After the first 15 minutes of Dennis Donnelly’s “The Toolbox Murders,” I thought I was getting myself into a nonsensical slasher with no plot and no character development whatsoever. To my surprise, that is actually not what ensued for the next hour and 15 minutes. Instead, I got a slasher flick that actually thrives on building the villain and tries to make the viewers really understand what drives him to do what he does.

The acting in this 1978 ‘exploitation’ [...]