill in "The Silence of the Lambs," namely Ted Levine.

That's right, Officer Ted, the exorcism didn't work so maybe a couple
of slugs'll take down the 5-ton, 40-foot-long steam ironer-and-folder!

Over the next few years, Tobe Hooper's output became increasingly disappointing. In rapid succession, "Crocodile," "Toolbox Murders," and "Mortuary" - all, coincidentally, written by Jace Anderson and Adam Gierasch - just made any appreciation of the filmmaker frustrating.

Basically, "Crocodile" rehashes what Kim Henkel, Hooper's writing and producing partner on "The Texas Chain Saw Massacre," mentioned during the production of the sequel, "Texas Chainsaw Massacre: The Next Generation," which he wrote and directed, when he joked, "You trot a bunch of these teenagers out, you get them isolated somewhere, and then you knock them off one by one." Or, in the case of "Crocodile" - direct-to-video and straight-to-the-Syfy-channel - it's a "bunch of" twenty-somethings pretending to be teenagers.

Speaking of rehashing, Tobe Hooper was doubtlessly referring to his own "Eaten Alive" in "Crocodile" when the "kids" hear a campfire tale about how in the past, a hotel owner featured a pet crocodile at his place. The crazed keeper called the croc Flat Dog and believed it to be an avatar of the Egyptian crocodile god Sobek.; Neville Brand's unhinged hotelier in "Eaten Alive" was convinced his pet was from the Nile.

Caitlin Martin faces down the jaws mock-up of Flat Dog in
"Crocodile." In a film that combines full-scale models with CGI,
you know you're in trouble when one victim - Julie Mintz, best
known as a frequent vocalist for ambient musician Moby - has to
physically leap into the mechanical jaws of the full-size mock-up.

Apparently, one of the production companies financing 2004's "Toolbox Murders" dissolved during filming with a third of the movie left to be shot, resulting in continuity gaps and plot holes that Tobe Hooper had to patch over as he hastily edited what had been photographed. It should be noted that in the DVD commentary, Hooper and his writers deny that's what happened.

"Toolbox Murders" was an in-name only remake of an exploitation drive-in staple from 1978. Gone are so many things that made the original so tawdry, so trashy, so memorable. Gone is the bubble-bath scene that had real-life porn star Kelly Nichols pleasure herself before being nail-gunned...

Gone is the performance of former child actress Pamelyn Ferdin (best known as Felix Unger's daughter on TV's "The Odd Couple," as the voice of Lucy in "Peanuts" specials, and as Amy, that little twerp at the girls' seminary who feeds Clint Eastwood the poison mushrooms in "The Beguiled") as the imperiled teenager...

(The Moviehouse once sent Pamelyn Ferdin a fan letter. She was
very gracious in her response and included an autographed 8x10.)

Gone is the hammy performance of Cameron Mitchell, who was allegedly battling alcoholism at the time, as the mystery man in a ski mask...

Instead of a serial killer driven by a religious fervor to murder perceived sinners in the apartment complex he's the super of, the remake featured a deformed monstrosity called Coffin Baby, probably as a desperate ploy to create a new horror franchise not unlike Leatherface from Tobe Hoopers "The Texas Chain Saw Massacre."

"Toolbox Murders" is the only film Sheri Moon Zombie
has appeared in not directed by husband Rob Zombie.
She did this movie as a personal favor because of the
friendship between Rob Zombie and Tobe Hooper.

Unfortunately, Coffin Baby didn't catch on like Leatherface, although there was one sequel, "Toolbox Murders 2" nine years later, starring Bruce Dern, but without any involvement from Hooper. Coffin Baby was portrayed in both films by Christopher Doyle, a prolific stunt coordinator and stuntman.

Some people insist Tobe Hooper's 2005 movie "Mortuary" is a dark comedy, but the unfunny thing is, any laughs are unintentional in this tale of a widow who moves with her teenage son and his little sister to a small California town to embark on her new vocation as a mortician.

The mortuary is located in an unbelievably rundown, rotting, moldy house, plopped in a muddy, sewage-flooded yard beside - oddly - an ancient graveyard right out of an H.P. Lovecraft story. Well, it isn't long before the black fungus running throughout the building starts reanimating corpses, who, in turn, infect the living by vomiting black bile in their faces.

Interestingly, the picture's co-writer, Adam Gierasch, threw himself into the story as an excruciatingly annoying real estate agent who never stops giggling and cackling (pictured above). Another bothersome character is the town's stuttering sheriff, played by Michael Shamus Wiles (best known as George Merkert, head of the Albuquerque DEA unit in "Breaking Bad"), who keeps an eye out for local kids making "graveyard babies" in the cemetery.

The part of a neophyte mortician in "Mortuary" might seem stardates
beyond Denise Crosby's signature role as Security Chief Tasha Yar on
"Star Trek: The Next Generation."

"Mortuary" star Denise Crosby was 19 when her grandfather, Bing Crosby, a man she never met, died in 1977. In 1979, she posed nude for Playboy magazine, as "some kind of rebellion on my part, some way of saying screw you to the family image." Denise's father, Dennis Crosby, committed suicide in 1991, 17 months after younger brother Lindsay killed himself.

Tobe Hooper's final film was held up, for whatever reasons, in post-production before its 2013 release. "Djinn" was remarkably the first full-fledged horror movie from the United Arab Emirate's fledgling film industry. A couple of UAE expatriates in New York City are grieving over the death of their baby when they are urged to relocate in Ras Al-Khaimah, where they settle in an imposing apartment building, seemingly enshrouded in a permanent fog bank, which was built over an abandoned fishing village said to be haunted by a djinn.

Well, before you can say "Poltergeist," the djinn, a half-human shape-shifter, is searching for her own lost child. Seldom seen and dismissed as negligible by even the staunchest of Tobe Hooper's defenders, "Djinn," which apparently played out like an inverse "Rosemary's Baby," at least offered a rare Middle Eastern setting and a glimpse into its corresponding mythology.

Tobe Hooper (center) poses with his cast on the set of "Djinn."

Some sources have claimed the picture was delayed because a member of the Abu Dubai royal family found the content to be subversive. Others suggested the movie's representation of Islam left a bitter taste in some of the faithful's mouths. Ultimately, there was the issue of the dialogue being mostly spoken in Arabic. One critic pointed out that subtitles are "a surefire way of stopping the average person from wanting to watch a horror. 'Cut the literature and show us some blood.'"

In 2011, Tobe Hooper entered the realm of horror fiction with the publication of his novel Midnight Movie, co-written by Alan Godlsher, author of Paul Is Undead: The British Zombie Invasion and My Favorite Fangs: The Story of the von Trapp Family Vampires.

John Carpenter praised the book as "brilliantly excessive and funny. Very cool, very enjoyable." John Landis, who called Hooper "a Texas original and a great American filmmaker," deemed the novel "as insane as I knew it would be. A violent, funny and novel premise." Rob Zombie noted, "Much like he did in the world of film, Tobe Hooper has brought a fascinating and twisted vision to the world of horror fiction."

"You've got to send a physical sensation through and not let them off the hook. I like to make it faster and faster and faster and pumping and banging until I get into you."
- Tobe Hooper, January 25, 1943 - August 26, 2017