The Mangler | | Cast : | Robert Englund, Ted Levine | | Director : | Tobe Hooper | | Studio : | New Line Home Entertainment | | Format : | Color, Closed-captioned, Widescreen | | Released Date : | March 03, 1995 | | DVD Released Date : | August 17, 2004 | | Language : | English (Dubbed), English (Subtitled), Spanish (Subtitled) | | Audience Rating : | R (Restricted) | | | BUY THIS DVD FROM AMAZON |
Customer Reviews
| Rating |  | | Date | July 18, 2005 | | Summary | Robert Englund wasn't paid enough to be in this. | Content
 | I'll give the Mangler credit, it was gruesome and original but there are alot of plot holes, lame acting jobs, weak plot development,and the ending is rather unsatisfying. As usual Mr. Englund gives a star-studded performance but no where near as powerful as his role as Freddy Krueger, The Phantom of the Opera, or Killer Tongue. This film was directed by Tobe Hooper (Texas Chainsaw Massacre 1, and 2), starring Robert Englund (A Nightmare on Elm Street 1-8)and Ted Lavigne (Silence of the Lambs). The major drawback is a weak story. One would expect more from a Steven King adaption. I actually liked this movie, not loved, until i reached the final big climax of it. They exorcise the machine, supposedly, but then the machine gets up and begins to chase them! It's a laundry machine! My god people! And to top it off, it no longer resembles a machine but looks more like a dragon. The ending is a complete burst of stupidity! It hurts me to do so but i'll give this movie 2 stars. Atleast it's not as bad as Chainsaw Massacre 4. |
| Rating | | | Date | July 13, 2005 | | Summary | Mangled | Content
| "The Mangler" is a film that should have never gotten a green light. Period. This is an embarrassment for nearly everyone involved, and that's saying something when you look at the talent in front of and behind the camera. First of all, you've got a movie based on a Stephen King short story. O.K., that's hardly a ringing endorsement considering how many sludgefests we've seen on the silver screen with, "Based on a story by Stephen King" above or below the title, but STILL. We ought to expect something special, right? Uh huh. Second, we've got Robert Englund camping it up as one of the two main baddies in the film. Not only that, he stomps about in old guy makeup with metal accoutrements hanging off his every limb. Cool, right? Well, yeah--except we don't see nearly enough of him. Third, and finally, none other than Tobe Hooper assumed the directorial duties for "The Mangler." The man behind the brilliant "Texas Chain Saw Massacre" and "The Funhouse" stepping up to the plate to knock another horror movie out of the ballpark. Sorry Tobe, but "The Mangler" strikes out at the plate. How could this movie possibly miss, you ask? Not only does it miss, it misses by a couple of million miles.
William Gartley (Englund) runs a laundry factory on the outskirts of some small town. He's a tyrant of a boss, prone to stalking about a catwalk that runs around the top of the factory while bellowing nonsensical insults at the put upon female workers toiling in the morass below. And the plant is a morass, full of steaming machinery that looks like it stepped right out of a Dickens novel. The centerpiece is a gigantic laundry folding apparatus, called the Hadley Watkins or some such nonsense, which systematically chews and folds humans when its not doing sheets. The first death in the factory summons the local constabulary in the form of Officer John Hutton (Ted Levine), but nothing much happens. We then follow Hutton back to his house where we meet his hippy dippy neighbor Mark Jackson (Daniel Matmor), a kook whose hobbies seem to revolve around the investigation of the supernatural. How handy! We just know Jackson's hocus pocus will serve a purpose later in the narrative, and indeed we are correct because the Hadley Watkins machine is actually a demonic force that gives power to those who feed it human sacrifices. Sigh. You know, this sounded better when Stephen King wrote the story.
