The Mangler (1995)
"Escape is not an option."
Plot
A detective investigates a brutal death at the local laundry company and finds that the big press machine nicknamed ‘The Mangler’ is possessed by an evil spirit that needs blood to keep its owner immortal.
Review
A horror film about a killer laundry-folding machine? That's what The Mangler is about! Adapted from a short story by legendary horror writer Stephen King, brought to the big screen by Tobe Hooper, the man behind The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, and starring Freddy Krueger himself, Robert Englund, as well as The Silence of the Lambs’ ‘Buffalo Bill’ Ted Levine, how could this fail? Well, let me repeat myself – it’s a horror film about a killer laundry-folding machine! That’s how it could fail. The omens didn’t look good because this was made in the mid-Nineties when the horror genre was really struggling. Tobe Hooper hadn’t had a commercial hit since 1982’s Poltergeist (and The Mangler only took around $1m on its release so hardly a resounding success). Stephen King horror adaptations were largely out of favour by the 1990s; this was a lean time with the likes of The Lawnmower Man and Sleepwalkers. Robert Englund never did find any real success outside of his work in the A Nightmare on Elm Street series, and his last outing as Freddy had been in 1994’s Wes Craven’s New Nightmare. But this is a film about a killer laundry-folding machine, how on Earth could anyone take this seriously?
You have this experienced team and the production designers, and the cinematographer clearly put in the effort to make this thing menacingl They tried to give this laundry machine a distinctly evil appearance, but there is an immovable reality they just could not overcome. At the end of the day, it is still just a big lump of metal. It presses cloth. It doesn't matter how you angle the camera or what shadows you cast across it. A commercial laundry press simply does not trigger that primal fear response that horror relies on. Mundane objects can make for some of the best horror I mean, look at a classic haunted car, or a creepy doll, or even a television set. But the difference lies in inherent mobility and the human connection to the object. A car moves and represents freedom. A doll is an uncanny reflection of a human being. A television is a conduit for communication. But a commercial laundry press is stationary, industrial, and highly specific. Most people do not interact with one in their daily lives. It just sits in a warehouse and performs a repetitive mechanical task. Everyone involved seemed to have this arrogant self-belief that they could somehow make this stationary object terrifying; some sort of blinkered devotion to the cause. Rather than elevating the material, that intense, serious devotion gave the hair-brain material a sillier edge because everyone takes it way too seriously. The inherent absurdity of the killer laundry press just became magnified on screen.
The first half of The Mangler isn’t too bad it has to be said. There’s a pretty gruesome death when a woman is crushed inside the machine and the plot, as it stands at this early point in the film, is reasonably believable. The idea of feeding people to a possessed machine to make its owner immortal wasn’t that far-fetched by any stretch of the imagination considering the lengths that other horror films have gone to provide a story - a blood sacrifice for immortality is a grounded, recognizable trope. But instead of keeping this idea as grounded as possible, The Mangler loses its steady footing. This semi-interesting plot is lost beneath a torrent of unnecessary sub-plots and strands which go nowhere and only pose more questions such as why do the townspeople have to sacrifice their first born to the machine? The film gets increasingly silly and more ridiculous, with refrigerators coming to life and attacking people, the attempts to exorcise the machine and then in the film’s finale, the machine itself starts to move around.
Now I haven’t read the original short story so can’t really compare how well it has been adapted but it’s only around ten to twenty pages long so how the hell did anyone manage to drag out a feature film out of it? All I can say is that sometimes what works well on paper doesn’t work well with full blown visuals and the idea that this laundry machine can move would have been better left on the page (if it did move in the story). The sight of this machine chasing people around the building is a total joke and the special effects are atrocious. Watching a laundry machine chase people through dark tunnels really needed some cash behind it to work so this idea should have been binned and the story re-written if it needed to be. By stubbornly forcing a high-budget concept through a low-budget reality, they turned their horror climax into a comedy routine. They failed to adapt the narrative to fit the physical constraints of their production.
Though the sight of this machine chasing people around proves to be an unintentional comic highlight, the film sadly lags whenever it is not doing anything remotely evil, which is unfortunately quite a lot of the time. At a brutal 106 minutes long, The Mangler outstays its welcome long before the end credits roll. Hooper has no grasp of pace and seems content to pad out the film with as much as possible. A more efficient director could easily have skimmed twenty minutes or more from this without major alterations to the narrative – not that it could have been disjointed any more than it was. Despite the film being set in 1995, the sets make it look like it was lifted straight out of the 1800s. The best parts of The Mangler take place on a fantastic set that was constructed, a dark and depressing industrial hellscape with the titular machine taking centre stage. The mangler is impressive, a metallic behemoth which does appear God-like in its position inside the factory, chains and cogs turning and clanking and demanding that everyone pays it the respect it deserves. Hooper does take plenty of time to linger shots inside this factory, with cinematographer Amnon Salomon creating some depressing atmosphere with his choices of lighting.
And at least the film features a couple of solid hands in lead roles. Robert Englund has an overplayed hoot under layers of prosthetics as the disfigured and crazy laundry owner, complete with eye-patch and leg braces. He’s fully committed to the cause and seems to understand the campy reality of the film he is in, leaning into the prosthetics and the theatricality. Ted Levine plays the detective charged with solving the case and does add some gravitas to the film, even if its just for his trademark voice because he’s not brilliant here. Only Englund seems to be in on the absurdity of the entire thing and everyone else thinks they’re performing Shakespeare. His reaction to the first victim being crushed to death inside the machine virtually sums up his entire approach here: “Hells bells, Adele”
Final Verdict
The Mangler may be worth a brief look for people who are curious to see how bad it really is but believe me when I say it, it is every bit as awful as you’ve been led to believe. How this was given a theatrical release is one of cinema’s biggest mysteries. The Mangler is further evidence of just how far Tobe Hooper fell from his 1974 genre-busting classic heyday and even die-hard Hooper fanboys will struggle to defend him here. What is more depressing is that this has since spawned a couple of non-related sequels. The mind boggles.
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The Mangler Director(s): Tobe Hooper Writer(s): Tobe Hooper (screenplay), Stephen Brooks (screenplay), Harry Alan Towers (screenplay), Stephen King (short story) Actor(s): Ted Levine, Robert Englund, Daniel Matmor, Vanessa Pike, Jeremy Crutchley, Demetre Phillips, Vera Blacker, Ashley Hayden Duration: 106 mins |  |
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