The Edge Online - Film, DVD, TV: The X-Files File 2 Tooms

The X-Files File 2: Tooms (VHS)
Fox Video, two X-Files episodes, 90 minutes
Review by Gerald Houghton (1996)

More for the unfortunates who lacked the foresight to thrust in a video from the start of the series. We’ll just mention in passing that suspending the original plans for video releases and issuing these special ‘movies’ in a moulded plastic box is a piss-poor way of serving those with more money than sense. For good or ill, The X-Files is as exploitable as the lamentable Star Trek franchise.

Tooms (this release takes its name from the second of the two ran-together episodes) gathers the last will and testament of one Eugene Victor Tooms, ageless serial killer, reawakening every 30 years just to gobble-up five human livers and hedgehog away again in his newsprint and bile bivouac. In the early-series episode Squeeze, the FBI are baffled – how are the victims offed in apparently locked and guarded rooms? Scully, naturally, is asked to profile the possible offender, donning her cute spectacles and artlessly cribbing from The Observer Book Of Serial Killers. Convinced (by some dodgy looking computer graphics) that Tooms is their man, Mulder is dismayed when the Feds release him, asserting, not unreasonably, that the suspect should be more of a fruitcake loner than a glowy-eyed India-rubber man. In tiresome woman-in-peril fashion Tooms goes after the redoubtable Scully.

The sweep-up eighteen weeks later in Tooms provided the series’ first sequel. It’s also The X-Files at its most tendentious. Breezing over questions of why pipe-cleaner boy hasn’t just slipped, fluke-like, round the U-bend, and against Mulder’s hysterical protestations, Tooms pulls the wool over the psychiatric board and is duly released from jail. Questions about time-frame (that shopping mall), or indeed the wisdom of freeing John Wayne Gacey with a van and care-in-the-community in the face of the evidence are handily dispelled. Tooms’ offing of the man who earned him early release is reactionary, knee-jerk schlock.

This matched pair are unreasonably popular. Which is not to say they are without merit, being atmospherically shot, and blessed with intermittent humour. But other than the fact that Tooms is a sequel there seems little to mark them out from the highly variable first series’ other geeks-of-the-week. Better than the pitiful Jersey Devil, Space, or all-time low Ghost In The Machine, certainly, but an early release is surely merited for Beyond The Sea or the brilliantly oblique E.B.E. first. And, as no attention is being paid to continuity, much of the far superior series two beckons. Still, take pleasure where it’s offered – smug-boy Mulder being proved wrong again; the smirk on Scully’s face as Tooms is turned to spaghetti – and thank your lucky stars Duchovny doesn’t get a contractually binding Big Emotional Scene. (Who among us hasn’t cried with laughter when the plank-like Duchovny – surely genre’s Hugh Grant – has turned on the tears?)

Unless you can’t live without the (awful) exclusive artwork or wait for the repeats, stow that wallet and go for the no less fleecing but far more satisfying Colony/End Game and Duane Barry/Ascension ‘movies’ this summer. Better yet, give up on all this nostalgia and find someone with the alarmingly smart third series on Sky.