"The Mangler" lurches from one turgid scene to another, only garnering interest when we catch sight of some of the gory carnage that inevitably arises when flesh meets steel. After a few more people say bye bye thanks to the machine, Hutton gets suspicious. It helps that a flashbulb tossing crime photog by the name of J.J.J. Pictureman (Jeremy Crutchley) pops up once in awhile to capture death on film and drop a few cryptic statements about the goings on in town. Well, it doesn't help that much, mind you, but he does swing by more than a few times looking all old and shriveled up in pancake makeup that should make a real special effects artist blanche in embarrassment. There's some nonsense about a possessed refrigeration unit from the factory--or whatever that white box with fire coming out of it was--and a bunch of scenes involving Hutton beating his fists against anything he can find and raging. I don't know; nothing really makes that much sense here. We also learn that Gatley is up to no good with a certain family member. Again, I don't really know how this relates to the narrative. By the time the movie judders to a conclusion that's witnessed the Hadley stalking about the factory like some sort of steel dinosaur with a bad attitude, I was ready for a nap.
I kept thinking the studio mangled "The Mangler" because the movie just doesn't seem to fit together very well. Of course, that's not the only problem here. A big mistake was casting Ted Levine in the lead role. I'm not criticizing his abilities as an actor; he did a fantastic job in "The Silence of the Lambs." But here he just...well...doesn't inspire any believability. He's more suited to playing baddies than good guys, what with that slurry voice and all. I clucked with disapproval on several occasions when he delivered lines that should have been serious but came off sounding banal because of that voice. Englund's much better--he dances around like some malevolent metallic elf at one point--but his scenes are so few that I felt the movie could have succeeded if only he had been the primary focus. The gore is great too, with lots of quick cuts of limbs and heads being folded and pressed amidst great gushings of sauce, but again there isn't enough to make up for the myriad parts of the movie that just drag by so slowly. I find it incredible that this movie inspired two sequels, one of which is coming out in the near future. I sure hope they're better than this heap o' compost!
Incredibly, there are extras on the DVD. I don't know if there's a commentary track on the disc (I wouldn't have listened to one anyway), but I do remember the inclusion of additional gore scenes. What they did is split the screen and play the edited version on top and the extra sauce on the bottom. The cuts are quick but especially juicy in some parts. It's nothing that would have helped the film had they been included, though. I'm betting good old Tobe wishes this one would just go away. Frankly, I'd rather rewatch "Chain Saw" and "Lifeforce" than spend a second looking at this tripe again. Not recommended for anyone.
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| Rating | | | Date | March 01, 2005 | | Summary | The devil can live everywhere | Content
| Based on a short story by Stephen King, this film expresses the ever present and ever surviving nature of evil, hence of fear. Here the film deals with the big monsters that the big machines of the industrial age contain and represent. Machines are evil spirits that can only work if they suck on humanity, their blood, their pith and marrow, and even their spirituality. The machine is the bloody god of the modern age that requires regular human sacrifices to go on working properly. This is frightening because it is coming from a popular saying that the machine eats the worker up. It is also visually shown in the fact that the master, the owner of the machine, the one who will make a big profit from it by exploiting the work of the workers has to sacrifice a body part of himself or herself to the machine for the machine to accept to work for him or her. There is no morality in all that, in this world. There may be a desire for the world to be ethical, but this desire is nothing but a pipe dream that has absolutely no chance to be realized. Once we have committed ourselves to the god of machines, we cannot go back and even destroy these machines. The devil that is living in them will get us before we ever even try, what's more succeed in destroying it. There is no effective exorcism even with holy water and wafers and incantations in Latin. These evil spirits living in machines are beyond this because they are the pure creation of men : Man created the machine and thus provided these evil spirits that are roaming the world with a haven where they can prosper and from which they can dominate and enslave the world, even if they need some « boss » to enact and realize this domination, to the boss's profit of course, but this profit is only a delegation of power from the devil to the boss and a temporary probation for the boss who will have eventually to go back to the machine as simple fodder. This is the most disquieting vision of our free enterprise society a sane mind can imagine.
Dr Jacques COULARDEAU
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| Rating | | | Date | October 19, 2004 | | Summary | MANGLED SCRIPT = MANGLED MOVIE | Content
| THE MANGLER originated in Stephen King's fun short story collection, NIGHT SHIFT. It was brief and to the point. In trying to expand its merits to the screen, director Tobe Hooper finds himself with a mangled script that gets so incoherent, it becomes annoying. Ted Levine is mysteriously miscast in the leading role, and his performance is wooden and uninspired. Even the formidable Robert Englund seems to be playing another Freddy Kreuger. The inclusion of the belladonna is confusing, and the ending where fingers start being lopped off comes out of nowhere.
