Plot
A fix-it man has got hold of what was
left of the notorious Mangler laundry machine and spends most of his time
tinkering with it and trying to repair it. Things go wrong for him when he
becomes possessed by it and he begins to kill people to feed it's thirst for
blood.
Review
From a killer laundry machine in the original to a killer
school computer and now just a plain old killer machine, The Mangler
series is one weird and meaningless series of horror flicks featuring
bottom-of-the-rung effects, a lack of story and all round sense of "why
bother?" Stephen King's weak short story was turned into a ridiculous horror
film with Robert Englund back in 1995. Not content with leaving it there,
someone thought it would be a good idea to churn out a sequel in 2001. What
then came was one of the worst sequels ever made - a sequel that instantly
turned the original into horror's equivalent of The Godfather. Now
here we are again, another four years later and ten years after the original
with the second sequel. On an ever-diminishing budget which screams that
they blew their money on acquiring the rights to the Mangler name (that must
have been really expensive) and with increasing desperation to milk
every last penny out of the name, The Mangler Reborn will bore the
pants off you in no time and make you wander just what the producers were
smoking when they green lit this.
The story of the film is simple: people wander into the house, they're
killed and fed to the machine. And that's the entire film in a nutshell! The
majority of the scenes are shot inside the house so the film consists of the
small-in-numbers cast stumbling around the empty house, looking in the same
empty rooms and making the same mistakes in their futile attempts to escape.
One trip around the house is enough but the more the characters search
around trying to escape, the more your eyes begin to hurt and the more you
wish they'd just go straight into the room with the Mangler or the
mallet-wielding repairman. Let me make this perfectly clear - that's all
that happens in this film. It's so light on plot, characters and any form of
development that it's almost impossible to sit through. To make things worse
not only is the film extremely monotonous but it's badly drawn out. The
pacing is dreadful and scenes just drag on for much longer than needed. I
can understand some scenes need to be dragged out to create a bit of
suspense or atmosphere but when guys are talking to each other in a car for
five minutes about nothing, it smacks of padding the running time. At least
they did the wise thing by ignoring the first sequel ever existed and
instead use events from the original to attach itself into Mangler history.
Things do pick up somewhat in the last twenty minutes or so when blood
begins to fly off the screen, the repairman starts bashing people with his
mallet and the Mangler starts, well mangling people. But it's too little,
too late.
About
the only notable thing in the entire film is the casting of Reggie Bannister
as one of the burglars who makes the horrible decision to break into the
single worst house on the planet. Horror fans will know Bannister from his
work in the Phantasm series of films and the film's best moment comes
when he realises he's actually stealing from a serial killer. We could have
done with a lot more of this guy in the film, cracking some one-liners and
livening things up. Also popping up in a cameo is Jeff Buff, a director
who's made plenty of low budget flicks in his time. Weston Blakesley may
look the part of a fat repairman but he's definitely not the serial killer
type and taking him seriously as some psychopath will take a lot of
imagination on your behalf.
Verdict
The Mangler Reborn is a
pointless film that serves absolutely no purpose in life whatsoever. It's
still better then the first sequel which says something about how truly
shocking this series really is. I never want to see a machine come to life
ever again unless it's in a Terminator film.
