Steve McQueen famously made his 1958 headlining screen debut in The Blob, playing a teenager whose innocent courage and purity is more than a match for disgusting obscenely blorping jelly from outer-space. But McQueen was not the only new face in that movie. His costar, Aneta Corsaut, also made her first screen appearance in the film.
At twenty-five, the fresh-faced Corsaut was only three years younger than McQueen. But she was a much more convincing teen, coming across as innocent and shy where McQueen’s performance often felt awkward and campy. Nonetheless, it was McQueen who quickly shot to big screen mega-stardom. Corsaut’s subsequent career was mostly confined to television, where she was best-known for playing schoolteacher Helen Crump on the Andy Griffith show from 1963 to 1968.
Corsaut did have one other credited feature film role twenty years after The Blob. This was oddly enough in another horror film—the 1978 slasher The Toolbox Murders, directed by Dennis Donnelly.
Unlike the campy, cheerful Blob, The Toolbox Murders is an extremely nasty piece of work; it was banned in the early 80s in the UK. Inspired by The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, the first half of the film is a series of homicides that conflate sex and stabbing with stylish gruesomeness.
The movie starts with a series of freeze frame flashbacks of a fatal car accident with a fire-and-brimstone preacher on the radio providing a chilling voice-over. It then shifts to a San Fernando valley apartment complex, where a man in a ski mask murders three women with an electric drill, a hammer, and a screwdriver, all pulled from a large, business-like metal toolbox.
The murders are not especially explicit by current torture-porn standards. But they include a number of shocking details—you can see the meat on the screwdriver bit—and with an impressively disorienting battery of film cuts and swoops. For the hammer murder, the killer straddles the unconscious victim’s body, his crotch obscured by the tool box placed in the foreground, just in case you didn’t get the point.
That opening scene is something of a tour de force, but the director one-ups it shortly thereafter with a more explicit (in every sense) Psycho homage. The killer returns to the apartment complex the next night, and catches Dee Ann Devore, played by porn star Kelly Nichols, masturbating enthusiastically in the bath. After staring at her like Norman Bates before him, he snaps her door-chain with a bolt cutter, and then chases her about the apartment with a nail gun that looks a little like a camera as she screams and provides glimpses of full frontal nudity.
In a very Lynchian touch, the whole scene is accompanied by a incongruously twangy easy-listening seduction song, “Pretty Lady,” performed and written by little-known country singer George Deaton. The music is queasily sensual, and when the killer finishes Devore off, her blood splatters onto a picture of herself, it reiterates the link between sex, voyeurism, and violation. Killer, director, and (presumably male) viewer are all linked together in a conspiracy to reduce women to an image which can be consumed, dissected, and defaced at will.
The second half of the film mostly abandons the spectacular murders, and instead delves at tedious length into the twisted psychology of the murderer. The apartment complex owner Vance Kingsley (Cameron Mitchell) was driven insane after his daughter’s death in an auto accident. He kills the women in the apartment because he thinks they’re sinners—alcoholics, lesbians, and masturbators.
Vance kidnaps 15-year-old Laurie Ballard (Pamelyn Ferdin) in order to replace his daughter and also rant at her interminably. Eventually he’s killed by his nephew Kent (Wesley Eure), who is also insane. Kent kills Laurie’s brother by lighting him on fire, and then rapes Laurie before she kills him with a scissors—a murder the film uncharacteristically refuses to show.
So where is Aneta Corsaut in all of this? She plays Joanne Ballard, Laurie’s mother, who works at a local bar, where they also coincidentally have George Deaton singing on the radio.
Joanne doesn’t get a lot of screen time, and her part is underwritten. The script calls for her to be querulous and nagging and doesn’t give her a lot of space to express grief after her daughter disappears. There are hints at a flirtation with the impressively ineffectual detective (Tim Donnelly), but they don’t really go anywhere.
Corsaut does her best, but the truth is her role in The Toolbox Murders is anticlimactic end to a career that started with such Blob-y promise. Still, not everyone can be as lucky as Steve McQueen. Corsaut can at least say she appeared in two cult favorite exploitation films 20 years apart, and that her character survived in both. Neither space colloid or drill bit can kill Aneta Corsaut. That’s not a bad film legacy.