Not one of the best King adaptations to hit the screen, but it IS far better than its ridiculous sequel. |
| Rating | | | Date | October 16, 2004 | | Summary | Folds, Spindles---& Mutilates! 2 1/2 stars! | Content
| How could you possibly go wrong with a movie forged by the Holy Trinity of Terror: the inspired, deranged, ghoulish minds of Stephen King, Tobe Hooper, and Robert Englund---particularly when the subject of "The Mangler" is a demon-possessed industrial laundry machine ravenous for human flesh and blood?
Short answer: you can't! If your local coin-op laundromat is closed for the night, it's certainly worth your while to take your dirty clothes over to the old Bartley mill and get 'em steam-pressed.
For your time and blood money, here's what you get out of this tasty little nugget of pure bloody stupidity. SEE---
*A REAL villain---certainly not your boring, ordinary old serial killer from central casting, but a demon-possessed 19th century steam-belching industrial press laundry machine (the Hadley Watson #6, naturally). This mass murderer means business: rather than just stabbing or shooting its victims---how mundane!---it folds, spindles, and mutilates them, then considerately folds and presses them!
*The great Ted Levine (who played Buffalo Bill in "Silence of the Lambs") woefully miscast as a small-town Maine police detective and hero of the movie! Levine slurs every line in that trademark cross between a gargle and a whine, and I would burst out in laughter every time he talked. Funny stuff! While Levine was investigating the messy death of the portly pill-popping Mrs. Frawley, I kept waiting for him to say "oh yeah, I remember, she was that great big fat person".
*Daniel Matmor as a sort of poor man's Tom Conti, who proposes to "read Leviticus" to the demon laundry machine and engages in a scenery-chewing contest with Robert Englund and the Machine. The Machine wins.
*And of course, Robert Englund himself, cackling insanely, cracking that corporate whip, and waddling about in a kind of combination crutches-lower body exoskeleton like some a demon-possessed version of Lionel Barrymore's Old Man Potter from "It's a Wonderful Life"!
There's a lot of material thrown into "The Mangler"---you've got the demonic laundry machine, belladonna pills, virgin blood, ancient sacrifice, the town's power-mad aristocracy, even a contract between Englund's insane old tycoon and the Hadley-Watson #6--- served up with some nice directorial panache and stylish camera angles by Tobe Hooper. But that said, "The Mangler" isn't about viewing-for-comprehension: this is high-octane garbage, served up with a fine helping up gore and with a side-order of extra-rare gore. Did I mention "The Mangler" is gory?
Levine, despite being stamped forever as the cross-dressing serial killer Jame Gumb in my mind, is actually pretty funny to watch as the lead---you laugh at him, not with him---and he puts some rough miles on a Jeep Cherokee. Datmor plays Watson to Levine's Holmes, and overacts ferociously to the scripture-quoting finish. Englund does his snarling, drooling, leering, cackling thing, evidently has the time of his life, and gets a good tailor in the bargain. Loved the ascot and smoking jacket!
Tobe Hooper keeps up the pace, throws in some moody interiors, cobbles together a pretty ferocious man-eating laundry machine (all stamped Industrial Revolution gears and pressed black metal---brrr!), and keeps up an onslaught of mayhem as workers get pulled into the presser and you start wondering about the damage this is doing to the mill's profit margins.
Moral of the Story #1: If you want to run a profitable and worry-free industrial laundry business, it's probably not a good idea to build it around a Demonic Laundry Machine.
Moral of the Story #2: If you absolutely *must* have the Demonic Laundry Machine in your business, then don't let the virgin mill-worker bleed into the press of the Demonic Laundry Machine.
Moral of the Story #3: If you're a 16-year-old virgin mill-worker, you probably shouldn't work for Robert Englund, and at the very least you should stay far away from the Demonic Laundry Machine.
Is this a horror classic? Absolutely not. Is it enjoyable, bloody, unapologetic, trashy fun, and will you get your clothes back on Monday in time for work? You betcha! Throw this sick puppy in the hopper and let's get to pressing laundry---we're on the clock, and time is money! |
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